(at Winsford United F.C.)
A match that nobody wanted to play, and a report that nobody wanted to write.
An equally apathetic Convo performance in this meaningless game, undertaken on a bone-hard pitch in uncomfortably hot conditions, can only lead any reasonable person to one conclusion:
Thank fuck the season’s over!
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; Flamson, Willis, Schofield K, Purcell; Schofield R, Jelen, Fairclough, O’Brien R; Topping, Parry Jnr; Subs: Kearney, McNally, Dickson
Bobby Mimms reports (or at least tries to, as he lost his bloody notes)
As a result of such carelessness, the only events that your correspondent can recollect from this semi-final defeat are:
Oh yes, and that black dog was there. (Maybe it ate your correspondent’s notes.)
Convocation (4-1-4-1): Wheller; Willis, Mitchell, Schofield K, Done; Fairclough; O’Brien R, Shanahan, Schofield R, Jelen; Prince; Subs: Kearney, Dickson (not used)
Bobby Mimms reportsh
It’s unlikely that any betting markets in the Far East were too interested in this game, but somebody, somewhere, could have made a couple of bob on Saturday afternoon had they been able to find a bookmaker stupid enough to take their money, as with only the loose ends to be tidied up this became the most anomalous result of its group. In theory, a top against bottom clash should have been close to a formality for Convocation, especially as, with three wins out of three, they had breezed into the last four with a game to spare, while their opponents had only managed to pick up a solitary point and been thrashed 10-1 in the process by a Croft side that had been conspicuous by their mediocrity when the team from Liverpool had come-a-calling a couple of weeks later (and who had conceded ten goals themselves when they had visited Wyncote earlier in the season). But as a famous shicker once liked to point out, football is a funny old game (presumably he meant in the peculiar sense of the word, rather than the ‘it’s a joke’ one), and as such Convo lost – funny old things like improvement can happen from time to time; it’s not as if these protagonists were two completely different teams than those that had fulfilled the earlier fixtures in this competition.
Perhaps the visitors had been in training since their last unconvincing performance a fortnight ago, or maybe they just save their most uncharacteristic displays for when they visit Mather Avenue, but whatever the reason for their Lazarus-like renaissance they deserve to be applauded for exhibiting a much greater zeal towards a dead rubber than Convo ever have, or have had to, in the past. Or, indeed, than they did on Saturday.
The home side were nowhere near their best, and faded much more noticeably than their opponents in the second half, so the irony of the afternoon seemed to be that tangled webs needn’t have been woven, or kettles blackened. Even before the interval far too many yellow-shirted home players were content to stroll around, delegating, with their hands on their hips, go through only the most basic of motions whenever they felt vilified from within, and make sure that others on their team paid a very aural price for any mistakes; sadly, once again, pootling, pouting and pontificating were all orders of the day.
Such unsavoury affairs, though not unheard of in Convo folklore, do thankfully tend to be rare and isolated incidents, so this defeat is unlikely to affect them in any way, next Saturday, when they face those most familiar of adversaries, Ramblers – opponents that lesser teams might fear to face. And not being bloated by egomaniacal self-importance, or crippled by any chasmic voids in their collective personality, the side from Wyncote will know that even if their reign as Sealand Cup holders comes to an end in Crosby it will be far from the end of the world. For theirs is not the insecure belief that a win must be obtained at all costs and that failure cannot be tolerated; theirs is not the manner to rely on others to obtain what they themselves require, or blame opponents for shortcomings that are closer to home.
They will have to play better though, as any kind of performance like this one will surely see them relinquish their crown with barely a whimper. The game itself was pretty much an irrelevance, what with the Vets having nothing to play for – well, being unable to progress from the group – and the home side worldly enough to realise that their semi-final fate had probably already been determined. But this being the amateur game at its most grassroots it was unlikely to be without interest, and even a moribund Convo would never let it lapse into the sterilised orchestration of El Molinoln, 1982.
With Paul Dickson off hobnobbing it at Uttoxeter, Andy McLaren was in possession of the sheepskin coat once again and chose His Pinkness, Barry Wheller, to start in goal, ahead of a back four comprising of Justin Shanahan and Kevin Schofield flanked by Richy O’Brien on the left and Mark Done on the right. Drier than Death Valley, the centre of midfield was the domain of Paul Fairclough and Joel Jelen, while two former First Team captains – John Topping and Richy Schofield – manned the flanks, and Andy Willis and Billy Lamb led the front line. Biding his time on the sideline by being bitchy (“He’s probably got his own gravitational field that #10”), Stephen Mason was Convocation’s lone substitute.
Either the opening period of the game was drearily uneventful or your correspondent was skipping some sort of light fantastic, because the first half-page of his match notes concern nothing but dogs barking, ice-cream vans jingling and helicopters hovering overhead. However, midway through the half one of the visitors, who was apparently being paid very little attention by any of his opponents, let rip with a thirty-five yard howitzer that found the back of the net off the underside of the Convo crossbar; there was little that Wheller could have done to keep the shot out seeing as it was one of those postage stamp efforts, but he still managed to make himself look completely ungainly and at fault, nonetheless.
Sandbach tried their luck from distance on a number of other occasions before the interval, without ever troubling the target, but they did force Wheller into making a good fingertip save inside the last couple of minutes, after Schofield (K) had been robbed in broad daylight ten yards outside of his penalty area. Earlier in the game though, the defender had been set up by Lamb for a shot of his own (from an equivalent position at the other end of the pitch) that the Vets goalkeeper only prevented from going in at the second bite of the cherry.
His brother had Convocation’s only other chance of the first period, shortly before half time, when he dragged back and controlled a cross from the right-hand side of the pitch with what was probably the touch of the game, before spoiling all his good work by blasting a terrible shot over the opposition crossbar from close range. The supplier of that ball for the profligate Schofield had been Lamb again, who had looked lively throughout the opening forty-five minutes (or at least, your correspondent can’t remember him skiving), which was just as well seeing as his strike partner was quite anonymous – it must be hoped that whoever washed the Sandbach kit after this match remembered to check all of the shorts before putting them in the machine, to make sure that Willis wasn’t still trapped in a pocket somewhere.
In case further proof that things weren’t far from the norm were needed, a slight tension between the two teams could be sensed in the latter stages of the half, and when the “lost soul” that was Terry Bargery blew for the entr’acte the visitors seemed to be faintly aggrieved that they weren’t further ahead than they were – a curious opinion to hold in a game between two, apparently, equally balanced sides.
With a smell smoke wafting over proceedings as the second period got under way, your correspondent felt obliged to take time out from ‘nursing his wounds’ and scrawling surreal observations (“bigoted woman dig me hole” ) to make sure that he hadn’t accidentally set himself on fire. The need for a visit from Trumpton’s finest averted, it was an equally proficient outfit – the home side – which conjured up the first good chance of the half, when Jelen played Lamb in one-on-one with the Sandbach ‘keeper, who kept his team in the lead with a good save using his leg.
Shortly after that though, the visitors should have doubled their advantage, when a dreadful Richy Schofield free kick on the edge of their penalty area was easily cleared and they broke down the pitch with the kind of pace you wouldn’t usually expect from a veterans’ team. Streaking past Done and on to the by-line, one of the Sandbach players put a cross into the Convo goalmouth where a colleague was waiting, only for him to put the ball wide of Wheller’s back post from a handful of yards out.
Despite certain pundits on the Convocation bench writing off the ‘cherubic’ Sandbach #9 as “not really doing anything” it couldn’t be sensibly denied that his was a growing influence on the game. Even before the interval he’d been causing the hosts problems, operating, as he seemed to be, in some sort of space between their back four and midfield quartets – one that no one would admit existed – and though Jelen offered at the recommencement to track the lively scamp, it was a great pass from him for a team mate that split Shanahan and the elder Schofield at one point, forcing Wheller into another good block to keep the score at one-nil.
Not for long though. The visitors won a throw-in ten yards inside their own territory and sent it up the left flank, before crossing the ball into the Convo box from not far over the halfway line. The back four picked an incredibly inopportune moment for a game of statues, seeing as Olly (the Sandbach #9) was loitering in the middle and won possession with ease, and once again one-on-one with Wheller he made no mistake by chipping the outrushing goalkeeper from the edge of the penalty area.
Just in case anyone had missed the move – the Convocation defence, for example – it was repeated almost perfectly ten minutes later (although Wheller managed to get a hand to the second effort), with exactly the same result.
Even though most of Willis’ contributions towards the game had been of the ‘subtle’ variety, he still seemed to be highly unimpressed with those of some of his colleagues (“It’s just shite! There’s people who can’t play.”). It certainly wasn’t one-way traffic though: Lamb forced a good save out of the Sandbach #1 with a shot that looked destined for the top corner of the goal, and O’Brien (playing left wing in the second period, with Mason – on for Topping at half time – tucking in behind him at full back) should have done better than fire high over the crossbar when Richy Schofield headed a free kick down for him on the edge of the visitors’ six-yard box. Not content with that embarrassment though, several minutes later O’Brien took what was undoubtedly the worst corner of the game, probably of the season, and possibly ever.
But while you sensed that Convocation might have a goal in them – they would eventually find the net through the younger Schofield – it was difficult to watch the home side fade quite dramatically, although understandably, towards the end of the game and not envisage their effervescent opponents scoring again. Not long after Topping came back on for Fairclough an instantly forgettable* fourth did ensue, and shortly after that the Sandbach #5 – one of their players who should have known better – was deservedly dismissed for directing a torrent of foul-mouthed abuse at Mr. Bargery.
The disgraced player only missed out on a couple of minutes though, as the referee’s next intervention was to call it a day, leaving Convo to reflect on living by the sword and dying by it. Their guests had accomplished what they’d come to Wyncote to achieve and the suspected semi-final draw was confirmed moments after the final whistle when a quick phone call belatedly revealed the result of the group game played in midweek – a feat that had been curiously beyond the footballing Dorian Grays and their website, before this one had finished.
As already mentioned, Convocation’s mission – to qualify for the last four – had been accomplished last week, and if they don’t know next Saturday’s opponents now then they never will. Ramblers are perfectly beatable, as the team from Mather Avenue have proven many times in the past, but they must be given their due respect as they are also capable of running the cup holders out of town.
There are many more disagreeable teams to lose to, so it won’t be the end of the world if they do. But for another seven days, at least, there’s still a chance that you could find a bookmaker willing to give you odds on a second successive Convocation triumph – the idea’s no more absurd than the conflict of interests that tainted their group.
Man Of The Match: Lamb and Wheller were the two best players in Convo colours (and pink), and the goalkeeper probably just edges it as there was little he could do with the goals he conceded, while he also made three or four fine saves to keep the score respectable.
Move Of The Match: There was a pass from someone… in the first half. It might have gone left. To be honest, your correspondent’s buggered if he can remember much from Saturday.
(* after four pints and four cans of Strongbow)
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; O’Brien R, Schofield K, Shanahan, Done; Topping, Jelen, Fairclough, Schofield R; Willis, Lamb B; Sub: Mason
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; Lamb B, Willis, Shanahan, Dickson; Toping, O'Brien R, Schofield R, Schofield K; Prince, Lamb C; Subs: Done, Kearney, Mitchell
Bob Marley reports
Another fine week as Convocation pushed closer to the semi finals. The sweltering heat, a poor pitch and an unofficial referee (at Croft? Surprise, surprise) were overcome with grit and determination from the fourteen chaps that travelled to Warrington. However, in the usual ‘twatting the ball at Barry’ warm-up we came close to only having thirteen as Richy Schofield blasted a forty-yard effort at Topper from just four yards – no one expected the water man to be needed before kick off.
Convo started with what looked on paper a strong side (apart from Barry in goal – just kidding). At centre half Justin Shanahan was paired with Kevin Schofield, while the reformed Andy Willis (back with his other half – “full of cold” my arse) was at left back and Mark Done at right back. Once again centre midfield was the ever-growing partnership of Paul Fairclough and Joel Jelen, the two Richys, O’Brien and Schofield, were on the wings, and Chris Lamb and Ben Prince held the attacking line. Paul Dickson, Stuart Walker and a dazed John Topping were on the bench.
Convo got the game underway and it wasn’t long before the first free kick was awarded for a nasty challenge on Lamb. A second, not long after that, and just outside Croft’s eighteen-yard box, saw Richy Schofield hit a driving shot that eluded everybody to find the bottom corner of the home side’s net. 1-0.
For the first time this season Convo kept the tempo up by playing neat football on an untidy pitch. It was not long before their next chance fell to Schofield again, when he picked up an attempted clearance with players surrounding him. A call of “time” went up from his team mates so naturally he performed his usual trick and did his own thing, volleying the ball with his left foot straight at the opposition’s ‘keeper.
In the next ten-to-fifteen minutes the visitors had six or seven corners, all of them golden opportunities but attacked with no real conviction.
While others strayed offside, a well-timed Fairclough run from his own half (not often seen) saw him receive the ball from Richy Schofield just inside the Croft half, but against the advice of “keep running” he tried a left-footed shot from thirty yards that went out for a throw in.
Convocation could have been six up and the players knew it, so hardly surprisingly they started bickering – with this Croft’s first chance arose. So far Shanahan and the elder Schofield had won everything that had come their way, while the two full backs hadn’t put a foot wrong, but when a loose ball from Jelen was pounced upon by one of the home side’s centre midfielders they could only watch as he went on a dazzling run before unleashing a great shot that flashed just wide of Wheller’s post (cue: more bickering).
In the closing stages of the first period the visitors regained the upper hand with good play that saw O’Brien and Done pairing up well on the right, and Jelen and Fairclough working hard in the middle. A somewhat lacklustre Lamb seemed to have other things on his mind (fancy dress party?), but it definitely wasn’t running. Fortunately Prince was making up for it.
As the referee blew for half time it was clear that Croft were disappointed with their performance and would inevitably come out fighting in the second period. Luckily enough coach Dickson was well aware of this and his own interval team talk consisted of demanding much needed improvement. With Topping coming on for Fairclough (playing out wide on the left with R Schofield moving into the middle) and [Tim Jago] replacing Prince up front, the idea was to try and hold on for ten minutes, with hopefully an accelerated work rate as a bonus.
However, true to form, several Convo players were more interested in the school kids on the side line or Andy Willis’ other half’s legs (or was it Andy Big Mac’s?). It was at this point that your correspondent realised that Mr. Schofield and Mr. Wheller had gathered a worthy fan base off the pitch – which would explain their unusual lack of swearing.
Not long into the second half Convo scored again when Lamb actually did a bit of work for a change, and crossed the ball to set Walker up with an easy tap-in.
Their joy was short lived though, as shortly after that a Croft free kick was played into the visitors’ box and their centre forward left his man (Willis) to tap the ball home himself.
What happened next was a bit of a nap, as the scorer tried to wrestle the ball off the pink-shirted Wheller and an “I’ve got a bigger chest than you” scuffle took place – with the Convo man’s tits coming out the best. Somewhat strangely, everybody else stood and watched, that is, until the Croft man got pissed off with the bust play and went for a choke hold, at which point Mr. Wheller forgot about class 7A and a foul-mouthed rant proceeded.
The visitors put the game to bed not long after that though, when Walker was put through by Topping and lobbed the outrushing goalkeeper.
Cue nap #2, as Willis shouted at the player who had moments earlier been wrestling with Wheller: “Hey suntan head man, did you think that was fucking great?”, before being bundled away by Kev Sco as another chest war threatened to break out.
With less than five minutes remaining Dickson pulled off the poor Lamb and played himself up front, but before he could touch the ball the referee blew up for full time and Convo celebrated in their tiny changing room to the tunes of Richy Schofield.
Man Of The Match: Justin Shanahan – definitely. Cool, calm and collected, as ever!
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; Willis, Shanahan, Schofield K, Done; Schofield R, Fairclough, Jelen, O’Brien R; Lamb C, Prince; Subs: Topping, Walker, Dickson
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; Lamb B, Shanahan, McNally, Kearney; Round, Jelen, Fairclough, Schofield R, Lamb C, Prince; Subs: Done, O'Brien R, Walker
Bobby Mimms reports
Wolves had parked the team bus in front of their goal and were desperately clinging on for another of those fiercely coveted points that they’ve almost accrued enough of now to stay up in the Premier League; in the Gardeners it was standing room only as a multitude of frustrated Evertonians watched the proceedings on the foreign channel du jour, their chances of playing European football next season receding a little bit further with each passing second. In cramped pockets around the pub, small groups of Convocation players huddled together in whatever space they could find amongst the vexed partisans and discussed whether Barry Wheller should be allowed to drink Black Sheep bitter if he’s a practising vegan, how old birthday boy Andy McLaren really is in “bear years”, and, in a serious moment, the unacceptable number of fines the club have received this season (with Andy Thomas having ‘joked’ himself into the referee’s notebook during the Firsts’ cup defeat to Old Xavs a little earlier in the day). Whisper it quietly, but someone even mentioned someone mentioning sp*r*tual heal*ng.
Once the game on the television had ended and the disappointed throng dispersed, allowing the chaps to grab a corner of the room so they could sit down and have their butties, Chris Lamb bemoaned his misfortune at having to leave his car at Wyncote (his keys had accidentally been taken to the pub by the First Team contingent while he made a cameo appearance for the Seconds), Keith Purcell groused about the levels of dubious ‘expertise’ offered up by “ten outfield goalkeepers” every week (Wheller coined the phrase), and certain players tried to solicit a man of the match award for the Second Team game – despite having only come on for the final ten minutes of it – with an alarming amount of really shameless arse-kissing. While he hoped nobody had been looking, Andy Willis received a peck on the cheek from Elaine the manageress, and he immediately flushed bright red when he realised that everyone had been. It was all run-of-the-mill stuff; a typical post-match pint in the pub; nothing to suggest that something momentous had just happened.
But it had.
While the Everton game had still been boring the arses off everyone and before any of the Convo crew could rest their weary legs, an impromptu but much anticipated meeting of minds had taken place in a corner near the gents’ toilets, one that will surely be recounted by students of club history many years from now. It was only a brief encounter, but it was a necessary one (necessary as a matter of urgency, not because either of the parties involved particularly wanted to make the other’s acquaintance), and it was one as overdue as when Henry Morton Stanley finally caught up with Dr. Livingstone at Ujiji, as ideologically intriguing as Molotov and von Ribbentrop agreeing to calve up Poland, and perhaps as cinematically melodramatic as Darth Vadar telling Luke Skywalker that he was his old man: it was Graeme Kay and Paul Dickson putting aside their imaginary grievances for a couple of minutes, and finally talking shop.
The grounds for their manifestly tortured tête-à-tête concerned the Seconds next game, in two weeks’ time, and the Firsts’ imminent lack of fixtures – not to mention the annual pilgrimage to Aintree that many within the club make each year. In other words: the defence of the Sealand Cup is due to get underway against Sandbach United in a fortnight, and Dickson needs players; Kay’s got plenty, but no games to give them; and a problem shared is a problem halved. It was Chairman Flamson who pointed out at last year’s AGM that “Convocation is one club, not two teams”, and at last it seemed as though the message was getting across.
Both sides appeared happy with the outcome of their short summit, and considering the Seconds’ laborious efforts at Wyncote earlier that afternoon it was obvious that Dickson was especially so. His tired and ailing charges had seldom looked like troubling their British Steel opponents until a few volunteers from the retreating First Team had bolstered their bare bones for the final fifteen minutes, whereupon the Welsh side had suddenly been found out as flat-track bullies. The visitors’ line-up hadn’t been anywhere near as youthful as when, rather flatteringly, they’d triumphed 6-1 against Convo at Queensferry back in September, but the home side were still giving them an average age of ten to fifteen years on Saturday, with only Ian Mitchell yet to turn thirty, and most of his colleagues never to see forty again.
Being the youngest on a team didn’t necessarily make him the sprightliest though, so you had to wonder what was going through Dickson’s mind during his pre-match positional lottery when he chose the clunky Mitchell to partner Willis up front. Having never scored for the club before, the lad’s unfamiliar placing did at least offer him the glimmer of a chance for a first ever goal, but in fairness it seldom looked likely once the game got going, mainly due to the self-defeating way he kept busting a gut to get into good positions, thus leaving himself completely knackered when any chances came his way once he was there.
