BFC 2-1 Shrewsbury Town, Monday 10th April 2023

‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’

Wow, that was a strange game. From being two up against a middle of the table middling side, we’re hanging on for dear life, down to 10 men and they’ve pulled one back. How did it come to this? I’d say the key ingredients were a side intent on all kinds of sh*thousery, an incompetent ref, and maybe a sprinkling of naivety from the Super Reds. It certainly wasn’t dull. (If timewasting makes you angry, is it by definition ‘not dull’? I’ll dwell on that.)

Shrewsbury Town. The only team I’ve ever seen timewaste while two goals down. This game broke records for the number of ‘head injuries’ sustained. Every time a Shrew went down, he was clutching his head. Ironic then that it was two of our players (Mads and Kane) who ended up bandaged up. Later, half their team surround Cadden after an innocuous looking tackle leaves their man rolling around. He’s a split second late, FFS, making a genuine attempt at a tackle. Red card it is. A minute later, their manager is mouthing off at the ref again. Seems the man in black can’t please ANYBODY. So he must be doing something right!

In a disjointed opening half, we somehow went in 2 goals to the good. Cadden crosses the ball and the keeper fumbles it into the net. Karma. The PA announcer mistakenly gives it to Cole, but I guess he’s on the wrong side of the pitch to see. Looked Cadden’s all the way to me. Then, 30 seconds after Phillips has found row Z* of the Ponty with a(nother) wayward shot, a centre half shows him how it’s done. Kitching hits it low and hard and Cole snaffles a carbon copy of the tap-in he got in the last home game. He’s a right sniffer! Watters does the best thing he did all game by following up and not stealing it off Devante.

*ok, pedants. Probably row T. You get the idea though.

Done and dusted you’d think. We’ll get into the groove second half and take these to pieces like we did Morecambe. And it shoulda been three as Watters does the impossible…heading it past the keeper on the edge of the box and somehow…somehow…failing to find the net, as a defender gets back while he dawdles. Maybe we had other shots, but by now there’s squabbles going on all over the pitch and the ref is finding his notebook.

There are 15 mins left as Cadden sees red. I still fancy us to go up the other end for a third (a la Cambridge home and away) but not if Mads connects with a stupid challenge as they break. Luckily, he’s so late he misses the Shrew. (They’re tricky little beggars.) On a booking, we’d have been down to 9. Now THAT would have been interesting. They pull one back with a superb dink down the middle for Phillips to head home (proving Cadden’s foul hadn’t broken him). But we aren’t troubled again, until a last second close range stab goes straight to Isted. Good positioning? Lucky? Poor finish? Who cares? The three points are ours, and with Plymouth losing and Ipsh*t drawing, this weekend hasn’t been the disaster it looked. A bit like Jesus, we’ve been crucified Easter Friday and are back from the dead come Monday. It’s what the Reverend Tiverton Preedy woulda wanted.

Onwards and upwards!

*** Goal King Cole. Busy up front, excellent runs, won balls in the air (!)…and held the ball up. Oh, and notched.
** Mads. Reckless challenge aside (see earlier) a tower of dominance.
* Kitching. Reading an article in the Chron, I was unsurprised to find Kitching used to do a bit of boxing. Well I never!

Londontykes’ MOTM: 1. Cole 2. Andersen 3. Kitching

Official MOTM: Cadden. A cheeky choice from the match sponsors.

Despatches:
Watters. Bloody useless. How can a bloke so big fail to be able to win a header? Even Cole won a fair few flick-ons Monday. I also saw him lead with his elbow (again) in one slow-mo challenge. Thankfully, that particular Shrew wasn’t bright enough to stand and wait to be hit and go down like the sack of s*** his teammates kept imitating. In the end, they only managed to get us 2 yellow cards (and the red) while they had….SEVEN yellows, including one getting sent off in injury time. I nearly forgot about that, though I can still see his look of amazement and his arms spread out like Cauley Woodrow in his best Christ the Redeemer phase.

