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Blue Square South Guide

Bin Man 87

26-04-2009

Staggering through the tape

"Judging by our final league placing (15th), this has been the worst season we have experienced as a united club. Yet, I’ve not hated this campaign as much as I perhaps should have done and don’t feel as disgruntled as I imagined I might now that we have stumbled over the finishing line like a marathon runner who’d traded their shoes for a Lucozade and a dab of Vaseline around the 15-mile mark."

Words roughly related to our last game of the season over at dubSteps. In some ways a bit of a relief, but I'll be missing it soon, for sure.

Posted by skif at 18:55:19 139 comments Leave a comment

19-04-2009

End of the road (trips)

Bishop’s Stortford 0 Havant & Waterlooville 1

In stark contrast to last Monday’s away game at Basingstoke, today’s game contained its thrills, albeit fewer in the first half, with nothing but an opposition goal coming in the second half. Clearly the half-time team talk had been “ease up lads; you’re in danger of losing your ‘relinquishing control of the game’ bonuses.”

So we now lie 15th, and with a five point gap above us, that will be the acme of our hopes for this season with one game to play, although we could still finish as low as 18th. At this part of the table you wouldn’t think there’d be much of a semantic difference, but finishing in a position where, if you parallel it to the Premier League, you could say “mmm, if we lived there, we’d be relegated now” it weighs just that little bit heavier.

Certainly this season has been a long old slog, and you can sense the weariness. I put it some that despite the disappointments we’d be missing all this knocking about and singing in a couple of weeks. However, I was met with several screwed up faces, all of which looked like discarded balls of A4 in a perfectionist writer’s waste paper basket. Those who do a lot for the club particularly seem in need of a good solid break from it.

Me? Despite the poor season, I can’t help but love it, I love getting behind the team, which is why I was happy to clap the team off, despite the second half performance not really warranting it. Being the last away game, I guess it was with a sense of relief and “well, thanks for not getting us relegated as we had begun to fear.” Most days like these warrant a sidling-off quietly but I like to think that generally we’re a bunch of fans who don’t just get behind our side in the good times.

It is a give-and-take thing of course, and you don’t want players to get a false impression of how we’re feeling (a couple of final whistles being greeted with “What a load of rubbish” should have been a clue), but at this stage of the season, you’d like to think that they’d be aware that this is not really what we’d anticipated. To borrow a recent phrasing of Armando Ianucci’s you could say this season has been an “anticapointment.”

Still, at least we could distract ourselves from our lacklustre second half by singing songs in the direction of Spurs striker Darren Bent who happened to be stood watching down the side. Our chants alerted eager young scribble-on-a-napkin hunters who queued up for a bit of haphazard ink-work that they will inevitably lose on the way home. To save him getting en ego from all this attention, and our chants of “Darren Bent’s come to watch the Hawks” and others chants suggesting we’d sign him and “give him a hundred quid”, our Malcolm marched round and pushed in front of Darren to his ask the controversial England call-up’s uncelebrated associate for his autograph. The random mate later apparently joined in with, what I think was a first run out for, a “shoes off if you love the Hawks” gambit. Good man.

So, spirits remain pretty jovial all things considered. Our general grumps will hang about like a pervert in a lido, of course, but why be angry when the sunshine’s out and there’s football to watch, eh? We’ve got all summer, and several empty Saturdays, to try and work this all out.

Still, I am speaking too soon about retreating and regrouping as we have one final conquest to contend with. Just as the gas is running out of our tank, we have Eastleigh to face at home. They can no longer win the league, unless both Wimbledon and Hampton lose and they beat us by about 25 goals (which, for all our woes, I can’t see happening), but local pride remains at stake. As it stands, I can’t see us winning the token final battle in this season’s long lost war, but I’ve expected a lot of different things this season and been confounded at almost every step, so who knows.

Come on you Hawks!

Posted by skif at 11:39:41 1 comments Leave a comment

17-04-2009

Brett Poooaaaaaaa-te, Brett Poooaaaaaaa-te, Brett Poate, Brett Poate, Brett Poooaaaaaaa-te

Stalwart left-side utility man Brett Poate left us earlier this month after seven years snuggled to our bosom. There was a brief period on loan to Bognor in the middle of it which, frankly, rejuvenated him, but he had stagnated a bit again, and was feeling a little disillusioned, so it’s probably for the benefit of both parties that contractual obligations were torn up.

Brett sits at number two in the all time Hawk appearances list (276 in total, 249 starts and 27 as sub), and scored 34 goals, most of which were hammer blows from outside the area. Free-kicks whose swoop registered on the Beaufort scale were a particular speciality of his. Over the years they increasingly ended up in the car park rather than the top corner but when playing in his favoured left midfield role, rather than at left back, he could cause keeper’s posteriors to squeak like the hinge of an outhouse door when cutting inside.

We will miss him cos, you know, he’s been a loyal servant and played vital roles in our more famous successes. However at least we won’t have to chant his song anymore, the tune and tempo of which meant we could do nothing but wheezily exhale his name, causing our behind-the-goal mob to sound like a heap of punctured bagpipes.

Best of luck Brett wherever you end up, even if it is the rumoured Eastleigh.

Posted by skif at 08:57:08 1 comments Leave a comment

15-04-2009

Stoke-ing the embers

"The first half of this game at our fellow thin-ice skaters Basingstoke certainly had that end-of-season ‘minds-eye-concentrated-on-the-window-display-at-Thomas Cook’ feel to it. Frankly I’ve seen withered cadavers with more vitality."