Willis, on the other hand, did at least seem physically capable of finding the back of the net, even if mentally it appeared as though that bus had long since departed. Twice in the first half he was presented with golden opportunities to score – absolute sitters in anyone’s language – but on both occasions the chance was wasted, and the second miss in particular, from deep inside the British Steel six-yard box, would be likely to give him nightmares for months to come if he hadn’t already been dreaming of such profligacy for the past twenty years.
For the Convocation midfield, as a whole, it was a bit of a curate’s egg of an afternoon. Phil Holt looked eager and lively (well, as lively as Holt can look) on the left wing, and Paul Fairclough was full of industry and battle in the middle. But John Topping seemed uninterested and lackadaisical out on the right, while Richy O’Brien gave the impression that he had only just been reanimated prior to kick off (it would turn out that he was quite hungover), and the overall result was that while the quartet held their own against their British Steel counterparts, they rarely created much in the way of chances for themselves, or their forwards.
So with Mitchell and Willis devoid of supplies and ammunition, and also seemingly oblivious to each other’s moves or ideas (they were like ships that pass in the night), it appeared that, somehow, Convo had come up with a way to play with two lone strikers.
If the front six had been looking for prompts with regards to creating chances then they could have done worse than cast an eye towards the other end of the pitch, because for a spell during the first period there was a worry that British Steel might run away with the fixture again. Despite having been off work all week with a bad back, Wheller had to start the game in goal – his GP had apparently told him to carry on doing whatever’s normal – as Convo only had the bare eleven at kick off, and a quarter of an hour in he pulled off a great double save that, unfortunately, but hardly surprisingly, left him barely able to move. Fortunately for the home side the tardy Purcell had arrived by then and he took up the mantle, but his first touch also needed to be a save as he pushed a low drive from just outside the penalty area around the right-hand post that had a prostrate Wheller behind it, groaning quietly to himself.
That shot in particular riled Dickson (right back, to McLaren’s left back – Justin Shanahan and Kevin Schofield were in between) who turned on his midfield and started counting out the number of players who had failed to track back sufficiently after the ball had been lost (he stopped at six). But if it was meant to buck any ideas up then it didn’t work as twice inside the last quarter-of-an-hour of the half the visitors found the back of the Convo net – the first a lob from twenty-five yards, the second a blast through a throng of players from the edge of the penalty area – and at the interval they looked comfortable with a two-goal cushion.
The break probably did come at the right time for Convo though, as it dispersed whatever wind was starting to get into their opponents’ sails, so that as soon as everyone re-emerged (from the sidelines) and got the second period underway the game began to stagnate. Multiple sessions of intense hypnoanalysis would probably be needed to recount anything of note from those first twenty minutes after the break, although the already sluggish home side did start to tire noticeably, particularly along the flanks.
Complete Convo catatonia was probably only moments away when the cavalry arrived in the form of the beaten First Team, and it’s unlikely that the dead men walking, Dickson and Holt, moved faster at any point during the second half than when they saw their chance for a breather (in the ‘you can fuck off if you think I’m coming back on’ sense of the word); the younger Schofield and the youngest Lamb replaced them, and within a minute or two Chris McNally had also come on for McLaren.
Suddenly the game was transformed as that priceless combination of vigour and (relative) youth fired the Seconds forward. It only took the visitors a couple of minutes to realise that Lamb was likely to cause them trouble, and they started dishing out some pretty heavy handling to the club’s leading scorer; in possibly an even shorter amount of time, Schofield to Schofield passes overtook all other types to become the most common move of the match.
And who could complain when one such manoeuvre created Convo’s first goal. Striding… scurrying out of the back line with the ball, Kevin played it long for his brother to chase (a stratagem known as the Stopforth Pass) and, controlling the thing beautifully near the British Steel goal line, Richy turned inside and shot across the target from the right (as he looked at it) to find the back of the net at the far post.
Remembering that they too were allowed to try their luck, the visitors forced a strong-handed save out of Purcell at his near post in what would turn out to be their last chance of the game. But back up the other end of the pitch, and with only a few minutes remaining, Convocation mounted another attack and managed to grab the equaliser that they probably, just about, deserved when O’Brien laid the ball off to Topping and he set up Shanahan for a looping shot that found almost exactly the same spot in the British Steel goal as Schofield’s had five minutes earlier.
Not winning the game was a kick in the teeth that, your correspondent suspects, the visitors hadn’t anticipated fifteen minutes earlier, and whether or not they were of the opinion that Convocation’s fight back was due to the late influx of fresh – well younger – legs (and let’s be honest, only an idiot wouldn’t), they didn’t at all seem happy with Lamb. Gravity’s best fiend had shown great restraint by staying on his feet during his brief tenure on the pitch, especially as the home side were chasing the game, but even he couldn’t remain upright when, right on full time, a particularly piqued opponent went through the back of him just outside the visitors’ penalty area and things threatened to get nasty. Referee Bargery cooled everyone down though, and blew for full time almost immediately.
Perhaps it’s ominous that the substitutions changed the game. For more than three quarters of it Convocation had been second best to opposition who’d barely got out of first gear themselves, and nobody could have complained that two-nil wouldn’t have been a fair result had it ended like that. But with the introduction of Lamb, McNally and Schofield – three players who had already played ninety minutes of cup football, AND, who were integral to last year’s triumphs, let’s not forget – the team from Wyncote looked reborn. Or maybe that should be reincarnated, because in those closing minutes Convo did have a similar aura about them as when they'd travelled to Sandbach and Halkyn and Winsford eleven months ago – an irresistible mood of destiny.
It would be unfair to suggest that those three alone salvaged the draw, as there’s no way they could have changed matters if Convo had already been five goals adrift. But when they were sent on, with the starting line-up having done enough to still be in contention with ten minutes to go, if little else, then the team clicked.
So maybe, despite all the doom mongering on these pages in recent weeks, Convocation do have a realistic chance of retaining their crown. They may not be firing on all cylinders yet, but stranger things have happened. And, as everybody must have realised when the two club captains momentarily conferred after the match, Hell has already frozen over.
Man Of The Match: O’Brien’s crutch, otherwise known as Fairclough, had a decent game in the middle of the pitch, while Shanahan was pretty much faultless at the back and scored a good goal at the other end to boot. The three retirees deserve a mention, and all earned their rests, but the award goes to Schofield: not the brown-nosing one who only played the last ten minutes, but his brother, whose canny (if slightly nepotistic) pass got the comeback ball rolling, barely put a foot wrong in defence, and managed to severely wind Holt up – admittedly, not the hardest of tasks – when the Mancunian wasn’t even on the pitch.
Move Of The Match: The build up to Convo’s equaliser. O’Brien and Topping may have sleepwalked through much of the game but they woke up at just the right time to ping a couple of excellent passes around the pitch and help earn their team a draw.
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller (Purcell); McLaren (McNally), Shanahan, Schofield K, Dickson (Schofield R); Holt (Lamb C), O’Brien R, Fairclough, Topping; Willis, Mitchell
Bobby Mimms reports
The seventy-eight year old Norman Tebbit might be charged with assaulting a man [who was dressed] in a Chinese dragon costume, Coronation Street’s Bruce Jones has admitted that he used to regularly beat up his wife, and Didier Drogba disgraced himself in Europe, once again, by stamping on Inter’s Thiago Motta and getting sent off for his troubles. Meanwhile at Wyncote this weekend, there had been enough sulks, strops, latent aggression (and not-so-latent aggression), mood swings, paranoia and general irrationality on show that you could have been forgiven for thinking that PMS awareness week was being held six months earlier than usual.
Has something dodgy leaked into the water supply recently?
Nobody in the Gardeners on Saturday evening seemed particularly bothered about the rise in anti-social behaviour amongst Britain’s ‘celebrities’, but a certain Andrew Willis was in no doubt what had lain behind Convocation’s problems earlier that afternoon, as they’d slumped to a second defeat of the season against those perennially-poor travellers, Sandbach Vets. “The ineptitude of the rest of the team” he’d proclaimed quite vehemently, with not the slightest hint of irony, or indeed any regard for the structural safety of his glass house.
Andy ‘McRafa’ McLaren wasn’t convinced though. Resisting any unnatural urges to quaff his port (“it’s not the sort of thing a chap does”), the captain for the day painted a different picture altogether: “Andy Willis is a cunt – and you can quote me on that” was his pretty unambiguous slant on the Convo Albert Riera’s shenanigans during the game, and it looked as though he might have had a point seeing as his opinion was immediately seconded and, in the time it takes to quaff a port, eleventh-ed by his peers; a chorus of “there’s only one cunt in Convo” ensued for the benefit of anyone still unsure about whether the latest bout of Willo’s Woe had gone down well with his team mates.
Obviously, running up to and volleying an opponent off the ball can’t be condoned, and Willis’ early bath was fully justified. But it’s perhaps a tad unfair to single him out for special treatment yet ignore the apparent ‘issues’ of others, because the most vilified man in the club wasn’t the only player who seemed to be suffering due to the time of the month on Saturday.
Not for the first time this season Barry Wheller squared up to a Sandbach player, during the second half (he does seem to have a thing about the side from Middlewich – mind you, so does Willis), and had to be dragged away by confused colleagues, unsure if they were experiencing déjà vu or yet again pacifying one of the more temperamental members of the club, while Paul Fairclough somehow managed to acquire an injury doing nothing more strenuous than standing on the sideline (after he’d been subbed on the hour mark – at his own request) and, with ten minutes to go, he chose to mope about unhelpfully rather than accept Terry Bargery’s invitation to return in place of the disgraced Willis. Meanwhile, never one to miss out on a good sulk, Keith Purcell might as well have been a limb in a hokey-cokey competition such was his inning and outing of McLaren’s squad on the Friday night, presumably depending on the direction of the wind in the Bay of Biscay, the number of whole peanuts in a packet of Nobby’s, and which addled voice in his head was shouting the loudest.
With their ranks riddled by so much unbridled and volatile emotion it’s a wonder that the home side managed to last until midway through the second half without conceding (although such is the capricious nature of the team, it probably wouldn’t have raised many eyebrows had they been five up by then), but a lot of that had to do with the fact that the first half was a complete and utter non-starter – squibs do not come much damper.
At full stretch, Purcell finger-tipped a Sandbach shot from the edge of the Convo penalty area onto the inside of his right-hand post at one point, but otherwise the most interesting aspect about the forty-five minutes before the interval was the breeze that was blowing diagonally across the pitch. There were no other goal attempts at either end (there were occasional shots, but nothing to trouble the sleeping ‘keepers), little in the way of good build up play or inventive flair, and most disappointingly of all, absolutely no defensive slapstick. No wonder Joel Jelen (who had been playing centre-mid with Fairclough) got off as soon as the half-time whistle was blown.
The Convo defence (Dave Hoban, Ben Prince, Ian Mitchell and Alex Hendry) couldn’t be faulted and did everything that was asked of them, but further up the pitch the players looked tired and lost, and lacking in imagination. Willis and his striking partner, Jon Kearney, might as well have not played the first half such was their anonymity, while the midfield quartet (completed by Wheller, on the left and John Topping, on the right), though full of graft, were constantly founding wanting when it came to craft. The puddle in the centre circle looked more likely to conjure up a chance.
The opening phase of the second period was no less soporific (although, at least the Sandbach shots – with the wind behind them – became more frequent), and certainly held no clue to the explosive ten minutes lying in wait. On the bright side though, Phil Millar slipped effortlessly into Jelen’s shoes (talk about back-handed compliments) and was shown the ropes of a Convo midfield by Fairclough, who was yet to be afflicted by the injurious nature of being substituted; Kearney and Willis actually showed signs of being alive.
And then, like some footballing Big Bang, the game went from a state of nothingness to absolute madness in the blink of an eye.
A blue-and-red striped visitor managed to get the better of Hoban on the left and forced Purcell into a great save, low to his right, which with hindsight he might as well have let in. Although the loose ball was half cleared, sixty seconds later it was back, passed diagonally across the eighteen-yard line and into the right-hand third of the Convo penalty area, where Hendry was running in with an opponent. Everybody knew the defender – and sometime goalkeeper – had to make a challenge, and everyone expected him to, but nobody could have foreseen the right-back smashing the ball into the top left-hand corner of his own goal from fifteen yards out. The lad seemed genuinely crestfallen at his clinical gaffe, but also gave further credence to Freud’s assertion that, subconsciously, there are no such things as accidents.
With Purcell and Wheller in full-on strop mode, and now Hendry having scored an own goal, all eyes were on Mitchell – the last of Convo’s Four Goalkeepers of the Apocalypse – to see what blight he could bring to proceedings. But the dad-to-be turned out to be a red herring as it was his central-defensive partner, Prince, who launched the ball down the pitch for Willis to chase, and one-on-one with the Sandbach ‘keeper the forward made no mistake from just inside the penalty area.
It had taken less than two minutes for the home side to rein their guests back in, but even that was made to feel something of a lifetime when Sandbach got the ball back to the centre circle and kicked off again, ran at the Convo midfield, which backed off, and had a shot from twenty-five yards. Purcell, who had been on his goal line at the resumption of play, suddenly had to scurry back from the advanced position he’d promptly adopted (in the foolish notion that his team mates would pressurise their opponents), but to the accompaniment of an anguished, yet very familiar cry of “Oh, shit!” the ball dipped just beyond his scrambling arms and into the back of the net – as though in tribute to the world’s smallest man, who had died earlier in the week, he’d been lobbed.
Still the fun wasn’t over though. This time it took the Seconds three or four minutes to equalise – during which time Wheller somehow managed to miss an open goal from a couple of yards out, when he only had to touch the ball, fizzed across the crowded goalmouth, to score – but when they did it was the turn of the Sandbach defence to get all huffy and hormonal. A little earlier, McLaren had come on for the soon-to-be-lame Fairclough and had pushed Hendry up onto the wing so that he could play at right back himself. Serendipitously, the vice-captain seemed to have pulled off a tactical masterstroke as the bane of Purcell’s life (well one of them) was much more willing to run at the visitors’ back line than Topping had been, and on one such foray into the opposition penalty area he was hacked down. The Convo man did himself no favours, particularly in the eyes of his opponents, by going down somewhat… dramatically, and those nearest the ball were apoplectic at his apparent simulation, although the Vets further away from the incident all agreed that it was pretty much stonewall. That didn’t stop them complaining that he kept going down too easily though (an accusation to which the general Convo retort was: “well, stop fouling him then”), and they could still be heard grumbling as their goalkeeper retrieved the ball from the back of the net, after Topping “gave him the eyes” and sent him the wrong way from twelve yards.
It was business as usual for The Great Vance moments later though, when he and Kearney conspired together to produce possibly the worst short-corner ever taken (it had been won by Hendry – or “Bambi” as the opposition had started calling the gravitationally-challenged winger) when the former passed the ball to his team mate, maybe six yards away from the flag, just as he’d turned to trot into the crowded box.
Within sixty seconds it was in the back of the Convo net again, after a Sandbach break and a fierce shot from fifteen yards out had forced Purcell into making another great save. But for the second time in recent weeks the power of the blast couldn’t be tempered by his efforts and the loose ball continued on its way into the gaping goal despite his interference.
In less than ten minutes the game had gone from the footballing equivalent of assisted suicide to an end-to-end goal-fest, but not only had Convo never led, with less than a quarter of an hour remaining they once again found themselves behind. Their fortunes became even less favourable shortly after the game’s fifth goal when Willis’ red mist descended and they had to play the final stages with ten men. As the incident was off the ball almost everybody on the pitch missed it, but the Sandbach ‘keeper didn’t (as it was almost next to him in the goalmouth), and neither did one of the miscreant’s own colleagues, who then called for his head; referee Bargery took counsel from McLaren, and the Spearmint Rhino began to batten down the hatches. The curse of the man of the match award had struck again – you know you’re plumbing new depths when even Barry “The Voice Of Reason” Wheller says you’ve got to go.
The frenzy finally over, the game fizzled out again after that, although Sandbach did net a killer fourth in the final few minutes when, at a cross from their right wing, one of their players put an unmarked header into the bottom left-hand corner of the Convo goal. Full time followed soon after that, and the post-match inquests began.
Having been drawn together in the same Sealand Cup group, these two will meet at Wyncote again in a little over a month’s time (the visitors had actually asked prior to kick off if this game could count towards the competition, but had had their request declined) and Convo had better pull their finger out by the time they do, because this was not the sort of performance that will help them retain their crown. Sandbach Vets have traditionally been the whipping boys of the competition in recent years, and if the holders are going to struggle to make an impact against the team that everyone expects to beat then they are in trouble. However, it’s not time to panic yet (in about three weeks, sounds about right) as the Seconds do have players waiting to come back into the squad, and they’ll almost certainly be stronger the next time these two face off – as Mr. O’Brien pointed out at the post-match ‘press conference’.
“If we’d had Dicko…” he started to say, before checking himself, perhaps realising as he did so that such unreasonable thinking could only provide further proof that this was, indeed, Convocation’s “On the Blob Weekend”.
Man Of The Match: Hendry played quite competently while at the back (irrespective of the own goal) and did add a bit of spark to the attack when he was moved up front, while Mitchell and Prince were rocks at the heart of the defence and could only really have done better at the last concession. The latter gets the nod though because he was the only one to point out the midfield’s contribution in the second Sandbach goal – i.e. he stood up for his goalkeeper.
Move Of The Match: A tactical move this week – when McRafa pushed Hendry up onto the wing he not only made his side look more threatening, but he also purged the defence of the enemy within. Fact!
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; Hoban, Prince, Mitchell, Hendry; Wheller, Jelen (Millar), Fairclough (McLaren), Topping; Willis, Kearney
Bobby Mimms reports
Even if they’d bought the space on the side of every bus on Merseyside, put up thousands of flyers all over Liverpool City Centre, and taken out a double-page advert in Saturday morning’s Echo, the Halton Castle players still wouldn’t have conveyed any more notice of their last-minute equaliser in this game than had already been given. There can’t have been a man on the pitch who couldn’t see it coming, because once Convocation’s 4-1 interval lead had slipped to 4-2 fifteen minutes from time, and then, portentously, 4-3 a little over five minutes later, a fourth goal for the visitors became as inevitable as David Beckham making himself the centre of attention at Old Trafford on Wednesday, Liverpool conceding a late goal to lose in France on Thursday, and Everton proving incapable of keeping Landon Donovan at Goodison on Friday. Once Terry Bargery’s watch tick-tocked into the final sixty seconds of the game, a levelling goal for the Nomads was about as nailed-on a guarantee as you could possibly get.
And yet despite its predictability the home side were as good as powerless to prevent it; for Convocation, forewarned is not necessarily forearmed (actually, for the Seconds forewarned is frequently dis-armed). There was no real disgrace in the concession itself – of Halton Castle’s four goals it was the only one that didn’t involve some sort of Convo ‘assistance’ – but by then the players in red were in the full throes of Shrinking Lead Syndrome, that most dispiriting and overpowering of the debilitating maladies from which they regularly pick up a sniffle (Not Got Out Of Bed Syndrome, Should Have Stayed In Bed Syndrome, Playing Like They’re In Bed Syndrome, etc). Oh yes, in those final five minutes as they battled the inexorable, rather than their actual opponents – in the time between the visitors’ third and fourth goals they never once realistically looked like scoring again, but everyone still knew that they would – the Wyncote Boys were in torment.
It had all been so different before half time. They’d been suffering back then as well – albeit from the flatulent effects of having all been out on the real ale in Woolton the night before (to celebrate Dicko’s fiftieth) – but their football had been so much more composed and assured. It certainly helped their cause that the Nomads’ performance had left a lot to be desired in that first period, as they rarely got out of their own half never mind near the Convo penalty area, but the home side did seem to have something of a bit between their teeth. Their passing was crisp, frequently intelligent, and more-often-than-not precise, while there was a definite adventurous feel to the team, particularly along the wings, where Dave Hoban on the left and John Flamson on the right always looked ready to attack their opponents’ rearguard at a second’s notice.
But although they also had the wind on their side in the first half – in more than one sense (Andy McLaren regaled his colleagues with a tale of the twenty-second fart he’d executed in bed that morning – measuring ten on the Yichter Scale – which had woken up his missus with its timbre) – one of the main reasons that Convo were able to take such a comfortable lead into the second was that, for forty-five minutes at least, Andy Willis had found his missing mojo. His actual performance was nothing particularly special to write home about, but then again, it didn’t have to be against a Halton Castle back line that were defending on the incompetent side of hapless; only four chances came the Convo forward’s way in the opening forty-five minutes, and every one found the back of the visitors’ net.