Kane was the subject of debate. Was he particularly poor in his passing, or was he giving the ball away trying to make things happen (as opposed to those tidy ‘safe’ passes wot players do). I was in the former camp. We can all kick a ball 6 yards square to someone unmarked. Phillips….was put out of his misery on 64. It’s always nice to see the manager reading my mind, taking off Watters and Phillips for Norwood and Benson for Beds. (Mind, we turned a 2-0 lead into a 2-1 scrape thereafter. Stats, eh!?) Oh, and while Bobby Thomas had another excellent game, his brother Luke’s main input once coming on was to be hacked down while in full flow in their half. If that challenge was worth the yellow it got, and Cadden’s was a red, there is something wrong with this game. Kane too was taken out by a wild challenge on the far touchline, the ball not even in sight of the proponent. Again, a worse ‘tackle’ than the red, but deemed only a yellow. No wonder it all kicked off at full-time, with manager Duff having to intervene to drag our players away.

Drink du jour: A better pint of pale ale in Spiral City. It might have been Acorn.

Away: 514

Today’s take home: Check your play-off final dates carefully! (They’ve changed.)

The Damage:
c. £40 travel (petrol). Up from London.
= £40

Burton Albion 2-1 BFC, Friday 7th April 2023

‘It is adamantine parallelograms – indeed, hard lines.’

What can I say? The world and his wife knows this game was decided 10 minutes in. Or, to be more precise, COULD have been decided. We’ve broken down the right, the ball’s been cutback, the keeper is nowhere. All Norwood has to do is slot it, but he finds the defender on the line. Or the defender’s ARM. Now, I’ll be honest, I’m at the other end of the ground and the ref is far closer and has a CLEAR view. No pen, no nothing. Everyone watching online is positive it’s handball. But I’m sure the ref’s subconsciousness comes into play. Give the pen, send their man off and the game is potentially over. And if he gets it wrong, he’ll run the gauntlet for ruining the match. Far better to give Burton the benefit of any doubt – after all, promotion chasing Barnsley still have 80 odd minutes to win this game. And win it we didn’t.

(I’ve since seen a replay. Norwood is 6 YARDS OUT, FFS. I can’t see how the ref can definitively spot that’s a handball, it happens so fast. But it does allow me to give credit to Adam Phillips for the throughball to Jordan Williams which tears them apart.) Anyway, cue the vitriol for me for sticking up for the ref. This is not the Premiership, the ref doesn’t have the advantage / fallback of VAR. And besides, I rather like the idea of getting promotion without gaining a single penalty all season. But yes, the shot does hit his arm. If it had been at our end, we might have had a better chance of persuading the ref (think Old Trafford and THAT Gary Neville foul on Andy Liddell).

Then we fell apart. Ball after ball was aimed at the heads of Norwood and Cole (and later, Tedic and Watters) and the Burton centre halves mopped it up. Kane and Connell, so often the lynchpins, couldn’t their feet on the ball and were pulled after an hour, with us one down. Kane fails to stop the cross, Phillips fails to cut it out, and their bloke prods it in. What a terrible, terrible goal to concede. This is food and drink to a defence, this type of ball.

Credit where it’s due for their killer second on 87, as their bod cuts inside from Williams and curls it into the far corner from 20 yards. The game is up, Sarah’s dad needs the toilet and he’ll see us outside. He misses the (our) best 10 mins of the match, as Cadden pulls one back, driving home through a crowd. 7 minutes of injury time offers hope…and Burton are now camped in their half. However, we barely threaten until a last second Tedic header sees the keeper scrambling.

Onwards and upwards!

*** No-one. A poor show all round.
** Tedic. Only threat we had. The turn and snapshot, the header…
* Cadden. Notched.

Londontykes’ MOTM: 1. Tedic 2. Cadden 3. Connell

Despatches:
It’s my old bugbear, timewasting. Their keeper had possession of the ball twice in injury time, holding it 15 and 13 seconds respectively. Last time I looked, the rule was 6 seconds. Of course, he'd already been booked, so the referee couldn't possibly award a free kick, as he'd have to send him off. When will this accursed rule be adhered to!!??

The yoof were in our real ale pub, pre-match, banging signs, standing on a picnic table, making a racket. Lads – fine, but wrong hostelry. (I think they had 3 drinks between them, so who knows what was powering their energy!?)

Excellent pre-match planning from the Londontykes as we agree to meet in a pub that doesn’t open till 4. Thankfully, crisis averted before I reached Burton. Visiting the outlaws in nearby Lichfield, I had Sarah and her dad slumming it from the likes of Norwich City and Aston Vanilla. Neither were impressed, but neither was I. Sarah wasn’t keen on the language (!) and both moaned about not having seats. Well, next season…

Drink du jour: Joules IPA in Coopers Tavern. Love this pub.

Away: 1500? A sellout, anyway.

