Pillow talk

The superfan had planned to see around ten games over the Christmas/New Year period but was continually beaten by the wintry weather. In the end he was lucky to make it to three: Tonbridge Angels v Hastings United (Boxing Day), Hayes & Yeading United v AFC Wimbledon (New Year’s Day) and Fulham v Swindon Town (2 January).

A four-day trip down to Bournemouth before Xmas had an inauspicious start. The train from Waterloo got stuck in the Surrey countryside, the guard announcing in dramatic style that there was a fire on the train in front of us and ours would now be ‘the rescue train’, passengers having to walk or slide from one to the other on a ramp.

All exciting stuff but the journey took more than three hours. My Saturday game was Bournemouth v Poole Town, a local derby in the Wessex League, and I called the ground at lunchtime to be told that it was definitely on. There hadn’t been any snow and the overnight frost was insignificant. I walked the three miles plus from my hotel to Winton and saw the players practising on the pitch when I bowled up at 2.10.

Literally ten seconds after paying the admission money and slipping a programme into my anorak pocket, a little girl rushed up to say that the ref had called the game off. Her story was that both teams were ready to play but the official had ruled that the pitch was dangerously hard. Poole had a training session instead and I heard one or two players muttering that the decision to postpone was ‘ridiculous’.

I got a 6c bus back to the town centre and I realised that, if I got a move on, I could still see the second half of Westover Bournemouth v Portcastrian in something called the ‘Poole Bay Challenge Cup’ in King’s Park.  The early signs were good as I approached Pitch 1: plenty of cars parked near the pitch, nets and corner flags in place. Then I heard the ref tell someone that he’d abandoned the game at half-time. “It shouldn’t really have been started”, he said into his mobile.

The four games scheduled for King’s Park on Sunday morning were all cancelled due to ‘frozen pitches’ and there was more disappointment for the superfan as Monday evening’s League Two fixture between AFC Bournemouth and Notts County also fell victim to the weather. This time the Dean Court pitch was ‘waterlogged’. The problem with having a mid-winter break, though, is that you never know when the really bad weather is going to occur.

I stayed with my sister Kathy in Sevenoaks for three nights over Xmas and we saw Tonbridge Angels play Hastings United in the Isthmian Premier on Boxing Day afternoon. Unexpectedly there was a train service to Tonbridge, which was then going on to Ashford International, and we got to Longmead Stadium seconds before the kick-off. It finished 2-2.

Games I tried to see on the 28 and 29 December were postponed due to a frozen pitch and a waterlogged pitch respectively. I had to settle for Wolves v Man City on TV on the Monday. I was liaison officer to the Italian U21 team when they played England at Swindon in the ‘80s and remembered that City’s new boss Roberto Mancini was rooming with Gianluca Vialli. I went past their room once and saw them standing on a bed having a pillow fight. Footballers, eh?

Things did buck up for the superfan at the end of the week with Hayes v Wimbledon in the Conference Premier (1-0) and Fulham v Swindon in The FA Cup (also 1-0). I stood behind one goal at Hayes and thought I’d lost a couple of toes to frostbite in the second half. But I did a count up when I got home and they were all there. Roll on April.