His last goal was the pick of the bunch: he collected a diagonal cross-field pass just inside the visitors’ all-but-deserted penalty area, took an excellent controlling touch that was necessary with a lone defender on his shoulder, and on the half-volley thwacked the ball into the top left-hand corner (as he looked at it) past the understandably static ‘keeper. But the others weren’t too bad either: a cross-goal shot from a dozen-or-so yards out (the first); a cool finish when one-on-one, after the goalkeeper had just passed the ball straight to him with a hopeless goal-kick (the second); and a low strike from eighteen yards out that crept in off the upright (for the hat trick), after defender Kevin Schofield had charged a clearance down in the middle of the pitch.
Suitably sated, Willis then crawled back into his shell and did the best part of four-fifths of bugger all for the rest of the game – although he did occasionally remind his team mates of his presence with the odd critical grumble now and again. But there didn’t seem to be any reason to worry about the anti-hero’s unexpected disappearance because Convo seemed so in control of affairs, right up until the hitherto inept Halton Castle scored their second. The home side had even had a potential fifth goal disallowed midway through the first half, when Phil Holt had found the back of the net only for referee Bargery – or “Terry ‘Bastard’ Bargery” as one unbiased Scotsman put it – to spot a hand ball (and as the player was, yet again, wearing a pair of black woollen gloves, it can’t have looked too dubious to the official).
The invalidation of Holt’s strike was slightly ironic considering that it was the visiting players who spent most of the first period handling balls with a gusto not seen since Michael Jackson’s last concert – almost all without sanction. The worst of the lot, attempted while the score was still one-nil, saw a player smash a deep cross into the back of the Convo net with his forearm, a move that was so blatant it can only have been borne out of frustration at the ball being inches out of the reach of his head. Thankfully for the home side, even Bargery spotted that one.
However, for all of their inadequacies at the back and their thoroughly toothless display on the front foot, at two-nil down the Nomads scored one of their own, and come the interval, though it must have seemed nothing more than a consolation goal, it was one that had earned them an exiguous chance of snatching something unlikely from the game. The Convo goalkeeper, Keith Purcell, punted the ball up the pitch into the midfield where neither of his side’s central grafters, Joel Jelen and Richy O’Brien, could get it under control, allowing their counterparts to send it back in the direction from whence it had come. With the ball at his feet, a Halton Castle player managed to wriggle between defenders Ian Mitchell and Paul Dickson (right back), and suddenly found himself one-on-one with Purcell, but the ‘keeper did well to block an extemporaneous shot from just inside the eighteen-yard line with an outstretched leg, although the ball rebounded across the penalty area to where another of the visitors was running in with Jelen. With the option of either trying to tackle his opponent or running in to cover the open goal, the Convo man chose the latter, for reasons only known to himself – presumably he thought that the ninety-five percent chance of the Halton Castle player avoiding a porky Jewish obstacle on the goal line was preferable to a fifty-fifty challenge in open play. Obviously, it wasn’t.
Having earlier tweaked his hamstring at a Flamson back-pass, Purcell’s efforts in the build up to the visitors’ goal had exacerbated the situation, and he played no further part in the game. Barry Wheller, who had started up front alongside Willis (but whether he actually touched the ball…), replaced him in the nets and proceeded to have, what we’ll call, a ‘Jon Venables afternoon’ – that is, initially the centre of everyone’s attention before fading into anonymity, and then being thrust back into the limelight thanks to a monumental cock up (in the figurative sense, in the ‘keeper’s case). Holt replaced him up front, while at the same time McLaren came on for Paul Dickson.
In fairness to the new goalkeeper he didn’t put a foot wrong until Halton Castle’s second, and even had to face a penalty within five minutes of donning the gloves when Jelen was rather unjustly adjudged to have tripped an opponent just inside the Convo box (you bastard, Bargery). But Wheller was up for the occasion and tried out his latest ‘mind games’ on the taker, which constituted telling him that he knew which way the kick would go and then complaining to the ref that the ball wasn’t even on the spot (so for ‘mind games’ read southern-twanged barracking). It seemed to do the trick though, as the penalty was smashed against the inside of the upright, and the rebound was ‘passed’ straight to Derren Brown in the goal.
It was no less than Convo deserved – not only because it was an unfair award in the first place, but as they were playing so much better than their guests as well. The flanks were hotbeds of activity, particularly the left one where Simon O’Brien was combining well with Hoban ahead of him, and there only ever seemed to be one direction to the flow of the game. Obviously it helped that the home side “had the wind” (in more sense than one) throughout that first half, but they didn’t really need its assistance.
It can’t be said that they were handicapped any when having to play into it, after the break, either. Although the Halton Castle goal kicks – which had struggled to get out of the penalty area in the first period – were much improved with the gusts behind them, the visitors still posed little threat to the Convocation goal during the third quarter of the game, and for quite a while it appeared that the change of ends had only negated Convo’s superiority rather than handed it to their opponents.
At half time Paul Fairclough had replaced Richy O’Brien alongside Jelen in the middle of the pitch, and ten minutes into his comeback (he had been out for four weeks with a compacted vertebrae in his back, or some such thing) it was he who almost set up Willis for a fifth, when he drifted out to the right wing and put a fantastic cross into the Halton Castle penalty area that young Master Hindley (on one of the adjacent pitches) would have been proud of. However, though it may have been almost inch perfect for the forward, the goalkeeper managed to pluck the ball off his increasingly apathetic forehead and the chance went begging.
Just before the tide turned Wheller was called upon to make a good block when a Nomads player managed to sneak between Simon O’Brien and Schofield and get in a low shot, but otherwise there was still no sign of the collapse to come; everything seemed under control. Orbiting each other like twin stars, Fairclough and Jelen continued to take responsibility in the middle in turns, while McLaren and Hoban on the wings (the latter had replaced Flamson on the right at half time; the former took up his mantle on the left) had yet to undergo the almost instantaneous burn out that would practically immobilise them by the end. Providing further proof that all was normal, Dickson nearly knocked an unsuspecting opponent out by smashing a throw-in into the side of his face.
And then, it happened. Just as nuclear reactions would never get going without a bit of inducement, but can then run quickly out of control if left unchecked, Convocation capitulations also require a little kick start, and there are usually no shortage of unwilling instigators – on Saturday it was Wheller. As is often the case it all began rather unremarkably: Schofield lost possession on the edge of the centre circle but a quick thinking (and somewhat surprisingly, quick footed) Mitchell managed to muscle the dispossessor off the ball, and play it back to his goalkeeper. But having presumably left his brain back in the changing rooms this was always going to cause a problem for the #1, and you could almost see on his face the internal battle going on in his head as he stopped the ball on the goal line (about six yards wide of his left-hand post) but didn’t know what to do next. With no team mates in the vicinity, and an opponent closing him down, pretty quickly, Wheller's body language alone could have scored the impending goal, but not believing his luck at the ‘keeper’s inertia, the Halton Castle man managed to rob the ball and play it across the gaping goalmouth to a incoming colleague, who couldn’t miss.
Remarkably, that wasn’t Wheller’s biggest error of the afternoon; that would be to probably think, immediately after conceding such a daft goal, that things couldn’t get any worse. Because half-a-dozen-or-so minutes later they did. He would claim after the game that the ball took a slight deflection on the way into the back of the net for the third time, and that that was the reason why he fell out of the way of a shot from the edge of the penalty area that was straight at him. But nobody else on the pitch saw the ball deviate from its path once it left the foot of the scorer. And everybody knew that by hook or by crook, a fourth was on its way.
They should have just been resigned to their fate, but the Convo players made the schoolboy mistake of trying not to concede an equaliser, which only made their plight all the more agonising to watch. It was real squeaky-bum time – a quite alarming thought considering half of them had partaken in a curry at the end of the previous night’s piss-up – especially as the last couple of interminable minutes seemed to drag on longer than a Michael Schultz anecdote. But then with almost the final kick of the game, one of the visitors blasted a diagonal shot through a throng of players in the Convo penalty area, and into the net at the back post.
Once again, the jaws of victory would have to go hungry.
It’s not often that a player scores four in a game yet still doesn’t win, but that’s what Willis will have had to chew on, on Saturday evening. Clinical and dormant in equal measure, it was the forward’s quartet of strikes that ‘earned’ Convo their draw, but his inability to muster up any further interest in the game once he had his hat-trick and the total absence of a creditable attempt on goal from anybody else on the pitch – despite playing so well – came back to haunt the home side, and it’s that that should be rued after this game, not the fun and games at the other end of the pitch during its denouement. For while it would be unfair to blame Wheller for all of Convo’s woes on Saturday, it is pretty irrefutable that if he hadn’t had his WTF moment midway through the second half then his team would have won.
But Convo don’t seem as mentally strong as they did this time last year (hence their late collapse) and they no longer possess that hard-earned aura of authority that carried them on to their first ever trophy (hence the dearth of chances). If they don’t buck their ideas up then they will struggle to successfully defend their Sealand Cup next month – and you don’t need to spend a fortune on advertising for anyone to see that.
Man Of The Match: It pains your correspondent to give it to Willis, but he did exactly what is asked of a striker, and though you could argue that he was little more than a spectator in the second period, four goals is still four goals, whether they’re spread out over the course of a game or all netted within twenty minutes. Hoban was the best of the rest.
Move Of The Match: Simon O’Brien and Andy McLaren – who were wearing matching cardigans – not sitting next to each other in The Gardeners, thus avoiding what would have been a terrible sartorial faux pas.
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; O’Brien S, Schofield K, Mitchell, Dickson; Hoban, Jelen, O’Brien R, Flamson; Willis, Wheller; Subs: Holt, McLaren, Fairclough
Bobby Mimms reports (without any notes, so it’s a short one)
Twelve months on (within a few days) from Waterloo’s last visit to Wyncote and little has changed – even Saturday’s final scoreline once again adhered to the same three-to-one ratio. And as though parodying some archaic, constitutional ceremony, the sense of unswerving perpetuation was further enhanced by everybody getting all decked out in their usual vibrant regalia, the visiting players being just as niggly and as highly strung as they were last year, and Convocation continuing to suffer from a failure to convert enough of the chances that they created, whilst gifting too many to their opponents at the other end. Of course, if the opposition are going to have a day like the Grammar School Old Boys did at the weekend, when just about everything that they hit at the home side’s goal was on target, and the large majority of those found the back of the net, then even one or two slip-ups at the back are going to prove costly: there’s no way that the Seconds can beat even those odds.
They wouldn’t have had to worry about doing so though, had they proven more ruthless in front of the Waterloo goal in the opening quarter of the game. By the time the white-shirted visitors scored their first, to level proceedings with a little over five minutes to go before the interval, their collective spirit should have been well-and-truly smashed and trampled into the Wyncote mud, for Convo had had the chances to be four or five goals to the good. A very attack-minded midfield quartet of Jon Kearney, Mike Edwards, Joel Jelen and Richy O’Brien ominously complemented the forward pairing of Matt Round and Ben Prince, and the six of them tore into the away side’s defences with a frenzy seldom seen in the Second Team.
A fortunately-placed Waterloo defender cleared a headed effort off the goal line at a corner (after the game nobody could remember who it was that had come so close to scoring), while Prince had sent a close-range shot inches wide of one of the uprights shortly before that. The irrepressible Kearney brought the best out of the visitors’ ‘keeper with a fifteen-yard half volley that seemed destined for the top right-hand corner of the goal, before it was tipped over the bar at the last second, and Round was a hair’s breadth away from connecting with an O’Brien ball into the box that he would surely have redirected into the back of the opposition net with even the slightest of contact.
Twenty minutes into the game though, those two players would play an integral part in Convocation taking the lead. The ball was gathered by O’Brien out on the right wing and he arced an excellent cross in to Waterloo’s back post, where Kearney (one of only two players in the club who are only ever referred to, as though aristocratically, by their surname) headed such a superbly cushioned pass back across the face of the goalmouth that Round had no dilemma about what to do as it floated onto his forehead, six yards out.
Convo thoroughly deserved their lead and there was no reason to suspect that the earlier missed chances would come back to haunt them (other than that old mocking friend, ‘experience’). They seemed to have the upper hand in the middle of the pitch, where Edwards was rolling back the years to put in an energetic, intelligent performance, and Jelen was frequently sublime and only occasionally ridiculous, while the defence had only once been in any sort of trouble and goalkeeper Keith Purcell had gotten them off the hook on that occasion with a great blocking save low to his left. The two full backs – the two Second Team captains – had been virtual spectators since kick off, while the combination of Justin Shanahan and Ian Mitchell at centre back was all about the latter putting his foot through anything that came near him, and the former picking up the pieces left behind.
However, as is the norm, Paul Dickson made a series of changes midway through the half, and not for the first time they upset the rhythm of the side. John Flamson and Kevin Schofield caused little disruption when they joined the defence, but when Simon Stanforth came on, on one of the flanks, and Andy Willis was sent up front, Convo’s fluidity seemed to desiccate immediately. Stanforth’s was the usual, gutsy, ultimately-futile performance that has come to be expected of him, but Willis would have one of those ‘little boy lost’ afternoons when he drifts in and very out of games, and was to all intents and purposes a passenger. He started as he meant to go on, flipping on Purcell within sixty seconds of walking onto the pitch (when the #1 had had the audacity to suggest that he might have tried a little harder to reach a ball – that he had called for – as it passed barely half-a-dozen yards away from him), but his heart wasn’t even in the ranting on Saturday, and he spent large periods of the game wandering around the pitch with his arms outstretched in faux-outrage at every misplaced pass, like a footballing Christ the Redeemer.
Despite the interruption to Convocation’s offensive aspirations though, everything still appeared to be tickety-boo on the defensive front, and as half time loomed it looked quite likely that they would take a lead into it. But two incredibly similar goals in as many minutes, just before the break, would turn the game on its head; both involved Waterloo gaining possession in midfield and splitting the Convo back line, both saw Purcell lose out in the resultant one-on-ones, and both ended with the visitors rolling the ball into the empty net past desperate goal-line lunges by Shanahan.
Somehow, at the interval the home side trailed.
Due to the profuse superiority that they had enjoyed during the majority of the first period, there didn’t seem to be any reason for the home side to be too rash as the second got underway, as it was natural to believe that the chances would surely return. But when neither Prince nor Round could make it work up front with the torpid Willis, and then Waterloo netted another, ten minutes after the break, it started to look as though Convo had done all the hard work for nothing once again.
Like the visitors’ first two, their third started inside their own half, this time when a clearance was pumped down the pitch and over the Convocation back line. However, unlike earlier, the chasing Shanahan looked to have the upper hand over an accompanying adversary – that is, until the cruel, but frequently-paired combination of misfortune and slapstick stuck their bloody noses in. The ball bounced towards the home side’s penalty area, soaringly so on the firm ground, with the two opposing players in hot pursuit and Purcell on his eighteen-yard line, mentally imploring it to hurry to his beckoning arms. But just outside the box it dropped from the heavens right onto the toe of the retreating Convo man and inadvertently caromed away from his impending goalkeeper (and rather more crucially, towards the open goal) – his rapidly impending goalkeeper. The collision between the two team mates was grievous only in the extent of its farce, but as Purcell was sent flying across the penalty area and Shanahan rebounded off him, spinning and careering in the vague direction of the goal, the Waterloo player had had enough time to avoid the comradely carnage and skipped past it, before catching up the loose ball and redirecting it into the gaping target.
The injustice of working so hard and having had so much possession only to find themselves two behind could have gotten to the Convo players after that, and on a different day they might well have given up and capitulated. But to give credit where it’s due, they kept on plugging away and asking questions of the visitors, albeit without ever really looking likely to score.
But then they did score when, wonder of wonders, the woeful Willis applied the paltriest of touches to a Prince cross-cum-shot and redirected the ball past the static Waterloo goalkeeper, whose body language suggested that he was expecting something a bit more substantial from the Convo man. Despite celebrating as though he’d scored the winner in the Maracanã, there was no suggestion that the goal redeemed its scorer for his otherwise dire display.
Though no one in red had slackened, suddenly there was renewed vigour; whilst nobody had conceded defeat, the goal infused the Convo players with rediscovered hope; and once again the visitors’ back line found itself under a similar pressure to that which it’d experienced at the start of the game. From fifteen yards out O’Brien placed a shot maybe a foot wide of Waterloo’s left-hand post, and moments later incurred the wrath of one of their less jovial defenders when, at the minimum of contact, he struggled to keep his balance in the opposition penalty area (in the ‘made no attempt whatsoever’ sense of the word struggle).
For reasons known only to themselves Schofield and Prince swapped positions, but the big man briefly stayed up front as Convo had a run on corners, the last of which was so tumultuous and volatile that the goalmouth momentarily resembled a mosh pit, and the young referee – who had been inconsistent but fair to both sides throughout (and looked a bit of a dick in his black tights) – had to warn everyone about their jostling. In the end though, they came to nothing.
As the game entered the final ten minutes the home side began to push more and more players forward in the search for the equaliser that they deserved, leaving themselves increasingly vulnerable at the back in the process, and almost inevitably they paid the price. Waterloo broke away in the middle of one Convo foray and, though temporarily held up passing the ball back and forth along the edge of the home side’s penalty area, eventually smacked a shot just beyond the fingertips of Purcell’s desperate dive, to kill the game off once and for all.
This time the Seconds did collapse in on themselves, and they conceded two more goals in the final few minutes – the first an absolute howitzer that Purcell did well to block but then had to watch from on the ground as the ball’s momentum carried it agonisingly slowly towards, and then over, the goal line; the second a back-post smash that the statuesque Prince tried to claim was offside (despite he, himself, playing the scorer on by a good two yards) – before the man in black called it a day as the visitors celebrated their sixth.
Considering that they did rattle in a half-dozen goals it would probably be churlish to suggest that Waterloo didn’t deserve to win, but as paradoxical as it sounds, Convo certainly didn’t deserve to lose either. Not for the first time they paid the price for being less than clinical in the opposition penalty area, however they are unlikely to come up against another team that hits the target so continually and successfully any time this side of the next blue moon – or at least until the next time they play Saturday’s opponents.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for an agreeable augury to take solace from then bear in mind that after Waterloo's last visit to Wyncote, twelve months ago (within a few days), the Seconds didn't lose another game for nearly three months. And you all know what that led to…
Man Of The Match: Edwards had a great game and as good as owned the area around the centre circle in the first twenty minutes, whilst Purcell made four or five good saves on his first appearance in ages and can’t be faulted for any of the concessions. If the match had ended at half time then the nod would have had to go to Kearney as he was immense before the break (not as much after it, though he might have been off the pitch), but Shanahan just seemed to be everywhere for the entire ninety minutes, so much so, that one of his colleagues jokingly asked for a “Justin head count” at one point in the second half. He also had a huge bandage covering one of his legs that made those wussy little knee straps that Phil Holt and Andy McLaren wear pale into insignificance.
Move Of The Match: The build up to Convocation’s first goal, the apogee of which was Kearney’s perfectly weighted inch-perfect header back across the goal for Round. Assists seldom come much better at any level.
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; McLaren, Shanahan, Mitchell, Dickson; Kearney, Edwards, Jelen, O'Brien R; Round, Prince; Subs: Flamson, Schofield K, Stanforth, Willis
As the Irish proverb goes; “A narrow neck keeps the bottle from being emptied in one swig”. As with Convocation, there is no point in winning comfortably (i.e. in control), you might as well make a game of it (or so it seems?), drag it out until the dying seconds…
Saturday was one of those lovely, low lying, sun days. It was almost perfect for football except if you were playing into the sun. Dickson had a respectable 13 players to choose from Saturday afternoon, with Tony Parry Junior crying off at the last minute due to poor relations with the Columbians.
Sandbach arrived with a full complement of players and as the seconds warmed up on the pitch closest to the tennis courts (soon to be demolished tennis courts!!) – the Sandbach team took an eternity to emerge from the changing rooms. This was noted to be a cunning ploy as Topper and Stanforth looked slightly jaded as the referee blew to start the match (the seconds were warming up for about 25 minutes).
Convo lined up with Wheller in goal (looking a little anxious at the previous week’s antics in Fazakerly) and a back four right to left of Dickson, Prince, Schofield and McClaren. The midfield gave opportunities to Stanforth on the left and Kearney on the right, with the midfield duo of Edwards and O’Brien (R). Leading the forward line were Topping and Lamb (B). The bench was warmed by Hoburn and Jelene.
