Off the hook

I’ve watched football in Florida and the Caribbean, taking in exotic matches like Tampa Bay Rowdies v Miami Toros and St Lucia v Grenada, but the hottest conditions I’ve ever experienced were in…Kent!

Seven years ago I went to Ramsgate’s opening Kent League fixture of the season against Sevenoaks Town, when the temperature on that August weekend reached 100 degrees. I sat in the shade in the stand, buying cold drinks and seeing the printing on the cover of the programme melt before my eyes in the sizzling heat.

It wasn’t exactly chilly at Saturday’s match at Champion Hill, my second of the current season. It wasn’t far off 90 and I made a point of staying out of the sun throughout. There wasn’t an anorak in sight as around 200 spectators saw Fisher FC achieve an excellent (and probably unexpected) 2-0 win against a Millwall XI.

Their previous incarnation, ‘Fisher Athletic’, rose from regional football up to the Conference but were wound up for non-payment of taxes in 2009. Their fans resolved to reform the club as a community owned and run venture and they have just completed their first season as a newly formed club, competing in the Kent League at Step 5.

Millwall’s first team were playing at Crawley and we heard they had conceded a goal in the first couple of minutes. The match in front of us was unusually competitive for a pre-season friendly, particularly one played in a furnace, and there was something odd about the first goal too.

In the last moments of the first half, Millwall’s ‘keeper shaped to take a goal-kick. On an instruction bawled out from the bench he tapped the ball to a team-mate just outside the box. He immediately lost possession to a Fisher striker standing right behind him.

The ‘keeper rushed out, lashed the ball against that striker and it looped into the air before bouncing gently into the net. Within five seconds the ref had blown for half-time. Predictably there were copious substitutions in the second period but the play was even more end-to-end, Fisher clinching victory with No.7’s low right-footer across the ‘keeper and into the far corner.

One of the assistant referees wore a baseball cap. It made sense.