Today’s take home: If Connell and Kane don’t boss it, what have we got?

The Damage:
£19 ent
£3 programme
= £22

Newton Aycliffe 4-0 West Allotment Celtic, Tuesday 4th April 2023

Newton Aycliffe 4-0 West Allotment Celtic, Northern League Division 1, SecuriCore Stadium (Moore Lane), att. 339

I have been neglecting the Northern League this season. Other football. Partner. Life. The usual. I am also running out of time here in the north-east, as my partner and I have had a bid accepted on a house in the Yorkshire Pennines, which should be nice. It seems a bit unfair to force the other half, albeit through circumstance, to live in my hometown which even I don’t like.

Tonite I’ve a choice: it’s Gateshead v Yeovil in the National League, a crucial relegation clash. And, despite the athletics track, I really like going to Gateshead. Easy drive, easy parking, easy in, sit where you like, steep rake in the stand, decent atmosphere. Or Tow Law in the Northern League, perhaps my favourite Northern League ground, with its hotchpotch of stands and other buildings, chiselled high up in the Durham Pennines. But, no. With 4 games or so left, I elect for local side Newton Aycliffe, on the verge of winning the Northern League for the first time in their history. I can’t NOT go and watch the champions-elect.

As I said, Aycliffe have 4 games left to win it. Under the leadership of former Sunderland midfielder Brian Atkinson, they’re 6 points ahead of Ashington, who themselves have 2 games in hand. However, the leaders have a far superior goal difference, helped in part by their latest victory, 9-0 at home to hapless Sunderland RCA. The title, therefore, is theirs to lose. This evening’s game against 5th placed West Allotment Celtic appears to be their toughest fixture. Mind, it’s also their last at home.

Both sides are in a remarkable run of form. West have 8 wins and a draw from 9, Aycliffe 12 wins and only one defeat in 14. It promised to be a cracking match, and it proved to be so. Both sides went at each other and in an even first half, the hosts went in ahead courtesy of an early goal from Liam Jarvie, getting on the end of a piercing throughball. With a spot adjacent to the dugout, I was enjoying the away bench appeal for anything and everything, but I did have sympathy as the tubby right back got carted off after a reckless challenge right in front of me. Not even a free kick. Acknowledgement of how poor this ref is was confirmed when the bench informed us it was the same ref who’d denied them a penalty at Pickering when the defender saved it on the line. C’est la vie.

The right back, meantime, was being goaded by a couple of elders about how soft he was for ‘going off again injured.’ Turned out to be mum and dad. Second half, as I stood behind the goal, mum comes over and accuses a (big) young lad of about 18 of hitting her younger son. Fair play to the other spectators for diffusing the situation, though it did finish with suggestions to call the police if she really thought her lad had told his story accurately.

With a well-above average crowd of 339, there was a general hubbub around the ground for a change. The yoof were in the seats…maybe driving everyone else out?...singing to themselves. ‘Shoes in the air if you love Aycliffe’ was a song I never expected to hear in my life. (If you’ve ever been to Newton Aycliffe, you’d know why. Even ‘new towns’ have seen better days here in the north-east.)

The Newton Aycliffe Sports Club, is, however, a rare beacon. Big social club, numerous playing fields, and a football ground smartly enclosed by wooden fencing. There are 2 stands, both on the right touchline as you enter, small modern affairs of the type unloaded off the back of a lorry. One standing, one seating. Behind the goal are the changing rooms, a refreshment kiosk, and a grassy space for the kids to have a kickabout on (and fall out, by the sounds of it). There’s hard standing around the rest of the ground, all very tidy.

The second half is an Eddie Thomas masterclass, the Aycliffe forward hitting a hattrick of impeccable quality. The first, a half volley across the keeper as he ran away from goal was itself worthy of winning the league. The other two are proper ‘sniffer’s goals’, as they’re fired in from close range during scrambles. Surely the title is imminent?

The Damage:
£7 ent
= £7

BFC 5-0 Morecambe, Saturday 1st April 2023

‘Ahm ganna kick its f***ing c*** in’

Please, EFL, NEVER have us kicking off a home game on April Fools Day ever again. Not if I have to put up with various Londontykes trying to outfool one another with japery you could signpost. Mads out for the rest of the season having been beaten up midweek by Washday fans? Duff to Palace in the summer, done deal? Devante Cole to score 2 goals in the same match? Yeah, yeah, whatever. Next time, try to be a little LESS preposterous in your japery.

