Stormy Corner

The superfan made his annual trip up to Liverpool to stay with John, a friend from his university days in the ‘70s (1970s, that is), and his family.

The journey by train from London takes more or less exactly two hours now, much shorter than it used to, but heavy rain was bouncing up and down on the station roof when the superfan pulled into Lime Street.

John, who is a vicar, is keen on football and we went to several games together when we were students. Especially memorable was Liverpool’s European Cup quarter-final with St Etienne, when substitute David Fairclough’s dramatic late goal won the tie. Standing (or trying to stand) in the Paddock, we were directly in line with the scorer. There were 55,000 inside Anfield that day.

We scanned the ‘Echo’ on Saturday morning for a suitable pre-season friendly to go to. I liked the look of Skelmersdale United v Plymouth Argyle, though it seemed to be a bit of a trek from John’s house at Hunt’s Cross in the south of Liverpool. But he assured me it was ‘motorway all the way’ and we’d be there in 45 minutes. Actually we did it in 40 via the M6 and the M58.

Skelmersdale or ‘Skem’ play in the Northern Premier League’s Division One North and their ground is Skelmersdale & Ormskirk College Stadium on Stanley Industrial Estate, which I believe is known locally as ‘Stormy Corner’. It was warm and sunny on Saturday afternoon, though there was a noticeable breeze. We were in the ground by 2.40 but found they had already run out of programmes.

The club probably weren’t expecting such a large crowd. I reckon there were more than 500 there.

So why were Skem playing Plymouth? Well, it was apparently part of a recent transfer deal that took two Skem players down to Devon to join the pro’ ranks that the Championship side would send their first team to play a friendly. Argyle, in traditional green, had Rory Fallon and Bradley Wright-Phillips up front and they buzzed around the home goal until the former notched an 18th-minute opener.

It finished 2-0 to Plymouth, the second being scored from outside the box near the end. So that’s three away wins out of three for the superfan this pre-season. Perhaps not surprisingly.

There was no local football on the Sunday, so I paid another visit to the former site of Holly Park, where South Liverpool FC played Northern Premier League football when I was a student. The ground closed in 1990, following fires and acts of vandalism, and there’s not a brick left now.

Where John Aldridge and Jimmy Case played before they became Liverpool stars is now the car park of Liverpool South Parkway station. I went to lots of games at Holly Park, which was walkable from my Hall of Residence, although ‘South’ always seemed to be struggling in their league. My last game was actually a Reserve fixture against a team called ‘Tricolore’.

I got a lot of stick from the chaps for watching a game like that, as you can imagine. ‘When’s the kick-off?’ ‘What time can you make it?’