Having to stay local as Master O was due to arrive from Sussex for a 3 day furlough, a leisurely trip out to Moor Lane, Wincanton via the backroads yesterday, giving me an early opportunity to indulge in that rustic autumn Daarzet custom of pheasant-dodging.
It finished 2-0 to me, both incoming kamikazes successfully avoided.
It’s a couple of years since I last visited the Wincanton Sports complex, and one noticeable improvement is that the large carpark has been re-gravelled to get rid of the numerous gawd-awful potholes. Entrance to the football ground has also altered – you now go in through the doors of the main building, the Maddocks Pavilion, rather than through the gate and up the pathway at the side of it; the soccer club’s paystation is now in the side foyer of the pavilion, reached via the bar area, from which you can then access the pitch. Before I went in, however, I wandered a bit further into the multi-sport campus to have a look at (the newly resurrected) Wincanton RFC team pitch; the club now play here rather than up at the secondary school in Dancing Lane. Well, it’s a pitch, nicely mown, with extremely tall goal posts, and that’s it.
The football pitch hasn’t changed much (despite various arson attempts over the last year or so
) – it’s still a bit ramshackle, the stand still has bucket seats with no backs, and the Scary Generator is still there in the corner
. Before the game, the opposition were complaining about a large hole in one of the nets and it took some time to fix it. Even then, the linesman took a very careful, suspicious look at it. I noticed that the linesman, a young lad, was one Spencer Chinnook, and the other (senior) linesman was Mark Chinnook, whom I’ve seen at numerous games over the years both in the middle and on the line. It’s such an unusual name, presumably father and son! Wincanton Town themselves have re-invented themselves yet again
, calling themselves the Wasps this season (previously variously a.k.a. the Yellow and Blacks, the Black and Yellows, and the Winkies), and the bar in the pavilion is branded the “Wasps Nest”.
The opposition team were, fortuitously, the last of the newcomers I’ve set out to see this season in the Western League Division 1. They’re from Hanham, a suburb of Bristol, and by all accounts a thriving community club with over 500 kids “on the books”. A history lesson - they are called “AEK Boco FC”, and were founded in 2003 by the merger of two junior clubs in the area. One of the junior clubs, formed in 1978 by a director of Bristol City FC as it happens, was Boco Juniors FC, named after the 1978 Argentinian champions. The other club, AEK Rangers FC, were formed in 1977 by a group of lads working locally in Fishponds, one of whom had just been on holiday to Greece (AEK Athens FC are one of the country’s top clubs) and who was by descent Scottish (hence Rangers!)
.
Anyway, Wincanton started 17th in the league with newcomers Boco 2nd, and initially it looked like the visitors’ game play was merely to contain Wincanton as far as possible, but that fell apart on 12m when Williams lofted one over the keeper from a wide angle. Boco’s Nathan Hall unfortunately deflected a direct free kick past his own keeper on 22m and Cole made it 3-0 on 32m with a simple tap-in at the far post.
There was a strange period of play straight after half-time in which it seemed that Wincanton had completely lost the plot. They allowed Boco to pull a goal back on 47m with a close range effort and Boco then proceeded to dictate matters for the next 20 minutes or so. Wincanton managed to keep them out, and I thought the game would gradually wind down to a 3-1 home victory, but a far-post header from Chapman (77m) and a 15-yard drive across the keeper by Williams (84m) made the score a rather flattering 5-1 at the end. A deserved win, nevertheless, for the Wasps.
18/09/21 – Western League Division 1
Wincanton Town 5 AEK Boco 1Admission: £4 concession (£6 otherwise)
Programme: £1 28pp non-glossy, but absolutely does the business, and includes some good action photos.
Teams: Flipboard by the paystation in the Maddocks Pavillion, no announcements, probably because they’ve never had a working tannoy …….
Refreshments: Canadian Ham flavoured crinkle-cut crisps, 80p from the bar. What distinguishes Canadian Ham from any other Ham, I wonder
Is it a marinade of maple syrup? Or possibly a whiff of polar bear pee?
Our Yorkshire readers should know; after all, this was a packet of Seabrook’s Crisps and they seem to come from here:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.79637 ... 384!8i8192Attendance: 69, with lots of (thankfully well-behaved) yoofs in attendance
Three final points:
(a) On the way down there, I stopped off at a local pub/restaurant (no names, no packdrill, after all, this isn’t Tripadvisor) and popped in to see if I could purchase a scotch egg or a pork pie or something, as I remembered they used to have them out on the counter. Got to the bar and there was a lady (manageress?) behind it, writing out some sheet or other. I was studiously ignored, and she didn’t look like the sort of person you’d want to interrupt. After a couple of minutes, another lady came out from the back and the two started talking, discussing cutlery, I think, and then walked off. Again, I was ignored.
So I simply walked out
. Their loss.
(b) At the ground, I declined to purchase a raffle ticket. The bloke behind me won a bottle of wine ……
(c) Mrs O and I have this week completed a full 5 years as residents of our town. I have read the small print - and we are both now entitled to a funeral plot in the town cemetery!
A truck turned up late one night and removed £30K's worth of artificial turf they were just about to lay .....