We don’t give Morecambe a chance. One up after 3 minutes, 2 up after about 20, 3 on the half hour….we could hit 7 or 8 here. That we don’t is down to Duff giving the lesser lights a runout and taking off star man Connell at four nil, 55 minutes in. Thereafter, we play neat little triangles in the middle of the pitch and proceed to do nothing for half an hour. Thankfully, a corner into the box in injury time gives Bobby Thomas the chance to add the cherry on the icing.

The first is straight off the training ground, as Kane drags the ball back from a free kick for Connell to hit low and hard, Cole gobbling up the rebound from 6 yards. We increase the lead from another Connell shot, as the keeper parries, we whip the ball straight back in and Watters provides the presence and their defender the final touch. Of course the PA announcer gives it to Watters, but his reluctant celebration is the giveaway. The third confuses me. Is that Mads Andersen dribbling in from their right? Yes it is. And Mads is confused too, as the ball bobbles around before deflecting off a defender for Kane to join the party. We could be talking silly numbers today.

The fourth, early in the second half as we kick towards the Ponty, is a beauty. Jordan Williams plays the ball inside and Kane dummies it for Cole to have a tap-in. This is the greatest dummy since Danny Wilson’s first season in charge, when we won 3-1 at Notts County. Problem is, with memory failing, I can’t remember if it was Payton’s dummy for Brendan O’Headless* to score, or vice versa. (The game also inhabits what’s left of my memory as my nana had never rocked up to an away game before, but hearing that her favourite - only – grandson was hitching up to the game from London, she came with my dad who’d called into Barnsley on the way down; try explaining to a pensioner why 1500 Barnsley are chanting ‘your mams and dads are scabs’ at the junior section**.)

* still one of my favourite ever Reds players
** the only part of the home end making any noise, hence the chants being directed towards them

Then Duff takes pity. Phillips, Russell and Benson come on for Connell, Thomas and Kane and all midfield impetus is lost. Tedic looks keen when he comes on for the lump that is Watters, but the supply line has dried up. We even let Morecambe have a kick, as former Red Dan Crowley (remember him? On loan from Arsenal? ‘The best 17 year old in the country.’ No? That’s cos he was RUBBISH.) Anyway, he bangs one off the far post from inside our box, as we start getting cocky. Still, it’s the wake-up call we need not to take liberties, and we play keep-ball. A rare foray into the final third brings a corner which Thomas heads in at the back post from a height of about 3 foot. THAT is how appalling the Shrimpers are. ‘You can only beat what’s in front of you’ et cetera.

Onwards and upwards!

*** Connell. Tackles, drives forward, shots. It’s no coincidence our game ended with him.
** Mads. As perfect a game as one could play in central defence at home to Morecambe.
* Goal King Cole. Scored 2 and good outfield play in the second half. (Couldn’t hold a ball up for toffee, first.) Denied his first (last?) hattrick by an incorrect offside flag, though it looked offside to me.

Londontykes’ MOTM: 1. Cole 2. Andersen 3.Connell

Official MOTM: Was it Mads? (My memory…or lack thereof…is a concern.)

Despatches: Good to see Duff agreeing that Phillips is a passenger, and demoting him to the bench. Or b) giving Luke Thomas a runout in a presumably easy game, get him back to full fitness, etc. Ditto Watters for Norwood. There is no way this lump of lard gets a game otherwise. He must be six foot two, 2 feet wide of…what? I never saw him once win a header, but that’s probably cos he can’t jump. Watch him. Kane was excellent in tandem with Connell, while the defence were untroubled, save for that Crowley shot.

Good atmosphere too, though I drew a line at waving my scarf about by the 4th. It was cold, godammit. Bumped into a couple of Morecambe fans in the chippy beforehand. They predicted 5-0. ‘But we won’t let the football spoil our day.’ Honorary Londontykes! Mind, must mention Nice Guy Chris. Who says perennial optimism doesn’t pay off? He’s won a tenner off me for Cole reaching 14…and now the talk is that he’ll hit 20. Wind yer necks in, lads!

Oh, and I passed another milestone today. A few months shy of the half century, I can finally say I’ve had a go of the old Polyfilla. I used to have a life…

Drink du jour: Some average pale ale I’ve never heard of in Spiral City.

Away: About 200.

Today’s take home: Clever management (again) from Duff. Off to Palace in the summer I hear…

The Damage:
c. £30 travel (petrol)
= £30