The hosts started the game superbly and played some excellent football in the opening 12 minutes. Convo were solid at the back and swept up any attacks swiftly and with ease, and the fullbacks played some decent football into the wingers of Kearney and Stanforth, with Stanforth in particular having great attacks down the left, causing no end of problems for Dolly at right back for Sandbach. The central midfield of Edwards and O’Brien was actually a joy to watch. O’Brien was fantastic – snapping into tackle after tackle and Edwards sweeping up the leftovers – with huge amounts of time to play in Topping and Lamb. Topping’s intelligent play allowed Lamb to get around the back of the Sandbach defence on numerous occasions – and the visitors had a torrid opening half hour. Dickson in his customary position “toed” it forward at every opportunity and on the other side McClaren was playing clever balls into the corner for Stanforth and Topping to run onto. Prince was majestic at centre half and won every header and calling the offside perfect every time. Wheller was a mere spectator!
In the opening 6 minutes Sandbach hadn’t really touched the ball. They had the occasional clearance but it fell to a Convo shirt every time and you could see that this wasn’t going to be their day. On 8 minutes and pass out wide from Prince to Dickson, allowed the captain to play Kearney into the corner who delivered an inch perfect cross to Topping, one-on-one – he put it wide (even though he had more time to take the ball closer to goal). Then in the 22nd minute Edwards played a lovely ball to Topping who in turn played in Lamb to split the Sandbach defence. The shout for offside was turned down and in turn Lamb was scathed down by the defender (Riggs). The hosts didn’t have to shout for a penalty – it was a stone-waller! There was many a player wanting to take the penalty but up stepped Schofield to put it away down the middle of the goal. The hosts were one nil up.
This sparked Sandbach into life and they started to play some decent football. The left winger was skipping past Dickson and at one point played in Scotty of Sandbach, who up against Wheller, looked destined to score. Wheller to be fair made himself bigger and he pushed his shot wide. This was the wake up the hosts needed but as you all know, Convo allowed their guests to continue to take control. A slip up by Schofield in the 30th minute, a poor clearance that ricocheted off a Sandbach player allowed the ball to squirm across the eighteen yard box. Prince on hand to clear – completely missed the ball and it fell to Scotty who slid the ball past a static Wheller. One all.
Again this got Convo into life. Hoburn replaced McClaren and Jelene replaced Stanforth – all on the left (slightly confusing as this is where most of Convo’s play was most dazzling). Hoburn was straight into tackle after tackle and he took no prisoners – showing Dickson he has the metal to be part of the seconds’ squad. Jelene on the other hand looked a little bamboozled as he had expected to go straight into the middle. The pairing of Edwards and O’Brien couldn’t be split, so Jelene decided the best thing to do would be to look slightly disinterested – not to Schofield’s amusement. It was O’Brien who decided to take the game to Sandbach. A couple of reckless tackles left O’Brien in a heap but he always got up to fight on. Then the years came flooding back! A smart cross from the left by Stanforth bypassed the whole Sandbach defence and it fell kindly to Kearney on the right. With the guests in a frenzy, Kearney played a beautiful ball to Topping. Again the shout of offside was waved on, and Topping fooled the defender sliding in and curled the ball around the flapping keeper, who got the slightest of touches on the ball. It hit the far post, rolled along the line, hit the other post and trickled in. It was no more than Convo deserved. It was two-one to the hosts.
Sandbach rode out the final 10 minutes – thankful of going into the break a goal down. It could have been more had Stanforth hit the target 15 yards out and Jelene blasting one over from a corner. The guests did have the chance for an equalizer with Nige through on goal, Schofield chased back and with Wheller closing down the angles – he shot wide.
The hosts looked comfortable at the break and were extremely happy a goal up. A change in the middle allowed Jelene to partner O’Brien, with Edwards shifted out to full back (not the best move by the captain). Kearney gave way for Stanforth on right.
With the sun in their eyes, Convo looked a shadow of the first half. Sandbach had more of a grip of the middle of the pitch and Topping looked very tired playing up front. The guests took the game to Convo and played the decent football they are known for. The Convo defence was under pressure from the start. A nice move by Sandbach in the 56th minute brought the left winger into life – which pulled a smart save out of Wheller. And the resulting corner was headed over but nice pressure from Prince prevented it being a certain goal.
It was a this point that Wheller lost all control of his brain and decided it was time to lose the plot (again!). He had a tit for tat with Scotty who decided that he was going to give it back. The feud continued until the final whistle.
It was about the 67th minute when a ball fed down the left had Hoburn and Schofield in trouble. With both holding the man up, he fed in the central midfielder Barnsey whose first time shot had Wheller pushing the ball wide for a corner. Convo being relatively small in height, the opposition sent all of the big players into the box and Nige won a free header into the top corner with the whole of Convo stationary. This made the score two-two and it looked like Sandbach had the edge!
The feud between Wheller and Scotty then erupted into complete madness when a through ball allowed a 50/50 and Wheller came out to kick and Scotty went in studs up. To be fair, there didn’t seem much wrong as it was there to go for and Wheller was fortunate to get a free kick to which the opposition moaned about. Wheller turned into the incredible hulk and was restrained by Prince, Hoburn, Edwards, Jelene, and the referee – in fact by everyone except Scotty. As you can imagine it sent nerves jangling. For a watertight defence – Convo looked nervous. The talking between defenders stopped, the midfield stopped and the forwards stopped. With Sandbach breaking in numbers, Convo had their own chance to capitalize only for poor thinking by Topping, Lamb and Stanforth, who each in turn either played the wrong ball, played a short pass or was caught offside.
Then a switch by Kearney for Stanforth gave the hosts the chance to win the game. Kearney came on a decided that Edwards could cope on his own and played like another attacker. The Sandbach defence was all over the place and a brave forward run by Hoburn into the corner – resulted in the overall winner. Hoburn played clever one-two with O’Brien and near the corner flag; he played an inch perfect cross to the near post. There was Kearney, whose control was impeccable and first time shot had the keeper rooted!
It was just rewards for Convo’s first half performance and dogged determination in the second half! It was then that the nerves took a hold. As with the saying – Convo’s bottle neck tightened and the game took a new light. With Edwards, Schofield and Prince shouting for offside – Hoburn was a good 15 yards behind. The left winger of Sandbach burst through and Hoburn made a desperate tackle on the edge of the box. The winger fell into the box and referee called for a penalty, which had Wheller and Hoburn with eyes like golf balls! For all their pressure – Sandbach looked like they were going to rescue something from the game (just as they did the season before at their ground). With 3 minutes left and feud between Wheller and Scotty getting worse – the referee warned Wheller and the Sandbach line complained about his “winding up” antics. With Scotty so desperate to score – he blasted the penalty straight at Wheller and the centre half running in hit the ball towards Mather Avenue! Wheller won the battle of minds and Scotty walked away with his head in his hands.
Schofield then told Wheller to calm down as his next piece of verbal action would result in him walking.
With Sandbach deflated – Convo held on for victory – playing out the final 3 minutes with relative ease. All players shook hands (apart from Scotty) and retreated to the changing rooms to celebrate a thoroughly impressive win.
MoM: Its one of the hardest parts to pick a man of the match, when everyone played out of their skins. Special mention to Topping – he never stopped running. O’Brien had a wonderful game in the middle and he’s been outstanding in the last three games. This week’s award is jointly shared between Hoburn, who got stuck in from the start and set up the winner, and even though he gave away the penalty in the final minutes – it wasn’t a penalty and he was there to try and stop the attack when he knew he was playing the winger onside. The other player to share the award is Prince. He was at fault for the first goal but he was strong at the back and never gave Nige (or Scotty) the time of day – which you could see – annoyed them. Well done lads!
Move(s) of the Match: 1. With Convo’s backs to the wall – it was Hoburn to O’Brien and back to Hoburn to attack in the corner. With Hoburn up against the Sandbach defender, he turned his man smartly and played a beautiful cross to Kearney and it was a wonderful finish to win the game. It was a joy to watch. 2. Wheller floating towards Mather Avenue after saving the penalty!
Team: Wheller, Dickson, Prince, Schofield, McClaren, Stanforth, Edwards, O’Brien, Kearney, Lamb, Topping. Subs: Jelene, Hoburn.
What a waste of time, they are much better than us and we didn't play too badly. Gave them the usual convo gift of three goals in the second half and Kev got a bit injured near the end.
There you have it. Oh, we had a game of killer on the pool table in the pub after. That was the highlight of my [ROB's] day and I only came in runner up.
Convocation (4-4-2): McLaren; Holt, McNally, Schofield K, Dickson; Fairclough, O'Brien R, Schofield R, Stanforth; Prince, Willis
Neville Cardus reports
A day which began in bright sunshine and ended in deep fog would be the best description of this Saturday for south Liverpool’s finest.
As the chaps set out, the weather in South Liverpool was glorious; bright sunshine and not a cloud in the sky. As we sped northwards up the M57 towards Fazakerley, at around junction 5 to be exact, a bank of fog and mist descended to the extent that there was some doubt if the game would proceed. It was a grim site indeed seeing the old psychiatric hospital enveloped in swirling mist at the side of the pitch; one expected to see to see Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee to emerge carrying a bloodied axe.
When the game kicked off however, Convo proceeded to play some of their best football of the season in the first half. With Wheller in goals; a back four of McLaren, Schofield, Prince and Jago; midfield of Stanforth, Edwards, Jelen and R O’Brien; and a strike force of Willis and Lamb, the visitors took the game to the hosts. The midfield was superb winning most balls and playing intelligent passes into channels where Willis in particular was causing all sorts of problems. It was from one such pass from Stanforth down the Convo left that Willis ran into the channel, latched onto the ball and slotted into the corner of the net beyond the stranded St Martins keeper.
The lead didn’t last long however as the St Martins left winger, who was proving a real handful, cut inside Jago and as he tackled, the St Martins player got his feet clipped a little but went down in a heap just to make sure. The referee pointed to the spot and Wheller was sent the wrong way.
Convo heads didn’t go down. They upped the tempo and proceeded to dominate the game for the next 25 minutes. The home defence was really struggling to cope with the balls played through them and over them for the Convo strikers to run onto. A number of times, the visitors were called offside by a referee who seemed so detached from everything that he could have been made of the mist which swirled around the pitch. At one stage, he gave offside against the visitors when he was looking at his feet. Very strange.
At last Convo’s dominance paid off. The midfield were superb in winning the ball and a dinked pass from Edwards over the opposing centre half left Willis shoulder to shoulder with a St Martins defender. Willis proceeded to shoulder him off the ball and as the goalie came out, he shouldered him to the ground and rolled the ball into the empty net. A nifty bit of American Football from the best body in the club but it was no more than Convo deserved as numerous chances were spurned. Wheller hadn’t really been called on; one shot from the edge of the area had been about it; and the Convo defence had found its feet and even the St Martins left winger was at last being subdued.
Half time saw the visitors 2-1 up. Jago went off to be replaced by Allister right back and Holt went on for McLaren at the other full back slot. The second half though saw all the good work form the first half disappear in the fog. Instead of working the ball through the midfield, the visitors proceeded to hump the ball forward and then not get it back for ages. Given this, it was no surprise that the Convo midfield tired chasing the ball around and as they did so, the home team gained the ascendency. Even so the equalising goal was of comical quality as a corner from the Convo right, wasn’t cleared at the first time of asking, nor the second nor the third as every attempt from one Convo player to clear it kept hitting another team mate. Eventually St Martins got tired of this Keystones Cops routine and as one of their players got a toe to the ball, it trickled ever so slowly off the far post into the net.
The third St Martins goal was equally “unworked” as a loose ball some 40 yards out was swung at and as it arced towards the Convo goal, one knew what was going to happen and it did. Wheller remained rooted to the ground and merely waved at the ball (or even gave it a buffing) as it dropped over him into the net.
The aforementioned mist, which had been grey, now took on a more pink / red lurid tinge as Wheller’s temper began to fray. The fourth home goal found a St Martins forward able to lob Wheller who couldn’t have been more in no man’s land if he had been on the Somme. The angry keeper now decided that it was the defence’s fault and when he thought that Schofield had apparently refused to take a goal kick him for him, complained to McLaren (boss for the day) that Kev was “refusing to play”. That certainly wasn’t the view your correspondent had as Kev was chasing down everything despite not feeling well during the week.
After working on his own players, Barry then decided to wind up the opposition, particularly after Prince had a wee spat with a St Martins player. The arguments raged and people were pushed. Even the sprightly league game on the adjacent pitch stopped to watch these old lags having a go. Eventually it calmed down and Convo concentrated on the football. A period of pressure (including a glorious miss from Willis at the back post) saw Stanforth turn his man in the area and brought down. A penalty to Convo! As McLaren roared to Kev to take it, Willis on a hat trick took it on himself and pushed the ball so far wide it was embarrassing. Another Convo homosexual penalty? Your correspondent who was standing next the coach made himself scarce as the Bear roared his displeasure at people not obeying instructions. Not a happy Bear at all.
Lamb and O’Brien had further chances but a one on one with Wheller saw the St Martins striker smack the ball in off the underside of the bar and then Wheller’s coup-de grace as a hopeful cross was flapped at, caught and then squirmed out of his pink gloves to be tapped in by a grateful St Martins player.
Fortunately the referee blew soon after as there wasn’t enough tranquiliser darts left to sedate both Barry and Andy McLaren and that was it. Wheller was able to compare notes with John Macca of the first team in the pub afterwards who had also let in 6. A great day for Convo keepers
All in all, it wasn’t a 6-2 game. Convo played extremely well in the first half and even in the second, had numerous chances to remain in the game. If they had continued to play through the excellent midfield in the second half, they could have got something form this game against decent opposition.
Man of the match: there were many candidates for this award. Willis for 2 goals and leading the line well would have been a contender but that penalty...His strike partner Lamb always made himself available. But the award this week goes to the Convo midfield. Edwards and Jelen were superb in the centre and O Brien and Stanforth worked really hard on the flanks. It’s difficult to separate them as they really worked as a unit.
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; Edwards, Willis, Schofield K, McLaren; O'Brien R, Fairclough, Jelen, Kearney; Prince, Topping; Subs: Holt, O'Brien S, Hoban
Convocation: (from) Wheller, Dickson, Jago, Schofield K, Edwards, O'Brien R, Holt, McLaren, Prince, Fairclough, Kearney, Parry Jnr, O'Brien S, Littler, McNally, Round
Convocation: (from) Hendry, Dickson, Jago, Schofield K, Willis, Flamson, Jelen, Edwards, Topping, O'Brien R, Holt, McLaren, Prince, Lamb B, Allister, Kearney, Fairclough
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Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; McLaren, Willis, Schofield K, Holt; Jago, Fairclough, Edwards, O'Brien R; Parry Jnr, Campbell; Subs: Lamb C, Littler, McNally, Schofield R, Round, Topping
Bobby Mimms reports
So Convocation end the decade in much the same way that they passed through it: beaten but not broken, and with Lady Luck giving them the finger. Over the years the club, in all of its many guises, has had to battle not just tangible opposition facing them over halfway lines, but the much more formidable adversary of fate itself, as well. It has seldom been a fair contest. And having carried the Convo word to far-flung corners of the North West throughout ‘the noughties’, it has been the Seconds in particular who have regularly had to get back up after being cruelly knocked down, and dust themselves off ready to start from the beginning once again.
Just as they must in the New Year. For theirs is, and always has been, a Sisyphean task; one as old as the club itself.
It may appear ungrateful to talk about the Seconds’ lack of good fortune at the end of their most successful and serendipitous year ever, but it still grates when something as trivial as the pre-match coin toss goes a long way towards deciding the outcome of a game. Slicker teams than they would find the holiday fixture at Chester something of a trial, seeing as how the hosts seldom fail to perform on their own patch, and morning kick offs rarely favour a team that has to travel. But had the side from Liverpool had that little bit of luck and come out on top in the lottery that was ‘which hand is the piece of grass in?’ (in the absence of a coin, that is exactly the method the referee used to decide who kicked off – he also offered the choice to the Chester player, when surely he should have let the visiting Convo delegate pick), then it is much more likely that they would have gotten something from this match.
In the second half, with the low-lying sun at their backs and the pitch gradient sloping away before them, Convocation were much the better team and created most of the game’s chances. But they also started it 4-1 down, as two sloppy five-minute spells before the interval had seen them suffer the same kind of defensive catatonia that had blighted their chances, on the same pitch and in similar conditions, twelve months earlier. Had they won the toss it’s fair to presume that they wouldn’t have had such a hill to climb – or push a boulder up.
But needs must when the devil drives, and chase the game they had to. They would have given their chances such a fillip as well, had either Richy Schofield (playing up front, having started in the centre of a five-man midfield) or John Flamson (left wing) found the back of the Chester net when clear through on goal in the opening minutes of the second period, instead of allowing the home goalkeeper to parry away their efforts from close range. But doing themselves favours has never been the Convocation way – neither holistically nor individually. Schofield can testify to that.
If Flamson could take solace from his miss then it was in the knowledge that things must only get better; for the player who began the year as First Team captain there could be no such guarantee, as he wouldn’t reach his nadir until twenty minutes later, at about the midpoint of the second half.
That was when a Chester back pass from about fifteen yards out rolled under their goalkeeper’s foot, and diagonally towards his back post, making it look momentarily as though the distracted glove wearer had gifted the visitors a daft notch that would really get them back into the game (by this time Convo had pulled it back to 2-4). But as the #1 chased back and slid in, feet first, to try and prevent the ball from crossing the goal line, it bounced back out off the foot of the upright anyway, while he became entangled in the side netting. And all the time, watching proceedings with interest, Schofield was lurking on the edge of the penalty area.
As the only player in the vicinity, the Convo man charged in to score what would surely be the easiest of goals, but with the whole target to aim at he somehow managed to kick the ball straight at the snared ‘keeper’s head – the only part of his body not in the back of the net – from a little over two yards out. It rebounded away to safety and it seemed that Schofield’s only consolation when he eventually turned back to face his dumfounded team mates, more crestfallen than you would have thought physically possible, was that there were no discarded rakes lying around the Nomads’ penalty area for him to convert shame into humiliation with.
There were other misses too, though – just none as egregious. At one of Convocation’s few first-half chances John Topping was just as guilty of overconfidence as Schofield would be, when he received possession just inside the Chester penalty area and mistook the absence of a ‘keeper (who had been caught hopelessly out of position by the clever pass) to mean an open goal. With only the target to find in order to level the game at two-all, he tried to stroke the ball into the back of the net from twelve yards out instead of just burying his chance, and in doing so gave a defender valuable seconds to run in and clear his effort off the line.
Later, in the second half when Topping’s hamstrings were turning into cheese strings, Ben Prince was equally as wasteful, albeit a little more understandably, when he sent an unchallenged header (from a corner) over the crossbar, instead of keeping the ball down and on target, which would have made it four-a-piece.
That miss would turn out to be the visitors’ last chance. Several minutes later – about ten from the end – another unmarked header would give the home side a killer fifth goal, and end any hopes Convocation may have had of a comeback. However, that they were still in with a shout so near to the end speaks volumes of their spirited second-half performance, because at the interval there were genuine fears that a rout was on the cards for the second visit to Chester on the run; in the first half they’d been quite at sea.
The players had had to survive the obligatory Boxing Day sprout farts in the (thankfully spacious) changing room, and the annual discourse on Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Christmas before they took to the icy pitch with just the bare eleven; of those, Joel Jelen only made it for kick off by a matter of seconds. It was obvious before the first whistle that the sun and the incline would be cause for concern, but an additional problem that became apparent once the game was underway was the baffling deployment of an unconventional four-five-one formation, which left the midfielders fighting each other as well as the opposition for possession, and as a result, the lone forward Topping as the only real outlet to relieve the inevitable pressure on the back line.
That, as was to be expected considering the circumstances, started straight from the off. Twice in the opening ten minutes goalkeeper Keith Purcell – making his first appearance for the Seconds in three months (to the day) – used the woodwork to his benefit, the first example of which was an excellent fingertip save that pushed the ball onto the inside of his right-hand post where it rebounded behind him and across the face of the goal towards the safety of Andy McLaren out on the left.