So, the season starts to wind down with our safety now assured. Although a second half at Basingstoke pumped a little bit of excitement in what is now a rather flat remainder. More words and pictures over at dubSteps.

Posted by skif at 09:22:07 0 comments Leave a comment

12-04-2009

Trying to avoid the piscine pun, and failing

Havant & Waterlooville 3 Fisher Athletic 0

Considering they have been long relegated and possibly have only eleven days before liquidation sees them reform much lower down the pyramid, or go dodo altogether, Fisher Athletic did not present the toughest of challenges in terms of the Hawks picking up a very late addition of pace in an otherwise sluggish season.

These Fish, you could say these days, come in a barrel of their own cooperage, and have been handing out the rifles ever since the bottom fell out of their recent rollercoaster existence. It was not long ago they were talking about 10,00 seater stadiums and full time football. Next year it may be about roped-off parks pitches and the Kent League, if that.

It has does nothing for the credibility of the Conference South that, since about October, any team facing Fisher are virtually guaranteed a win, with only four points coming their way since their mid November victory away at Bishop’s Stortford.

To be fair to them, Fisher’s young, inexperienced side lack nothing in effort and application in fighting for a cause they’ve no real connection to, having not been around in better times; an inferno fire-fight they’ve undertaken with only garden hose and a child’s beach bucket, with little or no reward either in the pocket or in terms of the collective morale. You can’t help but admire their strength of character and, certainly, the implausibly youthful-looking Alex Bentley (who would probably look less incongruous in a set of Spiderman pyjamas than a muddied Fisher strip) has impressed every time we’ve seen them.

However they are slight and callow and thus they struggle with the reading of the game, and the physicality of it and thus, had we been more ruthless, we might have had more than three. Mind you, aside from a 6-0 beating at the hands of Team Bath on the opening day of the season (when, let’s not forget, they still had a ‘proper’ squad), they’ve not taken any hammerings aside from the odd 4-0, not as many as you might expect in the circumstances anyway.

As such we shouldn’t feel disappointed – it was a job professionally done, with all three strikers chipping in with goals including a rare, and excellently finished, one in open play from Luke Nightingale. Paul Hinshelwood had a rare bad game but we’ll forgive him it in these less than high-octane circumstances, having been a reassuring presence since his arrival in terms of thinking, “well, where do we go from here?”

With safety now mathematically assured, the run-in feels weirdly anti-climactic and I think we’ll be glad to get the next fortnight out of the way so that we might retreat, regroup and properly consider our options for 2009/10. One thing we do know is that we’ll not have to face Fisher again next year which, for me in purely logistical terms, given the easy accessibility of their current Dulwich bivouac from my east London base, will be a shame.

Considering the up and down nature of their way of life, I imagine many others, even some amongst the Fisher support, will be glad that closure on their boom-or-bust story looks to finally be on its way.

Posted by skif at 01:31:10 10 comments Leave a comment

07-04-2009

Doing the math(s)

Just as our mood had dipped again, with disappointment and apathy brought about by the situation looking unlikely to change, another slice of home win was cut from a league programme pie mostly snaffled by our hungry Conference South rivals thus far this season.

The first half saw a committed and adroit performance and, unlike our previous few games, we managed to cling on through the nailed-on certainty of a second half lull. Welling came to West Leigh Park still in contention for the play-offs, and had beaten us at Park View Road almost exactly a month prior to. As such, I expected little or less.

However we started well and controlled the first half. That has been the case on several occasions though, where we haven’t capitalised with a goal and then fallen behind to a sucker punch. Tonight the punch came from us and what a blow it was. First Shaun Wilkinson delivered a roundhouse sighter that just missed the tip of the Welling schnoz (or in less pugilistic terms, his long range shot just curved off the outside of his boot and away from the far top corner).

A couple of minutes later we had a free kick outside the box, and we knocked it around to the sound of our chum Chris behind the goal letting out a vaguely panicked cry of “Give it to Wilko, give it to Wilko.” Jamie Collins gave it to Wilko and he unleashed a strike so fierce we had to sedate it with a tranquilizer dart then cage it.

Welling keeper Charlie Mitten (who, with that name, sounds like he supplements his football income by working as a cockney spiv in Trumpton) was stuck in a kind of shocked rigor mortis, eventually creaking his neck around to see the ball smouldering in the bottom corner inside his near post.

If only we had played all our games on Monday nights, this might have been the season we’d originally hoped for. As it is Saturdays unfortunately remained popular with our opposition and thus we found ourselves cast as April fools, the “big budget” boys still unsafe in relegation terms going into the final month.

Now, we have four games to play and Thurrock have five. We are eleven points ahead of them with the relegated, and possibly soon to be liquidated, Fisher Athletic turning up at West Leigh Park this coming Saturday, a game you’d hope would bring three of the five points we will need if we genuinely believe Thurrock can win all of their remaining games.

We then play Basingstoke away on Easter Monday, having hammered them 5-1 at home back in August. Not a place we’ve done that well at over the years but quite how that’s ever relevant I’m not sure. Besides it’s on a Monday so we’ll be fine. Assuming we get loads of 3pm cloud cover and can convince the Stoke-ites to turn on the floodlights anyway.

Posted by skif at 09:55:53 2 comments Leave a comment

Archive
Staggering through the tape
End of the road (trips)
Brett Poooaaaaaaa-te, Brett Poooaaaaaaa-te, Brett Poate, Brett Poate, Brett Poooaaaaaaa-te
Stoke-ing the embers
Trying to avoid the piscine pun, and failing
Doing the math(s)