DRAINING ON OUR PATIENCE
P- PTwo letters guaranteed to strike dread into the heart of any football fan. They may appear as a mere footnote in the results service – a quick job for the pools panel – but the human cost frequently goes undocumented.
Consider this season. Basking in my garden on the Friday afternoon before the opening game, I received an anonymous email. Subject matter: ‘Off.’ Body text: ‘Tinpot league!’ I didn’t instantly comprehend, initially interpreting it as an enthusiastic reminder that ‘The Tinpot League’ commenced tomorrow, something that I was acutely aware of, having been counting down the days throughout the barren summer.
It was only when it was followed by a series of chirrups that the penny dropped. The match was off, Chester FC’s visit to Solihull Moors postponed due to safety reasons. The first reaction was disbelief, requiring multiple news sources before progressing to acceptance. This was swiftly followed by rage. What the actual heck? They had the entire closed season to get their house in order yet waited until the last day to get a safety certificate. Amateur night in the Big Top. You couldn’t make it up.
Despair
For football fans, the first game of the season is like Christmas Day. New players, new kit, old faces. Equal top of the league with everything to play for. To have that snatched away from you with barely 24 hours’ notice is an absolute kick in the guts. And that’s before you consider the financial factors. Train tickets will have been bought, hotels booked – indeed some people will have already gone early.
I was only hours from departing myself, with a weekend conveniently arranged with friends in the Midlands. Embarrassingly, I had to uninvite myself, unable to bear the prospect of mooching round their house with no football to go to. My family still went, acting as emissaries on my behalf, delivering a half-arsed excuse about me having to write a book.
Of course I still had to go to the rearranged match, and indeed take my six-year-old son, thankfully still on school holidays. Driving up on a sodden Tuesday night, there was a real danger of it being called off again, which may have proved too much. Guiding us in to the partially flooded car park, the steward announced in his best Noddy Holder accent, “You ain’t gotta pay!” A miniscule consolation in the scheme of things. We lost 2-0.
Fast-forward to last Saturday. Following a textbook drive from London en-famille, I was strolling across a pub car park in Eastleigh, slightly regretting not wearing shorts given the autumnal sunshine. Beckoning me to his car, a fellow Chester fan showed me his phone: ‘Game off. Waterlogged pitch.’
Not again. We shook our heads in stunned despair. He didn’t even get out of his car, simply driving the four hours back to Chester.
As I say in my forthcoming book, “The postponed match is the bane of the long-distance football fan – if there’s one thing worse than driving the length of the country for a s**t match, it’s driving the length of the country for a postponed match.”
Halloween
Particularly when it’s due to gross incompetence, with Eastleigh’s ‘subsoil drainage’ problems long since known about. Utterly graceless, they didn’t even offer an apology to the 100 or so Chester fans who had already set off on a series of planes, trains and automobiles.
Following a joyless pub lunch, I went to the ground to have a look for myself. Even a home fan described it as “typical Eastleigh,” citing the money spent on lavish new facilities while the pitch is in disrepair.
Sneaking in for a look, I was made aware of some minor discolouration in one corner of an otherwise wholly playable surface. Pathetic.
The referee has to take some culpability. Just get the bloody game on. Apparently, the players were in danger. Of what? Getting wet feet? They’ll be in considerably more danger negotiating those eerie country lanes on Halloween, fittingly when the match has been rescheduled for. What a horror show!
There’s much to enjoy in Non-League, but nonsense like this makes you yearn for the big time. Or indeed The Deva Stadium. We got 99 problems but a pitch ain’t one...