Between the big full-back and Paul Dickson on the other side of the defence, Andy Willis and Kevin Schofield spent the majority of the first period drawing on all the world-weary pragmatism that they’ve accrued as Convo centre halves over the years, as the midfield’s inability to come to terms with having three at its heart only served to cede the centre of the pitch to the Nomads. And already having so much in their favour, the home side needed no further invitation to push home the extra advantage.
However, when Chester did break their guests resolve (after fifteen minutes – it wasn’t that great a resolve really) it was largely thanks to a piece of sloppy defending that was anything but a genuine reflection on the visitors’ overall performance. They launched a throw-in on Convo’s left flank, roughly level with the eighteen-yard line, into the penalty area, and as both Willis and Schofield (K) had been drawn towards the thrower like Gerry Adams’ siblings to Werthers Originals, the box was dangerously shorn of defenders – in fact there was only Dickson and three opponents in front of the goal, odds the Convo captain couldn’t hope to beat. But it was still a bit of a kick in the teeth when the player who tried his luck from fifteen yards out mishit the ball (he shinned it) into the bottom right-hand corner of Purcell’s goal.
Their second, five minutes later, also owed a lot to good fortune, although rather than being luck of their own making it relied instead on Convocation having none. They won a corner that was floated into the visitors’ goalmouth and which, after a quick bout of head tennis between various players, the elder Schofield tried to head back to his goalkeeper (actually, that reads a bit unfairly on the defender – he did head the ball back to his goalkeeper). On a different day, or from any other part of the pitch, that would have been that – a comfortable collection and a punt up the pitch for the midfielders to fight over. But unfortunately for Convo, Schofield was directly in Purcell’s line with the sun and was therefore nothing more than a fuzzy silhouette to the #1.
As the back pass was directly at the ‘keeper it still shouldn’t have proven too difficult to get the ball under control (once he’d overcome his initial shock at seeing it come out of the sun “like a Japanese bomber”), but that would be without taking into consideration the state of the goalmouth. Even before the game had started concerns had been voiced about the icy surface, all over the pitch, and Purcell had been advised to wear tracksuit bottoms to guard against the particularly serrated condition of his six-yard box. But the ‘keeper couldn’t have expected a ball to bounce in such a freakish manner, as this one did when it took off at almost a ninety degree angle to which it had landed in front of him. Too little too late, he tried to bat it away as it bounced up away from and over his shoulder, but all he eventually succeeded in doing was smashing it into the roof of his net.
It wouldn’t be the #1’s last cock up, nor would he be the only one to suffer in the sun. Though Convo pulled a goal back midway through the half, before Topping missed his chance to level the scores, the visitors endured another couple of minutes of defensive madness just before the interval, that began with Willis also rueing the star we all orbit. The midfield’s continued malaise allowed a good pass out of the Nomads’ equivalent to split the Convo back line and set up a one-on-one with Purcell, and as the goalkeeper started to advance the Chester recipient chipped the ball up over him and looked to have scored. But Willis had made great strides to run in and cover the goal line, and was in the perfect position to head the ball clear. Sadly though, unable to see anything other than the ball, he headed it straight back to the initial shooter, who had continued his run, and he slotted it into the corner from six yards out.
The home side made it four-one shortly after that when one of their big defenders gained possession on the right side of Convo’s penalty area and went on a mazy dribble between Prince (who had replaced Dickson when he’d eventually arrived – having driven up from Derby to play) and the new right-back Schofield (K), before firing across Purcell and into the back of the net despite the ‘keeper getting a foot to the effort.
And that’s how the game was balanced at the interval, and why the visitors decided that something had to change: the formation. The problem in the midfield hadn’t been that the three guinea-pigs in the centre – Jelen, Richy Schofield and Mike Edwards – were playing badly, but that they couldn’t play properly. Each is an experienced player used to playing as one half of a central midfield duo, so shoehorning the three of them into a space where they only really know how to play one way was always going to cause trouble, and their inability to get a hold on the game just compounded the effects of the sun and the incline. With Schofield pushed up front in the second half, as his side reverted to the tried and trusted four-four-two configuration, Convo were so much better.
You could argue that it was the complete reversal of the two teams’ predicaments that saw the visitors dominate the second period, rather than them playing in a more familiar style, but that would be to ignore just how ordinary their hosts were after the break. They only had two creditable chances of their own making (although they almost benefited from a Purcell slice at a back pass in the opening minute), but otherwise were very much second fiddle to their guests.
The Convo #1 made a fine save to his left to deny one of those opportunities, but spoilt the good work by allowing the ball to bounce under a lamentable dive at the other, when Chester’s first-half goalkeeper scored with a glancing header at a free kick. A team mate claimed the goal was reminiscent of Martin Peters; having come back on for Holt, Dickson (he of the Judy Garland key ring) suggested his goalkeeper’s efforts were more akin of Andi Peters.
The gaffe couldn’t have happened at a worse time as it knocked the burgeoning belief out of the visitors, and they were never able to fully regain the impetus in the closing minutes. Until then they had been looking stronger and stronger with each passing minute, and that they would grab at least a draw had seemed increasingly more likely than their opponents holding on to the lead.
The misses of those two profligates, Flamson and Schofield – the two players who had combined for Convo’s first-half goal, when the former “did stuff in midfield” that was described as “career extending”, before setting up the latter to smash the ball past the Chester goalkeeper (who turned his back on the shot) from close range – had been forgiven, if not forgotten, after their team pulled first one, and then a second goal back, and the home side seemed to be suffering the full throes of shrinking lead syndrome.
Liberated by the familiar four-four-two formation, Edwards had come alive since the interval and it was he who played in Topping to score Convo’s second goal, and go some way towards banishing the demons of his earlier miss while he was at it. Equally as relieved at the half-time alterations as his centre-mid partner, Jelen was much more… sensible, in the second period having made a number of baffling decisions through frustration in the first, including one insane ninja-esque ‘clearance’ across his own eighteen-yard line that nearly caused the elder Schofield’s head to fly off in apoplexy.
And out on the right flank Richy O’Brien continued to be the model of consistency that he’d been throughout the game, even when the rest of the midfield had been struggling. Attacking the Chester back line at every chance, when necessary he was also capable of defending with competence – a competence that had been noticeably absent from his driving on the way to the fixture, when he had taken his car and its posse on a sightseeing tour up and down the M56 corridor, as he twice drove straight past the same Chester turn off despite being told (on numerous occasions) to keep left, and he’d had to return almost as far as Helsby before he could turn around (it couldn’t have helped that Topper was trying to find directions to Feltchers, rather than Filkins Lane, or that Percy was insistent that they wouldn’t have gotten lost if the Sat Nav had used the voice of Joss Ackland).
The visitors’ protean line-up morphed again towards the end of the game, to three-four-three, as Prince was sent up front in a desperate push for goals. But it was to no avail. The historical revisionist Jelen, who denies ever having supported Newcastle (and who, according to Topper, would have been one of the first in the lifeboats, dressed as a nun, had he been on the Titanic), somehow got away with a handball in his own penalty area that made Thierry Henry’s against the Irish look borderline, while Richy Schofield – the scorer of Convo’s scrappy third – seemed to take leave of his senses and attacked a Chester player who had tripped him out on the flank (and he didn’t get sent off – which for him is a novelty of late).
But aside from the home goalkeeper smashing the ball into the back of the head of one of his defenders, the game’s final minutes were uneventful, and Convo were left to rue losing the toss, and their lack of good fortune – just as they have, regularly, throughout the last ten years.
Man Of The Match: Little to go on as nobody really stood out, so Edwards gets the nod. Though he was quiet in the first period, he was as good as anyone on the pitch after the break, and he also used the Treasurer’s prerogative and waived subs after the game.
Move Of The Match: Ten seconds before the end of the game, Dickson’s last touch of the ball was a perfectly executed back heel to Willis on the edge of his own penalty area. What a way to end a fabulous decade.
Convocation (4-5-1): Purcell; Holt, Willis, Schofield K, Dickson; Flamson, Edwards, Jelen, Schofield R, O'Brien R; Topping; Sub: Prince
Another mental game between these two old protagonists, memorable for Andy Willis being sent off for something that was not mental.
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; McLaren, Willis, Schofield K, Kearney; O'Brien R, Fairclough, Edwards, Jago; Campbell, Parry Jnr; Subs: Dickson, Jelen
Bobby Mimms reports
You only really need to have seen one American B-movie horror film of the nineteen-fifties to know how all the others will roll along; the gist is pretty much the same in all of them. Monster(s)/aliens invade a town or hamlet and strange things start happening, but as soon as the ever-so sensible locals finally work out what’s going on, they morph in the most cretinous people on the planet and play right into the hands of the brain-eating, ray gun-wielding baddies. Whether it is in The Creature From The Black Lagoon, I Was A Teenage Werewolf, or any of numerous others, as soon as the characters find themselves in mortal danger every decision they take makes their situation even more perilous. (However they are also the beneficiaries of amazing good luck – locked doors will miraculously open given enough shaking; cars seemingly beyond use will suddenly burst into life just at the last moment.)
Other than the amazing special effects, the appeal to the incredulous viewer – as they watch, groaning, through their fingers – is that they know where The Thing is waiting and that at any moment the unsuspecting hero (or more usually, the heroine) is going to stumble upon it, despite having been given a choice that would scream out to anyone with half a brain (which near the end of the film usually rules out half the cast) as ‘certain death or safety’. The viewer can see the characters’ witless mistakes coming (“No, don’t pick that door.”) and knows what’s going to happen next, but can do nothing to stop them regardless.
At Wyncote on Saturday, a modern-day reinvention of those black-and-white films was played out as the Second Team classic, Curse of the Man-Of-The-Match-Award, was performed yet again. Last week’s recipient, Joel Jelen, had put in an Invasion Of The Body Snatchers showing against Northop Hall seven days earlier, but he came crashing back down to earth unceremoniously during this encounter, as like one of those doomed dopes in the B-movie horror flicks he constantly made all the wrong moves throughout the game, with nobody else on his side able to stop him. However, as during the week he had celebrated his elevation to star player by changing his address for the seventh time in twelve years* – gifting Paul Dickson the chance to resurrect the Wandering Jew gag – he clearly has a problem with wrong moves, so perhaps he might benefit more from a chat with Phil and Kirstie rather than trying to play on the same wavelength as his colleagues.
Not that they could do much themselves for most of the game. But for a fifteen-minute spell in the second half – coincidentally, just after Jelen had been substituted – when Convo threatened to turn the game on its head and snatch something undeserved from the encounter, this was a very one-sided affair. Crewe had rattled in nine at Wyncote on their last visit and looked intent on trying to repeat the feat this time around, once the game finally got going (their kit man had got lost en route). The home side were overran by the quick passing and even quicker breaks of their guests, and could be thankful to the relatively small dimensions of their goal and the fingers of ‘keeper Barry Wheller that they were still in a position to even consider a comeback, after the break. Had they been well beaten by then they could have had little complaint.
Dickson had seventeen players at his disposal on Saturday, which turned the cramped changing room L into an even more disturbing place to get ready than the neighbouring Corinthian one sounded (as in, the First Team’s opponents – not Crewe Corinthians), with its peculiar cacophony of zoo noises and farmyard commotion. The home side spent fifteen minutes admiring the complex’s new electronic ‘scoreboard’ – which only gave the time and temperature – and watching the girls’ hockey through the fence around the Astroturf pitches, before the visitors emerged in all blue, and referee Bargery decided to shorten the game to forty minutes each way.
Ahead of Wheller, Convo started with a back line comprising of the memorable Jon Kearney (Dickson couldn’t remember his name as he called out the team) and John Flamson as the full backs with the ever chucklesome pairing of Andy Willis and Kevin Schofield in between, while in midfield Jelen and Paul Fairclough were flanked by John Topping on the left and Mike Edwards on the right. Controversially – well, eyebrow-raisingly – this meant that Lee Campbell was pushed up front, to partner Ben Prince; less controversially – well, even less eyebrow-raisingly – it meant that the home side could call on such stellar reserves as Phil Holt, Richy O’Brien, Andy McLaren and Tim Jago (Convocation’s answer to Jedward?), and Tony Parry Jnr, even though he could barely walk having sustained a dead leg while being arrested during the week. And, of course, there was the captain himself.
Unconcerned, it only took the visitors ninety seconds after getting the game underway to fire a warning shot across their hosts’ bow, as they broke quickly down their left flank and through the xanthous back line before firing low but wide of Wheller’s left hand post. Two minutes later they had another effort, albeit one from the centre circle, but one that the Convo goalkeeper needed to parry nonetheless to prevent his side falling behind.
However Crewe have shown in the past that they can at times get a little carried away with themselves – not in a ‘too big for their boots’ sense, but in a ‘too quick for their own good’ one – and when they made another high-speed foray along the home side’s right flank shortly after that, only for Schofield to intercept a cross into the penalty area, they seemed to take their collective eye off the ball and were nearly caught out napping. The Convo defender strode out of the back with the ball and played it forward to a wandering Willis, who in turn knocked it out wide for Campbell. Envious of the temerity shown by the visitors in shooting from the halfway line, there was only one thing on the forward’s mind once he was in possession, and though Topping had made a great late dash into the box at the back post, Campbell ignored him and instead shot, himself, from eighteen yards out. It never even looked like troubling the target. Moments later his team were behind.
If Edwards had put as much effort into staying in position and harrying a young Crewe midfielder (apparently named Danny) for a loose ball out on the right flank, as he had into complaining about your correspondent’s commentary before the game, then perhaps Convo might not have conceded so readily. But once the youth had gained possession, almost by default, he slipped an inch-perfect pass through the static home defence for a colleague to run onto, and one-on-one with Wheller the man in blue made no mistake, to give his side the lead.
For his part in the crime young Danny was caught by a crunching challenge from Campbell shortly after the goal, and unfortunately for the lad it was right in front of the far-from-sympathetic Convocation bench. Already well aware of his potential, the chaps ‘warned’ the Crewe player that he would be foolish to try and run off his knock, pointing out that he didn’t want to be a cripple by the time he was “sixteen” – basically they were joking that they’d like to see him replaced. But he carried on regardless, just as his team did in their persecution of the home side’s rearguard.
The temperature had started to drop quite noticeably as the fifteen-minute mark neared. From a goal kick the visitors won possession in the middle of the pitch and prodded the ball forward towards the Convo penalty area, and a shot from more-or-less the edge of the box forced Wheller to concede a corner with a good save to his left. The dead ball was partly cleared, but as everyone followed it out the Crewe right back (or at least, the player who was guarding the right-hand side of the defence while the corner was being taken at the other end) floated a cross back in behind the retreating mob, which a team mate ran onto from the opposite side of the pitch. Despite being under pressure from Flamson, the man in blue glanced the ball with his forehead into the bottom corner of the Convo goal, and the difference between the teams was doubled.
Within minutes it would become three-nil, but not before Campbell had forced a good block out of the Crewe ‘keeper with Convo’s only first-half shot on target. Having been unfairly barged off the ball just outside the visitors’ penalty area, Edwards was awarded a free kick which Schofield guided in towards the back post, and finding himself in much more space than he would have expected the forward blasted the ball goalward from six yards out, only to find the #1 in the right place at the right time.
Moments later, the same couldn’t be said for Wheller. With talk on the Convo sideline turning to chocolate shampoo and, of all people, Purple Aki, you could almost sense that something odd was on the cards. But when Crewe lofted an aimless ball down their left flank that none of their players could really be bothered chasing, especially as the deep-lying Willis was jogging after it and would easily intercept, there didn’t appear to be any threat to the home goal. Yet when Wheller also started to jog out towards the corner of the pitch to intercept the ball, with the defender still following in its wake, your correspondent could have sworn he heard someone strike up the Pineapple Rag.
When Willis finally caught up with it, he was about ten yards from the byline and just outside the penalty area; Wheller was halfway between his goal and the ball; there wasn’t another player within forty yards of them. Without warning the defender decided to pass the ball back to his ‘keeper, little realising that he was almost stood next to him… and with farcical inevitability he played it right past him and into the back of the net.
Although it was clearly down to a lack of communication, Willis does have form when it comes to playing blind back passes (he did one in the opening few minutes of the Sealand Cup final), while Wheller, able to see what his team mate couldn’t, should never have ventured so far away from his goal knowing that the situation was under control. The irony is that it was a really good, clinical finish, but regardless, it meant that with only a quarter of the game gone Convo found themselves 3-0 down and facing a rout.
Five minutes after Dickson’s first pair of substitutions (which had come immediately after the third concession – although not in response to it), Wheller went some way to redeeming himself with an excellent save, but increasingly he was looking like the little boy with his finger in the dyke. He was quick off his line when a Crewe man had danced between Willis and Schofield, far too easily, and faced with another one-on-one, got the slightest of touches to the player’s shot to deflect it just over the crossbar (still donning the pink top, someone suggested that it had been the “hand of Blob”). The corner came to nothing, but moments after that the goalkeeper might as well have been a spectator when young Danny was also allowed to pass through the middle of the pitch almost spectrally, and shoot inches wide of Convo’s left-hand upright from twenty-odd yards out.
The visitors were relentless and showed no sign of mercy, with young Danny in particular proving to be a bit of a thorn in Convo’s side. He kept winning his side free kicks around the peripheries of the Convocation penalty area – most of which for being kicked to lumplessness – and from one of those Wheller pulled off another great save from a header, although his thunder was stolen by referee Bargery deeming the player concerned to have drifted offside.
From the home side’s point of view the most frustrating aspect of the one-way traffic must have been that they weren’t doing that much wrong. Though Jelen kept playing passes to invisible team mates, Edwards couldn’t help but drift inside leaving the right flank for the visitors to do with what they wanted, and Schofield appeared to be trying to break the world record for being caught in possession, there wasn’t really much more that they could do. True Prince might as well not have been on the pitch for all he’d seen of the ball, and Fairclough’s toil in the middle of the park looked as likely to bear fruit as the Wyncote showers, but the Convo players were all working hard for each other, even if it was to little avail. Crewe were just a better side, with one or two players who should be playing at a higher level than this (at Port Vale, for example).
Swapping players around made no difference. The first pair of substitutions had been made at twenty-three minutes (Dickson had obviously forgotten that the halves were only forty minutes long) and had seen O’Brien replace Topping on the left wing, and Jago come on behind him for Kearney (whose no-nonsense long clearances hadn’t so much been ‘hoofs’ as Hail Marys), while just before the break Holt took over at right back from Flamson. But Crewe and young Danny continued to lead their hosts a merry dance.
In the final five minutes they skimmed the top of the Convo crossbar when their talisman had chased for a loose ball with Willis and lobbed the out-coming Wheller on the edge of the penalty area (it might have proved more productive if he’d left it to the two team mates), blasted inches wide of the target from fifteen yards out after Willis had ceded possession inside the box, and driven a shot across the face of the goal in the dying seconds when under pressure from Schofield and his ‘keeper. The home side had a lot to think about during the interval.
[Half-Time Fun Quiz: In which year did the Liverpool-Arsenal FA Cup Semi Final go to a third replay? Was it: a) the year of the Iranian Embassy Siege in London, b) the year of the Moscow Olympics, or c) the year that John Lennon was murdered?]
It was the visitors who came back out for the second half looking like the paint had been stripped off their changing room walls though. For the opening five minutes they laid siege to the Convo goal and, unable to clear the ball properly, the Liverpool side’s back line had to crack eventually (the midfield must have returned several minutes late for the restart). Unfortunately, once again it was one of their own players who had the hammer.
A hopeful, but innocuous punt into the Convocation penalty area was allowed to travel straight through to Wheller, who then rewarded his central defenders’ surprising trust by proceeded to miskick the ball to a Corinthians player lurking twenty-five yards out. His error immediately self-apparent, the ‘keeper started scrambling back towards his open goal frantically, but the recipient was as quick with his shooting as he was precise, so by the time Wheller did get back into position the ball had beaten him there.
And that, it seemed, was that. Convo had come back out for the second period with a sliver of hope that an early reply might kick start a comeback, but their bubble of belief had been burst inside five minutes, and deflated, they retreated into themselves; Crewe, considering the game to have been won, took their collective foot off the pedal. And the game stagnated.
On the sidelines, the two teams’ benches shouted abuse at a man trying to break into a house on Pitville Avenue. The temperature dropped a bit further.
The home side had lined up for the restart as they’d finished the first half, with the exception of Topping returning up front for Prince (and “thinking” a lot), and Kearney replacing Edwards on the right flank. But when not the slightest whiff of a chance had been returned after fifteen minutes of play Dickson rolled his dice again, and this time it was a lot more profitable.
