It will be a shame if Elon Musk does cause Twitter to implode as I currently get some great information from it. Last week I discovered from my feed that a team in Cumbria had fielded a sixty-eight-year-old player. You can’t pass up the opportunity to see something like that and so, on the off chance that his performance merited him retaining his place in the team, Jen and I headed for Sedbergh to see Sedbergh and Dent Reserves take on Kirby Lonsdale Reserves in the fourth division of the Westmorland League.
I like to try and combine these trips out with something other than football and a check on the route revealed that we would be passing Cautley Spout, which is the biggest waterfall of its type in somewhere or other, possible Cautley. Further investigation led to the discovery that we could park up at the Cross Keys temperance pub, have some lunch and then walk out and back to the waterfall, all in sufficient time to get to the game.
The Cross Keys was fantastic. It was full of old, interesting stuff and had a coal fire burning in one of the rooms. They do B&B as well, so at some point I’d like to go back and use it as a base for a longer walk across the Howgill fells.
The walk to the waterfall was easy enough as it probably wasn’t much more than a mile each way. Despite the rain on the way over, we struck lucky with a break in the inclement weather and within an hour we were back at the Cross Keys. We saw some unusual looking mushrooms but little in the way of wildlife apart from the brightly painted sheep penned in near to the road.
The short walk meant that we had plenty of time to get to Sedbergh, for the game in the seventeenth tier of the pyramid. However, as two o’clock approached we still hadn’t found a pitch with people on it. A further check on Twitter revealed that the fixture had been postponed due to a waterlogged pitch and so my plan to see the sixty-eight-year-old was thwarted. Temporarily, I hope.
Plan B meant seeing the Sedbergh and Dent United first team instead. They play in the dizzy heights of the fourteenth tier Westmorland League Division One and just four miles away at the club’s other pitch in Dent.
We arrived at the Church Playing Field twenty minutes into the game and with Sedbergh, in green and black, a goal to the good. It was a decent venue for a game at this level, with a grass pitch, dugouts and goalposts that didn’t require the players to fit the nets and risk losing a finger.
Jen and I set up our camping chairs on the far side from the dugouts, alongside the Wetherigg subs and manager. It was a reasonably feisty first half with a lot of noise coming from both sets of teams. Our arrival brought the attendance up to fifteen which seemed a little on the low side as I doubt that there was anything else going on in Dent that afternoon.
The visitors equalized a few minutes before the break with a well-taken half-volley, but Sedbergh re-took the lead bang on the forty-five-minute mark when the away keeper fumbled a corner. We then got to listen to the Wetherigg half-time team talk in which their captain criticised the jittery defending, commenting that it was as if they had all done three lines of coke. I liked his precision in specifying the quantity.
By the time the second half started it was already beginning to get dark, so much so that with twenty minutes to go there wasn’t sufficient light to take useable photos. The players and management continued to shout at each other and at the ref but didn’t manage to add any further goals. Despite not seeing the pensioner play it had been a good day out and I’ll try to get along to some more Westmorland League fixtures when the opportunity arises.
Trail of the Lion King 