We have an excellent weekly journal down here - the Blackmore Vale Magazine - free if you live in the Vale, the rest of you beggars pay!
120pp of local features and many adverts - Staff Required for Busy Game Farm, Cattle Insemination Services, Christmas Coffee Mornings, Traditional Folk Music Sessions sort of thing - and in this week's edition there's actually a three-column report of that Puddletown rugby match, complete with action photo!
Marvellous!
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03/12 – I’m sure it hasn’t gone beyond the notice of those hardy northerners on this board that this last week, there has been a bit of an inversion in the weather, and us “dahn sarf” have been experiencing a really frightful cold snap, with temperatures plunging to -7 and -9 degrees Centigrade
. Here in the rural Blackmore Vale, we’ve had three days of chill easterly winds and nights of hard frost, culminating on Thursday when we awoke to an absolutely magical Winter Wonderland scene – the overnight fog lingered all day with the sun a vague yellow circle in the sky and the trees and bushes were shrouded white in frost and rime. Every single cobweb was a delicate white rope, and our resident pigeon could be found standing forlornly on the ice in the middle of the bird-bath
. All of which was a key to the Ostrich drawing his horns in this Saturday, staying local, and knocking off the last of the “home town” grounds he had so far not visited.
Shaftesbury is an absolute pig to drive around, even worse than Walsall, which is saying something. From Gillingham, (well, from most directions actually) you approach it up a steep hill (a favourite site for the Dorset Speed Watch camera van monitoring descending traffic) and can turn off right into a series of narrow streets, with minimal footpaths, that lead to the town centre. Most towns have a “high street” which runs in a straight line from “here” to “there”; Shaftesbury is unusual in that the main street is an oxbow that runs from “here”, only to double back on itself to finish about 50 yards south of “here”
. This makes navigation somewhat confusing, for the pedestrian as well as the motorist. Unfortunately, Shaftesbury and Gillingham are rather symbiotic – the former has the shops (Edinburgh Woollen Mill, WH Smiths, Boots) and the major banks, whilst the latter has the railway station and Waitrose. Shaftesbury also has the local council recycling centre, which I’ve only visited twice, and on both occasions they’ve rapidly lowered the barrier as I arrived, keeping me outside for about 15 minutes
while a man with a JCB went charging erratically round the site using his bucket to violently tamp the contents of assorted huge skips down to a manageable level. Still, Skevvy’s Café on the trading estate serves a decent Full English Breakfast.
The other notable attraction of Shaftesbury is, of course, Gold Hill, where they filmed that famous Hovis advert, as couldn’t find anything picturesque enough north of Barnsley
. It’s actually quite easily accessible, running down from the back of the Town Hall, in front of which is incongruously a large concrete cottage loaf on a plinth commemorating the event
. Mrs O and I have staggered down the first part of Gold Hill, clinging like limpets onto the handrail whilst traversing the uneven cobblestones, to where the street opens out and curves downwards in that traditional picture – it is indeed very picturesque on the right day. And there’s a café. Which serves a decent Full English …
Knowing that the soccer ground was somewhere behind the Tescos (which has the cheapest fuel in the area, worth remembering), last Thursday I went on a voyage of exploration to find the stadium, and a good thing I did so too, as the small car-park was marked for Members Only. So it was a question of parking on a council car park some distance away, and I chose the free long-stay one (which weekdays is usually full) by the A30 roundabout rather than the pay car-parks closer to the town centre. I’d plotted my walking route from there to the ground using the map in the local Town Directory; a bit of a mistake, as scale appeared to be an alien concept, and several key features were omitted, just to make life more interesting
. I walked past the Shaftesbury Town Silver Band headquarters (motto: “Comitas cum Concordia”, meaning, I think “we will all make every effort to play the right notes at the right time
”), found my way to the crossroads by the Post Office, got totally disorientated, and took off along the wrong road out of town ….
The stadium itself, Cockrams, sports a rather nice clubhouse outside the ground, but inside is rather unpretentious, just a low-slung changing-room block with solar panels and a food hatch, and a long covered stand with bucket seats down one side. The dugouts and a covered standing area were on the far side, but nobody seemed to be using the latter, and the whole thing was enclosed by a hedge of conifer trees, which didn’t stop an evil wind fit to chill the bone-marrow today.
The match pitted 5th vs 6th in the table. The opposition, Tadley Calleva, were up from somewhere just north of Basingstoke. Tadley’s the village, and they added Calleva to their name in 2004 in honour of the nearby Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum. Both sides started strongly but Tadley took the lead on 7m when their ace goalscorer Brett Denham got the faintest of touches to the ball in the penalty area to steer it just inside the far post. Shaftesbury responded with a “goal” which was ruled out for offside, but Tadley then made it 0-2 with a complicated free kick routine on the edge of the area, involving two players jumping over the ball to cause maximum confusion before Charlsley simply strode up and wellied it straight into the net
. The hosts then pulled a goal back, a free-kick of their own being driven in to the near post where Matuszwski flicked the ball home. It seemed that Shaftesbury might be able to pull the game back, but Denham had other ideas; Shaftesbury keeper Card did well to foil him on 39m but he then scored twice before half-time, both goals clinically taken from around 5 yards out.
At the interval, the Ostrich repaired to the clubhouse for a warm-up; so cold was it that as the bird stepped through the outside door, his spectacles totally fogged up leaving him floundering in the foyer
! The clubhouse also had a rather peculiar background smell, so Ossie was back pitch-side well before the restart.
At 1-4, the game looked over, and Tadley seemed fairly content to defend their lead; however on 73m, Denham broke through the home defence and scored his fourth of the afternoon, driving the ball over the keeper. Shaftesbury immediately pulled one back through Benjamin after Hatchard had seen two attempts blocked on the line. Following that, however, it all got slightly tetchy, nothing too serious, but the referee also slightly lost the plot. Approaching the final whistle, the Tadley manager did a Jose Mourhinho and got sent to the stand – well actually, he walked round behind the goal and stood next to me, muttering darkly about the officials
, only retreating into the conifers when the play and the referee got up that end. And in the 7 minutes of injury time, Shaftesbury scored twice, a close range Hatchard header and a penalty by Ford after a rather innocuous defensive misdemeanour. Not, however, enough to save the match, so Ossie’s Home Town Hoodoo continues unabated!
Wessex League Division 1 (Step 6): Shaftesbury 4 Tadley Calleva 5
Admission £3, informative 20pp programme £1, flaky, overbaked sausage roll £1, mug of stewed coffee £1, attendance 47
Perhaps a tad whistle-happy at times, but he couldn’t really be faulted.