Moments after Crewe had smashed an effort against Wheller’s crossbar, Jelen and Fairclough were both hooked and substituted with Edwards and Prince, with the latter moving up front again, and Campbell dropping back into central midfield alongside the former. Suddenly the home side looked reborn, although before they could really get their act together Holt – who, wearing black woollen gloves, two knee pads, a long-sleeved shirt and baggy shorts, had absolutely no skin showing apart from on his face – played a suicidal back pass to Wheller that would have taken an eternity to reach him even if the pitch had been on an incline. To no one’s surprise it was intercepted by one of the visitors who, one-on-one once again, gave the first hint of a sense of arrogance creeping into his team's approach to the game by trying to walk the ball around the goalkeeper. But nobody takes the piss out of Convo’s very own pink panther without his say-so (Discuss.), so with his best poker face on Wheller took the sting out of his opponent’s attempt to embarrass him by nonchalantly walking into the shot to block it.
At the other end both Topping and Kearney had what could be loosely termed as shots on goal in the ensuing few minutes, before Jago – who had been a paragon of competence and tranquillity since he’d come on (while all around him flapped) – played a superb ball forward for Prince to run onto, that deserved more than Topping’s ambitious cross into an empty box after he’d received it from his striking partner.
But with the bit suddenly between their teeth Convocation weren’t going to be denied the goal that their unforeseen increase in tempo warranted, and when Campbell gained possession on the left-hand corner of the Crewe penalty area he provided it by curling the ball into the top, far corner of the visitors’ goal, with the ‘keeper motionless. It was identical to Parry’s notch seven days before.
It would be unfair to suggest that, in bringing himself on for Holt just after the goal, Dickson (whose red-trimmed stockings made it look as though he’d been slashing his shins with a razor) could scent a famous comeback on the cards and wanted to be part of it, but when the home side grabbed a second, ten minutes from the end, it was difficult not to wonder what could be on the cards.
Sadly on the port rather than the starboard bow, Richy O’Brien (whose own yellow shirt had a black diagonal slash across the shoulders, making him look like an extra from Star Trek) started the move that led to the goal, picking the ball up on the halfway line and taking it twenty-odd yards down the flank before knocking it into the path of Willis (who had moved up front when McLaren had replaced Topping, after The Great Vance had pulled his groin taking a woeful corner). Inside the penalty area, you couldn’t blame the man for trying his luck with the target in sight, considering what had happened earlier, but having beaten the ‘keeper with his shot, he managed, again quite inevitably, to find the sole defender guarding the goal line. His blushes were spared when the Crewe player scrambled the ball clear only as far as Prince, who simply tapped it back into, what was effectively an open goal, from six yards out.
The message from the gods was plain for Willis to see though, so when moments later a passing Chris Lamb (who had been playing on the next pitch for the Firsts – against the menagerie) enquired if anyone fancied coming off for the final minutes, he gratefully took up the offer.
For once the timing of the club’s top scorer was far from impeccable, as no sooner had he taken to the field, everyone else in yellow appeared to leave it (in spirit at any rate). Just as they were building up a head of steam, having created a foothold to make a real fight of it in the final ten minutes, Convocation simply seemed to switch off; just as the visitors started to totter, their hosts stopped pushing.
Wheller – whose performance had been the footballing equivalent of bipolar disorder – almost, unbelievably, recreated the fourth Crewe goal with five minutes remaining, and only just managed to get back in time to tip the ball around the post. From the resulting corner, one of the Corinthians smashed a header against the crossbar once again, a feat they almost repeated in the final minute but missed out on by mere inches.
In between those two near misses the visitors created another one-on-one with Wheller when they broke quickly from a Convocation corner and caught Schofield napping (who, having had the ball knocked past him on the halfway line, hilariously implored Jago – the only other player to stay back – to “make it Tim”, despite the Scot being a good forty yards away from the ball), but with too much time to think about what he should do the Crewe man had a sudden attack of Stubbs’ syndrome, and dragged his shot wide of the target as the big pink blob loomed.
There can be no doubt that the better team won, and had they done so by a greater margin it wouldn’t have been unjust. But Convocation can take solace from the fact that they didn’t give up, or even play that badly – they were just outclassed. It was suggested on the sidelines during the second period that the home side had “grown into the half”, but your correspondent believes that their improvement had more to do with the redeployment of Campbell. His industry and energy were wasted up front for most of the game, yet the most valuable asset he brought with him when he dropped back into the middle near the end was a modicum of predictability – Edwards had some idea of what Campbell might do when he had the ball at his feet. Which is more than can said for Fairclough, and the B-movie enigma that is Jelen.
Like the new electronic scoreboard, which proclaimed through the gloaming at full time that it was 7°, when it clearly wasn’t (there was some debate as to whether it was the temperature outside in Fahrenheit, or of the showers inside in Celsius), JJ’s just a bit different.
Man Of The Match: Wheller made some great saves to keep the visitors at bay, particularly in the first half, but [not enough time; not enough space], while Campbell was the only one who even looked like scoring before the break, and broke Crewe’s stranglehold on the game, at least for ten minutes, when he moved into midfield after it (he made a shocking two-footed challenge on an opponent near the end of the game though – Boo! Hiss!). However the Zen-like Jago gets this week’s poisoned chalice. He was fortunate enough not to be on the pitch for the opening quarter of the game when it looked really ominous that there might be a caning on the cards, and while it’s a step too far to suggest that he steadied the ship, he certainly kept his own quarters above the plimsoll line once he came on.
Move Of The Match: Was there one? As the first goal was an individual effort, it’ll have to be the build up to the second.
* Stats provided by OPTA and/or DICKO
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; Kearney, Willis, Schofield K, Flamson; Topping, Jelen, Fairclough, Edwards; Prince, Campbell; Subs: Jago, O’Brien R, Holt, Dickson, McLaren, Lamb C, Parry Jnr (not used)
Bobby Mimms reports (suffering from trench foot)
Invisible pink unicorns rule the universe. At least that was one theory suggested in the mid nineties when a group of college students produced a short manifesto positing a new religion based upon them, and their great spiritual powers. In it the idlers claimed that the capability of being pink and invisible at the same time proved that the unicorns must be omnipotent, and that, just as in all religions, belief in them must be based on both logic and faith: as, logically, they couldn’t be seen because they were invisible, followers had to have faith that they were pink.
The whole thing was nonsense of course. It was a satire of the properties attributed to religion and its deities – the mutually exclusive characteristics, and the inability to disprove the unfalsifiable claims of their existence – but as a result, the parodic unicorns have become symbolic of the atheist movement.
But it has recently been discovered that there is a creation in pink even more ridiculous and fantastic than anything the febrile mind of an argumentative student can come up with. In fact this blushing beauty was located at Wyncote on Saturday… playing in goal for Convocation’s Seconds. A handful of yellow polka dots (and a bow tie) short of passing for Mr. Blobby’s angrier twin sister, Barry Wheller marched proudly out into the November gloom for this game donning a salmon-coloured ‘keeper’s top, matching gloves (nice!), and with the inevitable wisecracking banter of his team mates ringing in his ears.
Not that he cared though, as playing in goal for the Second Team has never been for the faint of heart, so a couple of suggestive jokes at his expense was hardly likely to faze him or get under his elephantine skin. No, it’s opposition players that do that, and the sight in the second half of a blaspheming, southern blancmange trying to square up to one of the laughably over-macho Welshmen, whilst a linesman tried to hum the score from Jaws but only managed the theme tune to Blind Date, was one of the more surreal moments of the afternoon.
But then, it was a bit of an odd affair all round. Due to so much recent rain the game was more akin to an advance across no-man’s-land, such was the heaviness of the pitch, and at times it seemed as though no one was capable of staying on their feet for more than a couple of muddy steps. In fact, playing was occasionally so toilsome that it does beg the question of why those notorious pluviophobes at Wyncote hadn’t already pulled the plug, earlier in the week; as the surface never started to really cut up though, perhaps their faith in the newly improved drainage system was justified.
However the most anomalous factor of this game must surely be that Convocation somehow managed to lose it. For eighty of the eight-five minutes (for some reason referee Terry Bargery only played forty minutes in the second half) the home side looked the finer team, played the better football and created the more promising chances, yet their guests managed to put five goals past them – a few with more than a modicum of luck – in the few moments at which they mentally switched off.
For the final three, the Convo players were physically shutting down as well, as the heavy ground, having no substitutes, and a lack of fitness combined to take their toll. It was a far cry from the start of the game, when Convo had taken an early lead through a super strike from the returning Tony Parry Jnr. One of Convo’s most potent finishers of the last ten years, Parry had deliberately destroyed his boots and shin guards in a bonfire since he last played (as you do), yet the footwear he’d borrowed from his cousin for this encounter did nothing to hamper his style. Having already peppered the Northop Hall target with several long range efforts, and fired into the side netting when Phil Holt (playing right back) had sent him through on goal, he put the visitors to the sword in the tenth minute after the other full back, Andy McLaren, played a great ball up the left flank for Simon O’Brien. Strongly, the radio star rode a hard challenge from an opponent before playing the ball inside to Parry, who was lurking just outside the Nomads’ penalty area, and from the corner of the box he curled an excellent shot into the top far corner of the goal. One-nil.
He could have had a second, midway through the half, when Holt and the impressive Joel Jelen – having his best game in quite a while – combined to once again play the forward through the lethargic Northop Hall defence. Though his shot over the bar was disappointing, at least it was understandable against the pressure an opponent was putting him under. The same can’t be said of his so-called strike partner, Andy Willis, who, scandalously, shot quite a distance wide of the target at a one-on-one, once the opposition ‘keeper flashed him the whites of his eyes. He may well have had an oh-so-rare win at the bookies before kick off, but it seems the man and goals still have a lot of making up to do.
At the other end of the pitch the Convo defence were coping pretty well, limiting their opponents to one long-range effort that drifted wide of the target, and one spurious penalty claim (after Wheller had slid out and up-ended a player a good five seconds, at least, after he’d dragged a piss-poor shot well wide of the goal) in the opening twenty minutes. There was a warning of things to come though, when everyone in yellow switched off at a quickly taken Northop Hall corner and allowed one of the visitors to fire a header over the crossbar. But otherwise, by the time Wheller started to lose the plot just before the half-hour mark – or as one spectator put it: the pink mist descended – the home side were very much the ones on the front foot.
A lot of that had to do with the sterling work the midfield put in. In the centre, Jelen and Richy O’Brien – very much the Lucas and Spearing of Convocation – were running the show easily against opponents that appeared confused half the time, with the former in particular giving glimpses of what everyone knows he’s capable of, but which so often gets kept concealed behind his fancy-dan posturing. None of that from O’Brien though, who always seems to revel in conditions that entitle him to become plastered in mud as quickly as possible, and Saturday was no different as he regularly left the confines of standing to tackle whilst parallel to the ground.
His brother, playing left wing and causing no end of trouble for the Northop Hall right back, is another fond of those sliding challenges that leave the pitch bearing great clefts, and the back of his shorts looking like he’s suffering from dysentery, but it was while he was giving gravity a run for its money that he was at his most dangerous during this game. Having already set up Parry’s goal, on a number of occasions he played delectable through balls that the two forwards were just unable to get on the end of, and shortly before the interval it would be another great pass from him that set TPJ up to grab, what should have been, Convo’s second – Mr. Bargery, wrongly, deemed the player offside.
Also falling foul of the referee’s myopia (he did have a fairly decent game otherwise – by his own standards, at any rate) was John Topping. Playing on the opposite side of the pitch to the elder O’Brien, the Charlie Chaplin of the club was unlucky to be pulled back by the official when he made a clever dart through the Northop Hall back line, shortly after the opening goal. Though he may have felt hard done by, it was put to him from the sidelines, with slightly inaccurate logic, that even if he was five yards off his arse would still be onside.
Figurative storm clouds were brewing though, and had it not already been so bleak, overcast and spitting (and SO BLOODY DAMP) then it would almost have been possible to see them. Twice in a five-minute spell just before the break, Northop Hall somehow managed to score against the run of play, and turn the game on its head. An unfortunate slip from Holt – which the increasingly barracking Convo support likened to a move by Jane Torvill – allowed the man he was marking to connect with a cross from their right wing, and though Wheller did well to block the initial shot he could do nothing about an in-running opponent netting with the rebound.
Worse was to follow as the home side contrived to shoot themselves in the foot and concede, indirectly, from one of their own corners. A ball over the top of the Nomads’ back line played Parry in, but one-on-one, the goalkeeper slid out and got a vital touch to the Convo man’s shot to deflect the ball inches over his crossbar. The visitors cleared the dead ball first time and streaked down the pitch, through the far-from-alert defence of their opponents, and forced Wheller to pounce low to his left like a panther to tip the eventual shot around his post. But seemingly having learnt nothing from a similar corner earlier, the yellows failed to pick up their men and they were punished, as an unmarked header found the back of their net.
Moments later the referee struck Parry’s legitimate strike from the scorecard, and shortly after that blew for the interval with Convo, having been hit by two sucker punches, behind.
Although the second period began in a slightly subdued manner, Convocation continued to look the better of the two sides. Both O’Briens battled for everything that came near them with meaty but fair challenges, while Topping also provided a strong presence on his side of the midfield. But it was Jelen who stole the show in the middle with a creative and intelligent performance that was all the more impressive considering just how outstandingly poor he can play at times. Integral to most of the home side’s chances it was only his finishing that let him down on Saturday, and his best chance came five minutes after the restart when he shinned an effort over the Nomads crossbar at a disputed corner.
A less controversial one, several minutes after that, gave Convocation yet another chance to level, and had the centre back Ben Prince kept his powerful header down and on target, rather than directing it up into the heavens and over the bar, then they would surely have done so.
But with the increasingly powerful wind behind them, the home side started to become wasteful in possession. Wheller made a ridiculously nonchalant stop with a foot when Prince and an opponent had come storming down the pitch towards him, but then moments later hoofed a free kick on the edge of his own penalty area straight to his opposite number in the Northop Hall goal. As someone pointed out to the goalkeeper just what a waste his poor excuse of an effort had been (and those on the sidelines reminded him of when Paul Robinson had scored in a similar fashion – against his beloved Watford), he conveniently spotted some spurious offence in the Nomads penalty area and appealed for a penalty, if only to distract attention away from himself. Not for the first time, Willis was on the same wavelength as his #1 and laughably (and blatantly) attempted to get himself fouled at the very next challenge.
Without warning, and quite visibly, the mud-spattered players in yellow started to tire and right on cue, as their performance levels flagged, they started to get on each others’ backs. Slightly hypocritically, considering he’d already spat his own dummy out, the linesman (the Scottish one who couldn’t hum Jaws) pointed out that, with Willis and Wheller at opposite ends of the pitch, and the increasingly vocal Richy O’Brien and Kevin Schofield in between, Convo had unintentionally acquired “a spine of moaning”, and though their grumbling was nowhere near as bad as it has been known to be, it was still worrying that it had begun while the game was still retrievable.
Even that didn’t last for long though, as the visitors soon netted a killer, third goal. Having already conceded one unmarked header from a corner, and only avoided a second by little more than a coat of paint, there was little reason to believe that the Convocation players might have learnt from their mistakes, and might actually give that marking malarkey a go, when Northop Hall won another, twenty minutes from time. And sure enough, as they stood around scratching their heads and trying to come to terms with the intricacies of picking an opponent and sticking with him, yet another header crashed against the Convo crossbar. But if they’d yet again rode their luck when the woodwork came to their rescue, they ran out of it when one of the visitors tried to cross the ball back into the penalty area, seconds later, only to accidentally slice it over the flailing Wheller and into the back of the net.
The fourth Northop Hall goal, ten minutes from the end, once again had an element of good fortune about it. Prince conceded a throw-in level with the eighteen-yard line, and as one of the visitors received the ball and tried to flick it over the Convo back line, his attempt deflected perfectly for a colleague who had run in, in between McLaren and Schofield. Although Wheller did get a hand to the subsequent shot, he couldn’t keep the ball out.
Fading rapidly, the Convocation players played out the last five minutes by just going through the motions. They won a handful of corners, which Simon O’Brien and Topping took in turns, each one even more abject than the previous, while at one point Holt had one of those gloriously undignified Grassy Knoll moments – that only he seems to have – when he went arse over tit with no one within ten yards of him.
There was still time for one last kick in the teeth for the home side. Just as it started raining again, and with Schofield, Willis and the younger O’Brien all having a to do with each other, a cross from out on the right wing beat Wheller but not the back post, rebounded into the middle of the penalty area, and was smashed home by an incoming Northop Hall player. The referee blew up moments after the restart – five minutes early – with Willis about to walk off.
For taking their chances, the visitors might just have deserved not to lose this game, but there’s certainly no way Convocation did, and the final scoreline was positively unfair. While it would be unrealistic to suggest that they could have rattled up another double-figure victory, a win wouldn’t have raised too many eyebrows along Mather Avenue, yet once again any potential supreme beings weren’t smiling on the home side. You could argue that as it ended as they were beginning to really implode, the official saved them from even more misfortune by blowing up early, but the Wyncote side were a lot better than the final stages of the game suggested.
You could even say that they were much more in the pink.
Man Of The Match: Parry looked lively and took his goal well, while Topping had a good game out on the right even if he was curiously underused. But Jelen’s performance wasn’t just much improved on usual, it was actually bloody good. When Convo looked promising he was nearly always involved and kept things simple for once. It can’t be coincidence that he wasn’t constantly farting around with the ball on Saturday.
Move Of The Match: The linesman picking his flag back up, five minutes after having petulantly thrown it to the ground when Topping questioned one of his decisions. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t clever, Timbo. It was mildly amusing though.
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; McLaren, Schofield K, Prince, Holt; O’Brien S, Jelen, O’Brien R, Topping; Willis, Parry Jnr
It's said that history is written by the victors.
Well not in the Seconds' case. The first time they hit double figures in a generation, and no one could be arsed...
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; Lamb B, Prince, Schofield K, O'Brien S; Schofield R, Fairclough, Jelen, O'Brien R; Lamb C, Campbell; Subs: Dickson, Holt, McLaren
On 31st October 2009 a magnitude 5.0 earthquake hit 37 km West South West of the summit of Mt Pinatubo volcano. The earthquake focus was at a depth of 79 km. Mt Pinatubo is noted for the large eruption in 1991 which was the second largest of the 20th century. Also on this day Andy Willis erupted with a magnitude 7.0 verbal eruption “Why don’t you fuck off, get off my fucking back, I have done nothing wrong.” It was the culminating incident in a niggley narkey, bad tempered and at times verging on violent encounter.
Convocation started the game with Wheller in goal, Andy Mc and John Kerney left and right back respectively and Kev Schofield and Richy O’Brien at centre half. Simon Stanforth and Tim Jago filled in at left and right midfield respectively with Paul Fairclough and Lee Campbell fill the central midfield berths. Whilst up front were Joel Jelen and Andy ‘Vesuvius’ Willis (no more digs Andy, feel free to read on!). While Billy Lamb and Paul Dickson warmed the bench.
The game started in a lively fashion for Convo and after a mere two minutes had taken the lead, a through ball found Willis hassling the goalkeeper and a poor clearance fell to Fairclough who calmly placed his first goal of the season into the home sides net. This raised the heckles on the home side and led to what can only be described as niggley, at one point after a particularly late tackle on Lee Campbell the match threatened to turn into a mass brawl, every time it calmed down someone would spark the whole nonsense off again (it has to be pointed out your was correspondent not involved in this, but stood watching the whole debacle unfold in front of his eyes from the safety of his goal). Convocation held their own during the next 15 minute period and were very unlucky to be pegged back after a through ball down the right found a Sandbach player who calmly slotted past the onrushing ‘keeper.
It was around this point anyone who happened to be watching the game could predict the referee would have a large influence on the final outcome, he had already shown an alarming potential to lose control of both sets of players and was giving the Convo team no protection from late tackles and silly off the ball incidents. Leave aside the constant torrent of abuse from one of the mouthiest teams we have ever played!
Convo once again took the lead from Lee Campbell, after trying his usual trademark half way line shots he scored, quite how he scored or who passed to him is a mystery to me, but he scored! The referee then turned the tide of the game a cross from the right and poor marking at the back post allowed an equaliser, even though the forward was a good 5 yards offside the referee quite clearly didn’t want any more abuse from the home side and allowed it.
