Team Bonding Football Blog

  Fleet Spurs 3 Denmead 4 Hampshire Premier League – 29th August 2023   Relegation. Sometimes, there is a crushing inevitability about it. You can look at a club on day one of the season and confidently predict a slow, lingering death of a season. Other times, a club has mishandled every big decision over a season, shoot themselves repeatedly in the foot, and their unexpected demise will stun the supporters. The term “too big to go down” can also apply, but broadly speaking, any club that gets relegated gets what they deserve. In some situations, a club can point to bad luck, a sliding doors moments when the giddy heights of mid-table swap places with a league table showing a capital “R” next to their name, below a dotted line, possibly even with a different shaded background highlighting their end of season status. Leeds United, from the moment they slipped out of Champions League football in the early part of the century, were financially and administratively mismana...

  Springboks 35 All Blacks 7. 25th August 2023   There are very few occasions I’ve attended an event that has bothered the history books. Back in my teenage years, I went to see the Manic Street Preachers play the London Astoria at the very end of The Holy Bible tour. A nose-bleedingly loud set ended with the band destroying their instruments. I couldn’t hear properly for a week after. And with most historical events, you don’t know you’ve been part of something bigger until after the fact. The gig itself went down in rock and roll folklore as being the last gig ever played by Richard James Edwards, before he disappeared the following February (I still think about that gig a lot). Sporting wise, attending A Major Event hasn’t been something I’ve managed too often, usually only managing to be at minor footnotes in history: the first Full Members Cup final, which was also my first ever football match – a nine-goal cup final at Wembley (yes, football was pretty much downh...

  Pre-Season Friendly: Frimley Green U18 1 Aldershot Town U18 7 (Seven) 23rd August 2023 When I was at school, there was a boy in my class who had trials with Southampton. He was, possibly, the best player in the school. Certainly, better than I ever was. I could hold my own, but even at my absolute best, I could hope to be labelled “bang average”. I was close to indispensable for the school team in the Sixth Form as I had one advantage over most of my peer group: I was left-footed, which guaranteed that I would pretty much always get picked at left-back. I had no attacking instinct back then, which is something that rings true even now, as any attempt at venturing beyond the half-way line in the Monday Night Frimley Power League usually ends in confusion, the five-a-side equivalent of a fish on a bicycle. My Southampton-trialing classmate was the first player I had played alongside who could pass the ball with the outside of his foot around an opponent. The first time I seen him...

  National League: Woking 2 Altrincham 3 12th August 2023. It can be a challenge sometimes trying to formulate a plan on where to visit on a Saturday afternoon. Spending a Friday evening agonizing over the myriad travel options to get to a game in the Hampshire Premier League, or working out just how long it would take to walk from a remote train station to a playing field in Berkshire. Factor in a six-year old who likes trundling along and stopping for no reason, throwing some dance moves in, and suddenly the three o'clock kick-off time can loom large, with only one of the party nervously looking at their watch. So, gingerly prodding the beast marked "train travel" on a day when there were ASLEF strikes in operation, we found we could chance leaving the Rushmoor area for a match. With my wife helping a friend move house, I nobly took our daughter for a trip to, um, Woking. Am nice like that. Woking. Altrincham. Two big names from when I started watching non-league footba...