Fun in the sun

Seven matches in seven different competitions in the last six days have taken me up to 57 for the season and 6,108 altogether. An eventful FA Vase tie on Friday night had seven goals, two hat-tricks, two penalties (both unsuccessful), one red card, at least six yellow cards and 12 minutes of stoppage time at the end.

The results, with attendances in brackets, were…

Tuesday: Berkhamsted 0-3 St Albans City in an FA Cup replay (306)

Wednesday: Edexcel 2-3 First Capital Connect in the Islington Midweek League (7)

Thursday: Whyteleafe 3-1 Woking in The FA Youth Cup (55)

Friday: Haringey & Waltham Development 4-3 Kings Langley in The FA Vase (35)

Saturday: Sinjuns Grammarians 2-3 Old Suttonians in the Amateur Football Combination (4)

Sunday (am): AFC Brasenose 1-5 Burgess United in the London Sunday Junior Cup (3)

Sunday (pm): Joybabe 0-2 Hackney in the Greater London Women’s League (12)

I paid my first visit to ‘Broadwater’, the home of Berkhamsted FC, since the ‘90s on Tuesday night and saw St Albans win comfortably in the pouring rain. I was sitting at the back of the stand about ten minutes from kick-off, waiting to make the team changes to the programme, when the PA announcer began…

“Welcome to Broadwater, Ladies and Gentlemen. Here are this evening’s line-ups and we’ll start with our visitors from St Albans. Number 1 – Nick Jupp. Number 2 – Nathan Ralph.”

That was it. We didn’t get any more. Extraordinary.

The station is less than five minutes’ walk away but when I got there after the match, I found there were ‘severe delays’ due to a broken down freight train at Watford Junction. We crawled all the way down to Euston and ‘severe delays’ on the tube to Paddington, due to a signal failure at Farringdon, meant that I got back to the hotel at a quarter to midnight.

The AFA football season tends to start well into September because grounds are shared with cricket teams and I spent a pleasant afternoon in SW17 watching an AFC Senior Division One fixture between Sinjuns Grammarians and Old Suttonians. The ‘Trinity Fields’ ground, with two pitches and a few park benches, is about five minutes’ walk from Wandsworth Common station.

It was an area of girls with posh voices walking their dogs, twee little cake shops, competitions allowing children to dress up. Sutts deserved their 3-2 win but the best goal, scored in added time by the home side, was a curler into the top corner that would surely have beaten Joe Hart.

On Sunday, I had a morning match and an afternoon match in Regent’s Park, either side of a ‘Sunny Side Grill’ in the Baker Street café. The London FA Sunday Junior Cup First Round tie between AFC Brasenose and Burgess United started 16 minutes late after the visiting team – representing a Chinese/Vietnamese community in Kent – had experienced travel problems. It didn’t affect their play: they were 3-0 up in 15 minutes.

Hackney Women won 2-0 in an afternoon when I saw Imogen Thomas out jogging and two Swedish-looking girls kissing and cuddling at the touchline. Everyone was having fun in the late September sunshine.