Half time was 2-2, the team talk concentrated on Andy Willis, but less said about that the better! Convo sat back much more in the second half, and soaked up most of the pressure there were very few goal scoring opportunities for Convo, whilst at the other end Wheller made a few good saves to keep the score at 2-2.
We more than held our own until the last 10 minutes an attack down the right and a cross into the Convo box was cleared to a Sandbach player who passed the ball into the box to the forward at least five yards offside, he slotted the ball into the Convo net, one word sums up the feelings of the Convo team gutted. To rub salt into the wound they scored again from a corner in the last few minutes.
Convocation did not deserve to lose let alone by two goals, the referee didn’t have a good game, and the whole day had a chapness rating of 1/10. All
Quote of the game – After the first bit of nonsense in the first half and the handbags that accompanied it the whole incident calmed down until the Sandbach number 8 (Barnsey who had a ‘mare!) decided to inform the Liverpool team “Let them get on with it, they are all from Liverpool and just have a chip on their shoulder.” Close Mr Barnes, but no cigar as the team had two Southerners, a Cornishman, a lad from the North East, a Wiganer, a Scotsman and a Joel where ever he comes from.
Man of the match – Billy Lamb gave a solid performance, Richie OB and Kev at centre half could not be faulted for any of the goals, Fairclough and Campbell both topped good performances with a goal apiece, but man of the match goes to Andy Mc for a faultless performance, solid at the back, and criticising Simon Stanforth for gaining a extra few pounds!
Being a club heavily imbued in the traditionality of Association Football, and also not being averse to the finer things in life, some might say that it came as no surprise that Dermot Allister recently came up with a new angle on the beautiful game. Perhaps it was the opposition on that sunny Saturday afternoon, the fellow chap-like Ramblers, which inspired this new direction, something that can be termed as 'comfort football'.
Like the workman working away who really wishes only to be home, so does the Convocation footballer yearn for the patio and dream of the countless cans of Carlsberg piled high in the fridge in the conservatory on match days. Dermot, who, having spent a large portion of his appearance playing firmly planted to the deck, (some said that his main problem was that he kept standing up) decided to make quick trip home and brought onto the field of play his favourite piece of furniture from Allister Towers,; his 17th century chez longue with Queen Anne legs. Hauling in into the central defensive position, Allister donned his smoking jacket and reclined gracefully into the lounger. Monocle in place. Allister was able to carry on his defensive work in a far more comfortable position without the trouble of having to get his knees dirty. A quick sweep of his left leg to intercept, a deft dabble with his right to clear, Allister carried on as of nothing had changed and in doing so beckoned in the era of 'furniture football'.
In the future we can think about standard lamps carefully positioned at the corner flags to aid ball placement during winter evenings. Perhaps an oak chair in the centre for our chairman to orchestrate proceedings. Even a bookcase on the side lines replete with tactical tomes to allow our relentless quest for self improvement to continue. A TV and sofa in the goal mouth could liven up things for our keepers during quiet interludes and perhaps even a shed (filled with gardening equipment) for the green-fingered convocationers to help repair the divots at half time or for the off-form footballer to retire to contemplate the future without the need to listen to the jibes from their angry team mates. Finally, for the tired player who downed too much booze on a Pudding Club night out we could have a double bed conveniently placed, and of course this could come in handy if one of the chaps gets lucky with a WAG at half time. Comfort Football; remember it, it started here.
Convocation (4-4-2): Wheller; O'Brien S, Mason, Shanahan, Jago; Topping, Campbell, Fairclough, O'Brien R; Jelen, Willis; Subs: Edwards, Allister, Mclaren
After threatening to win their first game of the season in the last 2 weeks, it all came good for south Liverpool’s finest this week in the heart of Cheshire with every player putting in a great shift and working hard all afternoon. The hard work which won the club the Sealand Cup last season was at last seen again.
It was a glorious autumn day with a lovely pitch, overlooked by the stately Radbroke Hall, which greeted the Convo players. Due to call offs and car mechanical problems, Convo lined up with only 12 players, coach Dickson’s sore toe keeping him on the sidelines. There were some returning faces as well with Allister making his first start of the season, Schofield junior back in the chaps’ team and Topper reappearing from the middle east. So the starting line up was Wheller in goal; a back four with the Schofield brothers as the centre halves and Allister and Kearney as the full backs; a midfield of Topper, Campbell, Fairclough and Jago; and Willis and Jelen up front. Andy McLaren started on the bench.
Straight from the off, Convo were up for this. A characteristic “let him know you’re there” tackle from Campbell in the first minute rattled the stain-glassed windows on the Hall. Against youthful opponents, Convo simply didn’t let them settle. Wheller in goal was as solid as a rock and was having the best game he has had for a long time. The Schofields in the heart of defence won everything and the midfield quartet, snapped and tackled at everything. When Convo got the ball, Willis and Jelen, playing on the opposition defenders’ shoulders, were getting in behind. Once Campbell had his trademark shot from 50 yards, most attacks after that went down the flanks. On a couple of occasions, Willis took shots himself instead of squaring the ball to better placed team mates but the key this week was that when Convo attacked, the ball didn’t come straight back as the 2 strikers held the ball up well and most of the time, played the ball to the supporting midfielders.
Whilst it was clear that Convo were up for this, it can’t explain the plethora of early Radbroke Hall substitutions as a number of their players claimed “they needed a shit” and bombed off to the toilets. It turned out that a dodgy curry and dodgier wine had taken its toll but it accounted for their keeper who ran like the wind to the lavvies followed by a couple of midfielders.
Once things had, er, settled down, Radbroke Hall started pinging the ball around and the game developed into a good quality football match. Given the start that Convo had however, it was no surprise that they want behind shortly before half time. Allister was flummoxed by the Radbroke Hall winger and as he turned the Ulsterman, Dermot took his legs from under him and the ref had no hesitation in pointing to the spot. Despite some blatant gamesmanship form Wheller (“nobody wants to take it do you? Nobody wants it. Oh your taking it number 5 are you?) number 5 stepped up and hit it low to Barry’s right hand and although he got a hand to it, it wasn’t enough to keep the ball out.
At half time, the hosts led 1-0 yet coach Dickson and players knew we had a chance here and so the team talk was simple. Keep working hard and doing the same again. Allister made way for Andy McLaren and the second half kicked off. Once Campbell had made his characteristic “letting him know I’m still here tackle”, Convo tore into their opponents. Willis came close and it was one way traffic as the visitors played the best football of the season. After so much pressure, it was no surprise when Convo equalised and what a goal. A neat interchange at the back between the elder Schofield and Kearney saw the ball move into midfield where a neat pass released Topper down the right flank. He ran past his full back opponent and whipped in a cross which Willis met with a diving header into the bottom right hand corner of the net. A great goal with one touch football from back to front.
Still the visitors pressed forward and 10 minutes later, another attack saw Convo grab their second and winning goal. An attack instigated by Campbell saw the ball played forward to Jelen on the edge of the home penalty area. Ignoring calls from the on rushing Jago for a lay off, Jelen tried a shot with the outside of his foot which wasn’t that good to be honest but which hit the nearest defender and as it skewed off him, Richie Schofield was charging into the area and he smashed it past the keeper from 10 yards.
The remaining 25 minutes were end to end stuff. Convo had chances to extend their lead. A Jago cross was met by McLaren but the Radbroke Hall keeper saved well and Kearney should have done better when firing from a narrow angle into the side netting when Willis was square and unmarked. A good advert for the Willis Respect agenda this as there was no Willis remonstrations with Kearney when in previous weeks, it would have invoked a tirade to make a docker blush.
The home side pressed hard for the equaliser. There were several calls from their ranks that “they didn’t want to lose this”. It was then that the real spirit showed from the visitors as everybody defended. From Willis and Topper up front (who had replaced Jelen who had moved to midfield to replace Fairclough who had run himself to a standstill in the cause), to the midfielders who closed down and forced the home side into shooting from further and further out. Anything which got through was dealt with superbly by the back four, including big Andy who was winning slide tackles and really frustrating their opposition left winger by winning everything and by the Schofield boys. Anything which came into the area was grabbed by Wheller who was superb. One of the Radbroke Hall players extracted revenge on Campbell after another one of his bone rattling tackles but the ref saw it, showed the card and the game carried on.
At last the ref blew the final whistle and the players celebrated not only the first win of the season but a great performance. A standard has been set now so no slipping up.
Man of the Match: very difficult to award this week as this was a team performance in the full sense of the phrase. Everybody was up for this and it shows that if you work hard and keep the shape, we can beat younger and fitter opponents. So this week it’s a team of the week award – step forward Convocation.
Move of the match: the first Convo goal. Brilliantly worked and a great finish from Willis. Worth the £3 subs alone. Another move worth commending was the Radbroke Hall goalie desperately trying to get his keeper’s shirt off so he could run to the changing room bogs. When he was asked why he needed to be substituted, he shouted “cos i need a shit”; a response which was greeted the same way by some of the outfield players as they desperately tried to find a substitute so they could run off as well.
Moan of the match: None really. A lovely day, great pitch and opponents who wanted to play football; Convo up for it and quality food in the pub after. The only slight moan was the portacabin we had to get changed in (in the grounds of a stately home?) and the limited water supply (of any temperature) and electricity which left your correspondent soaped up and nowhere to go when the water packed up halfway through the shower. The fact that Richie Schofield had been in the shower for half an hour had nothing to do with it and anyway he’s been in Iraq and deserves respect you know...
Convocation: Whller: Kearney; Schfield K; Schofield R; Allister: Topping; Fairclough; Campbell; Jago: Jelen; Willis. Sub McLaren
Bobby Mimms reports
Though hardly Hell on earth, when you consider the near howling gale that battered the players’ senses throughout this game, and the low sun that shone across the pitch making visibility for them almost torturous for large chunks of its duration, you could be forgiven for thinking that Satan himself had paid a visit to Wyncote on Saturday. There is a good chance that he’s overdue. For earlier in the year, as Convocation battled their way through to the Sealand Cup Final in Winsford on the back of an unbelievable ten-match unbeaten run that seems almost chimerical now in the cold light of autumn, did it not sometimes feel inconceivable that they could carry on winning game after game with such limited resources; that their escalating run of form and subsequent cup glory was just a bit too unreal and eldritch.
Well maybe it was. Maybe there was more to their vernal ventures than meets the eye; more than your common-all-garden match fixing. Maybe a deal had been struck that was so Mephistophelian that the adverse conditions smiting those on show this weekend were really the infernal glare of Hades’ bowels, and the fiendish tempests of its fire and brimstone, escaping the gates as Lucifer rode forth to collect his dues.
For anyone of sound mind – and you know who you are – the very idea is of course fanciful folderol, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to deny that the Seconds seem to be paying a devilish price for something, whether or not it be the successes of last season. Following on from that unprecedented streak of victories they have now been beaten nine times on the bounce, which is pretty lousy even by their accursed standards, but it’s the manner in which they have lost most of those games that is the worrying – particularly those at home.
There’s got to be something in the Wyncote air at the moment. In their two other home fixtures so far this season Convocation have been obliterated in one and, with the help of the opposition, contributed towards a game that could turn wine into piss in the other – it’s debatable which was worse. Saturday’s fell into the latter category as, once again, the Seconds and their latest accomplices went about playing mind-numbingly stultifying football capable of rotting spectators’ brains quicker than heroin. God forbid that any France Telecom employees happen to be in South Liverpool the next time Convo are entertaining.
But while their crashing back down to earth with a very tedious bump was always going to be the price that the Seconds would have to pay at some point for last season’s swashbuckling adventure, it was still nowhere near as much the dead cert that was Paul Dickson having a cornucopia of players to pick from for this match. After the paucity of recent weeks – while on the road, don’t forget – it was inevitable that the captain would return to find more people making themselves available than there were places, and though he managed to trim his team sheet down to a mere fifteen, he did so at the expense of putting one or two noses out of joint (well, one).
In goal, Alex Hendry would probably have preferred less blustery meteorological conditions in which to make his first appearance of the campaign, but behind a back four that consisted in part of Barry Wheller (left back) and Andy Willis (centre back) he must have realised that there was the potential of greater storms to come; Ian Mitchell and John Flamson (right back) completed the defence’s initial line up. Convocation’s chalk and cheese pairing of Mike Edwards and Joel Jelen both began the game in midfield, with the latter partnering Lee Campbell in the centre and the former on the opposite side of the pitch to left-winger Simon O’Brien, whose brother Richy got the game going, partnering Ben Prince up front. Looking like part of the cast in an adaptation of a Dickens novel, the home side’s bench comprised Paul Fairclough, Andy McLaren, Tim Jago and Stephen Mason.
It took a while for the elderly(ish) referee to make himself known, and when he finally did he gave off the impression that he was kept in mothballs between matches (and considering the poor fare on show, it seemed that he’d donated them to the two teams for the duration of the game). But he was on the ball enough to give Campbell a ticking off in the opening minute after the Convo man had given an opponent a rude awakening with a clattering, but slightly late, challenge.
The Knowsley Boy had come out of the traps looking lively and would give his side the lead after a quarter of an hour, but they should have scored before that, seconds after his early rebuke. With the Halkyn players still looking a little shocked at the ferocity of Campbell’s opening gambit, their disorientation allowed the elder O’Brien to win the ball in the middle of the pitch, from whence he played it out to the Prince on the left flank. The big man drifted inside a little before playing a great low cross into the penalty area for the other O’Brien to run onto, but with only the visitors’ ‘keeper to beat he somehow scuffed his effort wide of the upright.
Both the official and Mitchell then took a turn-a-piece at applying the offside rules of the dim and distant past to the game, as first the man in black deemed being five yards beyond the last defender as onside, and then the Convo player (employing a similar tactic) kidded himself into believing that even though he was playing a similar distance behind the rest of his team mates, all the opposition players would still be off. Fortunately the cap-donning Hendry made a couple of good saves to deny the Welsh team their two chances, but it seemed surreal that Mitchell found himself five yards deeper than even Willis, who always insists on playing that far behind the rest of the defence himself (it was like the footballing equivalent of an impossible object).
It was Campbell who had started the brightest for the home side though, and before long he scored the goal that his zeal deserved. In such wild conditions he was always going to try his luck from somewhere near the centre circle at some point, and on ten minutes he did just that, nearly catching out the reluctant Halkyn goalkeeper (he was a definite outfield player) when the ball landed near the penalty spot and almost bounced up over him.
But if that effort had only been to find his range, it was worth it, as several minutes later he found the back of the visitors’ net instead. Hendry took advantage of the wind, which was blowing diagonally across the pitch from behind his goal (on the whole), and hoofed a long ball down to Prince, just outside the Halkyn penalty area. The forward laid possession off to the dynamic Campbell, who from twenty yards out and slightly left of centre nonchalantly curled the ball into the top left-hand corner of opposition goal.
He nearly added the feather of an assist to his good-game cap shortly after that, when a free kick he punted into the Halkyn penalty area should really have been attacked more purposefully by Richy O’Brien. But despite being just unable to get on the end of the dead ball, the forward still managed to get caught offside.
Flamson took a breather midway through the half, having put in a competent yet unspectacular performance up to that point (which is probably exactly what you want from a Convocation defender), and was replaced by Jago who proceeded to look very comfortable at right back: if he was worried, Dickson didn’t show it. On the other side of the defence Wheller appeared to have gotten out of his system whatever it was that had been bothering him in Cheshire last week, and was much calmer as a result, although he did keep conceding free kicks with what were described as ‘Mascherano fouls’ for the remainder of the first period.
Both teams slipped into a soporific lull for ten minutes, during which time nothing at all seemed to happen – apparently the writers of the new drama FastFoward got the idea for their show by watching some of Convo’s earlier games this season – but it was the visitors who came out of the temporary slumber the less drowsy, and with their hosts’ back line still consumed in mild hypnosis they levelled the scores.
Willis nearly did it for them when he headed a clearance inches wide of an upright, while one of the Halkyn forwards almost back-heeled an audacious goal after Jago had had an ‘over me’ moment and let a dangerous ball across the face of the Convo goalmouth reach him. But they were only transient reprieves. Jelen and Campbell got their wires crossed in the middle of the park allowing the visitors to play the ball through the territory with little hindrance, and as the man in possession neared the home defence he split it with a pass out to the (Halkyn) right, which set up a one-on-one in the process. Hendry did all that could have been asked of him and pulled off a fine save to his right from the initial shot, but the same can’t be said of his outfield colleagues who had all stopped to watch the ensuing drama, and were therefore helpless when the ball subsequently ran loose – it only needed the minimum of effort for a blue-shirted player to tap it into the empty net.
There was a collective groan of resignation from the Convocation support on the sidelines – their biggest crowd for some time – but once the game restarted Halkyn began to pass the ball around more accurately and sweetly, and for a few minutes it didn’t look good for the home side.
Willis sliced at an innocuous ball across the defence and the visitors were in again, only narrowly failing to find the top corner of the target from just inside the Convo penalty area. Hendry was forced into making another good block low to his left shortly after that, and for awhile it seemed that only Wheller’s clumsy impression of the Argentinean national captain were preventing the Welsh side from running riot.
Baffling doesn’t do justice to why Halkyn were enjoying such a purple patch, as the home side weren’t doing too much wrong. The midfield were holding their own against the visitors’ equivalent: Campbell and Jelen enjoyed an understanding that the latter is unlikely to find on JDate, while Edwards and O’Brien (S) patrolled the wings with the energy of men fifteen years younger and certainly not at any corporeal disadvantage to their immediate adversaries. It was as though there were dark forces lining up against them.
Eventually though, Hendry’s encounters with the ball diminished and in the final minute of the half the home side could even have regained the lead. Simon O’Brien – who had set Prince up with a glorious chance from a free kick earlier in the game, only to see the forward’s header ruled offside by the decrepit referee – swung another great cross in towards a melee at the Halkyn near post that somebody got a hopeful flick on, but Convo were out of luck and the ball zipped inches wide of the upright to bring the curtain down on the first act.
Multiple changes ensued in the Convocation ranks during the interval. Flamson returned on the left-hand side of the defence in a straight swap for Wheller, while Edwards took an extended break and was replaced by Fairclough (who moved into the middle of the pitch, pushing Jelen out to the wing). Mitchell called it a day altogether, so Prince dropped back into defence, and Mason made his bow up front alongside Richy O’Brien.
However, the biggest change for the home side as the second half got underway was that they were now playing into the squall, and if the wind was “truly invigorating” (as one spectator had observed) then a fair few of the players that came back out for the restart must have been dead. Simon O’Brien had demanded that his team mates “double the work rate” during the interval, but such were the pitiful endeavours of both sides in the ten minutes immediately after half time, that the first period must have been even worse than your correspondent remembers, if that prayer was answered.
It took a twenty-five yard Halkyn effort that caught the wind and drifted harmlessly wide of their opponents’ goal to bring an end to the action void that had engulfed the game. But rather than watch the dross on show during that sterile stint, the bored souls on the sidelines had tried to guess the identity of the mummified scout who seemed to be watching Prince (it was his mate), attempted to find a better way of describing Mason’s gait than: “he runs like a girl” (they couldn’t), and assigned geometric shapes to various formations in the Convocation ranks (“an ugly rhomboid” being the best description of the midfield, as it slowly succumbed to the Mogadon football it was itself partly responsible for).
And of course, slap bang in the middle of that vacuum of vigour, everyone was treated to a brief respite from the tedium when Willis – who had promised pre-match that he would be on his best behaviour and was launching his own personal Respect campaign – launched into an unprovoked tirade that went something along the lines of: “Dicko, make some fucking substitutions, cos these are shit.” (But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?)
If Convo’s resident nutter was beside himself with rage at whatever triviality that had kicked him off on that occasion, then lord alone knows what state of frenzy he must have been in when Hendry suffered a Roman Polanski/”Oh bugger, what did I go and do that for” moment. Halkyn broke down their left flank and put a cross in towards the home side’s penalty spot, but when the goalkeeper called out claiming the ball everybody stopped expecting him to catch it. Which technically he did, except, with the defenders in yellow walking back up the pitch ready for the ball to be punted up over their heads, he dropped the bloody thing right at the feet of a lurking Halkyn forward. The resulting goal was depressingly inevitable.
After that the game actually livened up for the final fifteen minutes, as the home side went looking for an equaliser and their guests sought a third. Halkyn struck the Convocation crossbar from out wide on the right shortly after Dickson had made his last planned changes (McLaren for Flamson; Wheller back on for Simon O’Brien; Edwards back on for Campbell), and Fairclough – who would limp off shortly before the end, with O’Brien coming back on – almost returned the favour with a twenty-five yard shot that the visitors’ ‘keeper plucked out of the air from just under his.
Mason, the Caster Semenya of Convocation, nearly looped an effort into the top corner of the Welsh side’s goal following sterling work, and more pertinently an excellent Intercity impression, by Fairclough (“He’s from Wigan” was the Chairman’s explanation for the train noises); Halkyn went down the other end of the pitch and put a shot onto the top of their host’s net.
When Richy O’Brien battled away to get in a shot that was unfortunately straight at the visitors’ #1, you had to wonder why the two teams couldn’t have produced something a bit more like the final quarter of an hour, during the rest of the game. They were like two punch-drunk boxers who, sensing the final bell, suddenly try to get that one elusive knockout blow.
But ultimately Convo had left it too late. For the second week running Prince got away with handling the ball inside his own penalty area, in the dying seconds, and as though to distract the referee’s attention from his defender’s faux pas, the drama-queen Hendry collapsed into a heap at the slightest hint of an opponent’s touch, to win a free kick and time that he could ill afford. From the second ball Edwards misplaced a pass to an opponent, and the final whistle shrilled across the dance floor.
And the Seconds’ demonic sacrifice for their moment of glory continued, with Lucifer seeming intent on making their suffering as miserable as possible. But help might be at hand: it is said that the Lord works in mysterious ways, so when Willis announced in the Gardeners after the game that he has been attending Alpha meetings to try and find God and discover the meaning of life, was it the latest twist in the eternal battle between good and evil on the football pitch? Could the atom bomb on legs be the good shepherd to lead the Convo heathens out of their wilderness and into the light?
It might be worth giving the Prince of Darkness one last chance yet.
Man Of The Match: Both O’Briens can be pleased with their performances, as can Wheller and Jago, particularly in the first half. But it was in that opening forty-five minutes that Campbell shone, and if he’d been able to keep up the level at which he started the game throughout the entirety of his time on the pitch it would have been a classic performance. Either through fatigue, or assimilation with everyone else, he faded in the second period, but he’d already done enough to be this week’s top dog.
Move Of The Match: The migration to the Gardeners – even though it would have been better for everyone had it been undertaken two hours earlier.
Convocation (4-4-2): Hendry; Wheller, Willis, Mitchell, Flamson; O’Brien S, Campbell, Jelen, Edwards; Prince, O’Brien R; Subs: Jago, Fairclough, Mason, McLaren
Bobby Mimms reports (though sometimes wonders why he bothers)
There were people who travelled to Sandbach on Saturday who really should have known better. There were people who let what was going on, on the football pitch, cloud their judgement and affect their thinking. There were people who reacted to what they saw during the match, and said and did things that they knew were wrong and would regret afterwards.
And as halftime approached in this encounter, with the visitors three-one up, playing well, and coping quite easily with the minimal threat of their hosts, there were people who mused momentarily about whether a comprehensive victory – the sort that is usually so alien to those particular travellers to Sandbach – might be on the cards.
They should have known better.
For just as it’s always been madness write off the Germans, or assume that a visiting team’s injury-time equaliser at Old Trafford will be the final word, you must never take it for granted that Convocation will win a game, let alone contemplate by what margin. No matter how great their lead, until the final whistle is blown it is folly of the highest order to expect the team from Wyncote to hold themselves together and seal a victory.
It isn’t that they are chokers – far from it. They don’t hold decent leads often enough for the accusation of being serial capitulators to be levelled at them, and they certainly don’t need to be in the lead to suffer a demoralising collapse. But they do have this infuriating tendency to make the simple things in football, unnecessarily difficult; they don’t so much shoot themselves in the foot, as take out Uzis and blow off all their toes.
Such is their nigh-on pathological capriciousness, when they conceded the fourth goal on Saturday, having previously being two to the good, it would have surprised nobody in the visitors’ ranks had they simply gone down the other end of the pitch and rattled in a couple of late strikes to win the game. Of course they never, but had they been a little more clinical during the game they wouldn’t have had to worry about hypotheticals. The record books will show that Convocation’s wretched start to the season was further prolonged, by a Sandbach team who are a bit of a difficult book to read themselves – but that only tells a fraction of the story.
It was a game of two halves, in that Convo were two different teams before and after the break. In the first period they were very much the dominant side, despite falling a goal behind to their hosts, but though they conceded three after the interval, only those Cheshire locals wearing rose-tinted glasses would suggest that the visitors were any worse than their blue-and-red-striped opponents. The problem seemed to be that the Liverpool team were too good in the first half, and couldn’t keep up their fine work in the second; before the break they had passed the ball around sweetly and competently while Sandbach had struggled in attempting fancy execution, yet after half time the roles were reversed and the visitors kept trying hopelessly ambitious passes that never looked likely to come off, as their opponents reverted to the “basics” that Convo’s stand-in skipper, Kevin Schofield, had continually tried to stress the importance of (and in typical Convo fashion, while his team mates were perfecting them).
It seems unlikely that the half-time confab will ever be dissected to find a piece of great galvanising rhetoric. Schofield’s observations were picky, and focused somewhat unfairly on the few mistakes that the Seconds had made during a near-faultless first half, but he was made to sound like Shakespeare’s Henry V by the ensuing protean ramblings of Andy Willis. Having found himself one-on-one with the Sandbach goalkeeper in the first ten seconds of the game, only to pea roll the ball straight to him, Willis had more reason than most to fear any second-half deterioration in the Convocation performance. But strangely he seemed to be under the impression that boundless energy was the answer to problems that hadn’t yet manifested (it was a very negative team-talk, considering that Convo were three-one up and much the better side), and tried to rally his colleagues with the far-from-Wengeresque advice: “we need to run around like soft cunts”. Presumably, it wasn’t a tip he’d picked up in William Shawcross’ new biography of the Queen Mother.
What he neglected to add though, was that they also needed to be able to kick the ball with both feet. The visitors’ two best chances of the second half fell to Willis, but in his refusal to use his right peg – and his clear discomfort when it became unavoidable – he ultimately squandered both. With the score at three-all and following good preparatory work further down the pitch, the forward was played through on the Sandbach goal (albeit with the ball running across it to the right) but a defender on his shoulder deprived him of the time he desperately wanted to transfer play away from his right foot. With space running out as he neared the goal line, he eventually attempted a lame shot with the outside of his left, but this proved to be as good as a pass to the ‘keeper (again).
Five minutes after that, he found himself in an identical situation but opted, against the wishes of every fibre in his body, to try out his right peg instead. This time the ball never even made it into the welcoming arms of the #1 as Willis somehow squared the ball across the six-yard box. Inadvertently, his miscue almost fell perfectly for his partner up front, Ste Mason (don’t be fooled into believing it was a pass), but just as it looked as though the Scot couldn’t miss what was practically an open goal, a defender snuck in and smashed a clearance into the middle distance.
That missed opportunity did nothing to pacify the mercurial Willis, and right on cue he exploded into the first of several incomprehensible rages moments later when the Sandbach goalkeeper picked up a quite blatant back pass from one of his defenders, and the Scottish referee – who had officiated the Sealand Cup Final back in May – refused to penalise him. “You are the most biased referee I’ve ever seen” the Convo man screamed at the non-whistle blower, before complementing the abuse ten minutes later by informing him, much more calmly (and rather sinisterly): “You’re having a nightmare, aren’t you.”
For that, he talked himself into a lengthy lecture from the ref, and quite hilariously, a rebuke from Barry Wheller. The Watford supporter was playing left wing for the visitors and, when he wasn’t going around kicking opposition players (yet again) was presumably perfecting the art of calling kettles black, as whenever Willis took a moment out to recharge his volatile batteries, the psycho baton was passed to the pot that was Wheller. Time and again the counsellor-turned-counselled got involved in niggly little spats with opposition players, and at one point in the second half he shamelessly kicked out at an opponent as he ran past, mere seconds after he had been warned by the official to calm down.
His Damascene conversion in reverse hadn’t gone unnoticed on the Convo bench either, where Tim Jago (who had played right wing in the first half, and would replace Gareth Jones at right-back when he returned to the action near the end of the game) had to reminded him repeatedly that if he had enough breath to moan and argue – as well as kicking lumps out of opponents, Wheller had begun to double-up on the referee with his loony brother-in-arms – then he wasn’t trying hard enough, and would be substituted. Although that warning seemed to do the trick momentarily, and negated the need for any tranquiliser darts, the Southerner’s mood wasn’t soothed any during a brief spell when the ball seemed to crash onto the roof of his car every thirty seconds (it was almost as if everyone on the pitch was trying to manipulate the ball’s motion through some sort of Uri Gellar mind trick, in a bid to wind the hot-head up further).
With Wheller suitably pacified, Willis took up the mantle once again and gave the man in black a dog’s abuse when he never penalised him for an unavoidable hand ball (the ref was about to blow, before realising that the home side had an advantage – Willis took umbrage with him deeming it a foul in the first place). However, when Sandbach committed an identical foul in the final moments of the game, in almost the very same place on the pitch (just outside their penalty area), the two-faced crank was quite happy to accept that free kick.
Of course, with Willis in such fine form his own team mates weren’t going to get off lightly, and at one point in the second period, after a piece of far-from-impressive Convo defending, he turned and screeched at the back line: “Rubbish!”
But with those two goliaths of goofy football rumbling around across the pitch, it was only a matter of time before Lee Campbell (playing centre-mid, with Joel Jelen) picked up on their unhinged vibrations, and he began to get upset with a few of his colleagues, and the occasional, innocuous challenge of his opponents. With their histrionics, each of the three have been known to liven up a match just on their own, so for a while it was as if the trio were playing as a tag team; as though, like Jupiter’s most volatile spewing satellites, they had all aligned and, through their eruptions, were all contributing towards a celestial display of tempestuousness.
Their questionable conduct after the break stole the spotlight from a fine first-half team performance that could have seen the yellow-shirted Convo out of sight by the time the two sides swapped ends. As well as Willis’ first-minute chance, Campbell hit the Sandbach crossbar from the edge of the centre circle – in his own half – and Jelen should have done better when gifted an opportunity just inside the home team’s penalty area.
Come the interval there seemed to be no reason why they should rue those missed chances though, as Convo went into it with a creditable and well deserved lead thanks to goals from Willis, Ben Prince (playing centre-back with Schofield), and Campbell. Sandbach had taken the lead with a perfectly-executed lob that the scorer could attempt another ninety-nine times and not replicate, but otherwise the visitors dominated play and their hosts were reduced to long-range ambitious efforts that usually cleared the hedge behind Keith Purcell’s goal, on the few occasions that they made it that far (their goal was their only shot on target in the first half).
At the other end of the pitch, Convocation’s first was very similar to the one they had scored at British Steel a week ago. Schofield gained possession on the edge of his own penalty area and played a long ball down the middle of the pitch that Ronan Dineen (who started up front, but would only last thirty minutes before pulling his hamstring and being replaced by Mason) flicked on with just enough weight for Willis. One-on-one with the Sandbach ‘keeper, the forward made no repeat of his earlier botched effort and netted quite comfortably.
The visitors’ other two goals both came from Jago set pieces. They took the lead when Prince headed the ball home forcefully from one of the Co-op aficionado’s corners, and strengthened it five minutes later through a Campbell header, when the same source had floated in an excellent free kick, which had been awarded after Dineen was flattened by a fierce challenge from behind (in his short stint on the pitch the Irishman was levelled a few times).
But it wasn’t just through their goals that Convo deserved their half-time lead, as they played well all over the pitch, passing the ball around sensibly; Sandbach were the ones who were overcomplicating things before half time. Mike Edwards at left-back interacted well with Wheller ahead of him (and the tardy Jon Kearney, when he replaced the lull-before-the-storm teacher after half an hour), while the same could be said for Jones and Jago on the other flank, with the Scotsman being granted great swathes of space on the wing. But it was in the middle that the visitors kept it simple with the greatest effect, as Jelen and Campbell played intelligently and prudently, and Sandbach couldn’t get a foothold on the territory.
All of which leaves you wondering why it fell to bits so easily after the break. That they conceded a second Sandbach goal less than sixty seconds after the restart probably didn’t help matters though. Purcell took a short goal kick to Schofield, who in turn played the ball forward to Jelen – Convocation’s officer-without-portfolio – for him to arse around with in the middle of the pitch. Possession promptly ceded, Lady Luck then took a swipe at the visitors when Edwards’ block on Jelen’s dispossessor took a rather fortuitous ricochet, setting the man up for a shot into the bottom left-hand corner of the goal.
Within two minutes it was nearly three-all, and only a fine save from Purcell, as the ball looked set to find the same portion of the net that he had just retrieved it from, kept his team in the ascendancy.
But, as the Convo game plan imploded, and several of their players exploded, it looked as though it would only be a matter of time before the equaliser arrived – and it was. A free kick just outside the visitors’ penalty area was successfully dealt with, but the ball that was punted back in after the clearance, wasn’t: the back line remained motionless, expecting offside to be given against a Sandbach straggler who had run in at the initial dead ball, but he made no attempt to interfere with play and a colleague ran in to slip a shot underneath the only Convo player with his wits about him, Purcell.
To be fair to the visitors, it could have really gone tits up at that point, yet they managed to pull themselves together and ward off their hosts for much of the remainder of the game. But the impressive passing performance of the first half was, by then, a distant memory, and Jelen in particular seemed unable to make any sort of pass without embellishing it with a fancy flick that would ping the ball thirty yards ahead of the intended recipient. Everybody (of both sides) started to judge the bounce wrong on the hard pitch, and slices and miskicks became the norm; the cushioned touches of before the break had been replaced by quite the opposite, while the merest whisper of the word ‘time’ induced the sort of desperate panic-stricken reactions in whoever had the ball, that someone with a burning box of fireworks tied to their chest would exhibit.
Prince somehow got away with handling the ball inside his own penalty area, and for once it appeared that Convo’s luck might be in. But it was too good to be true, and wouldn’t last. With about three or four minutes remaining, and having jinked around unchallenged on the edge of their opponents’ eighteen-yard box for what felt like an eternity, the home side finally grabbed a winner following a prolonged bout of head tennis (during which Wheller must have made eight attempts to clear the ball, but to no avail, even heading it directly up in the air three times running at one point – all he was missing was a drum on his back, and some cymbals on the insides of his knees), with the killer blow being blasted through a throng of disorientated players and past the unsighted Purcell, from twelve yards out.
Jones made a brief return at the heart of the defence in the final minute, after Schofield had been wiped out by a very poor challenge that didn’t seem too concerned with winning the ball. But as the final whistle sounded, to make a mockery of all that hope and promise from forty-five minutes earlier, Convocation had once again been beaten by the one opponent that they will never get the better of: themselves.
And your correspondent really should have known better.
Man Of The Match: He couldn’t seem to get his head around the child locks on Jago’s car, but Edwards looked perfectly at home in the left-back berth – and played nothing like Jelen – whilst the Scotsman himself put in a fine shift on the right wing in the first period, helped himself to two goal assists, and just about managed to keep the nutcases under control in the second half, from his vantage point on the sidelines: through default, they share the award. But had he not spoilt it for everyone with his thoroughly bonkers performance after the break, Willis would have got the nod, as otherwise he had a great game (first-minute miss aside). You can never accuse him of being dull. Or sane.
Move Of The Match: There was a moment of jaw-dropping epiphany in the second half, when Jones and an opponent battled it out for a loose ball that had been played towards the visitors’ right-hand corner flag. Though the Convo man had a five-yard head start on the Sandbach player, and can’t have been far off half his age, somewhat incredulously he was pegged back and eventually overtaken in the race for the sphere. Everyone else seemed to mentally rub their eyes at the nascent realisation of what they’d just witnessed: My God, he’s even slower than Dickson.
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; Edwards, Prince, Schofield K, Jones; Wheller, Jelen, Campbell, Jago; Willis, Dineen; Subs: Kearney, Mason
Bobby Mimms reports
They may very well shit in the woods, but where exactly do bears go to, to be sick? Well, if the evidence of Saturday is anything to go by, it’s the hard shoulder of the M56. That’s where Andy McLaren – currently the Second Team’s ‘man with his finger on the button’ – had to make an impromptu stop on the way home from Queensferry, to regurgitate any nuts and berries that he may have gobbled up in preparation for winter. It seems that the potent combination of the nauseating effluvium that had wafted across the pitch throughout that afternoon’s game, the post-match curry and chips that had been served in the social club (the rugger buggers also got sausages – they were all ‘Twats of the Match’), and an unsavoury colloquy concerning Bob Carolgees, Spit the Dog, and a spot of fisting, had proved too much for the vice-captain’s delicate constitution (although it’s possible that he might have had a bit of a bug as well). The technicolour yawn that he splashed all over the road as cars sped past, their drivers open-mouthed in astonishment at the sight of such a large carnivore vomiting, proved that it wasn’t just at the anal-flap end of his digestive system that the vice-captain was far from tickety-boo.
A delayed nervous reaction can’t be written off either, as after last week’s egregious debacle the pressure was well-and-truly on McLaren and his team to show that they could raise their game and play better; that the absent Paul Dickson (he’s still in Greece – it’s where they… etc) wasn’t as indispensable as he would no doubt have suggested, if he’d returned after another hiding. And though the score line suggests otherwise, this was a much improved performance from Convocation, especially as their opponents looked to be even younger than the St. Martin’s side they had faced seven days earlier.
Then, too many players had simply vanished like countryside bees once the going had gotten tough, but on Saturday nobody went missing and everyone was willing to stand up and be counted. It probably helped matters that half of the fourteen players that made the dual journeys to face British Steel – one to get to Queensferry, and then another to reach the pitch – had had no part in the anti-football that Convo had experimented with last week, and that several of those on show were, what would in all likelihood be termed as, ‘occasional players’, ready and willing to take advantage of their first appearances for the club in a while.
Stephen Mason, who would patrol the left wing in the second period, hadn’t played since that madcap game against the jolly Northop Hall Old Boys in April, whilst his first-half predecessor, Gareth Jones (Convo’s undercover Welsh agent), last turned out for the club nearly twelve months ago; Ronan Dineen, another half-time introduction, who did little more than kick lumps out of the British Steel players during his time on the pitch, hadn’t made a Convocation appearance for over half a decade.
It goes without saying then that they never took part in the silverware success of last season, so it was nice to see them quickly encompass – and the more frequent players, rediscover – the team spirit of that cup run, and to play and look out for each other. Everyone kept moving at all times, trying to give whoever had possession at least one outlet to play a pass to; nobody was static or pedestrian. On the occasions when the ball was given away – seldom cheaply, although Barry Wheller (playing left-back) did have a ten-minute spell where he seemed physically incapable of passing to a yellow-shirted team mate – everybody gave their all to win it back: both Joel Jelen and the right-back Tim Jago epitomised this by making a half-the-length-of-the-pitch lung-busting dash each, to intercept potential shots inside their own penalty area.
However it was at the other end of the bone-hard sward that the visitors made a good case for the game being closer than the final score-line implies; as on the opening day of the season, their opponents probably deserved to win, but not by the margin that they did. At times in the first half, particularly before Paul Fairclough shook off his mental cobwebs, British Steel did threaten to run riot over the Convo back line and a repeat of last week’s doomed Little Big Horn resistance looked possible. But as the game proceeded the central-midfield partnership (Jelen and Fairclough) began to click, which not only alleviated the strain on their defence, but also created a greater conduit for the whole team to attack through. By the final whistle Convo had had quite a few extra opportunities to score than their opponents – their chances being even more frequent than the freight trains that had regularly rumbled past behind the goal they defended in the second half.
(When the railway lines were free of traffic the atmosphere pitch-side was very still and quiet, as though a storm were brewing; eerily, no birds sang, and the occasional leaf falling from the trees, giving warning of the onset of autumn, was Mother Nature’s only contribution to the mysterious hush.)
Fairclough himself had nearly opened the scoring in the very first minute, when a sliced kick from inside the centre circle almost caught out the British Steel goalkeeper, who only managed to stave off the ignominy of being lobbed at the last moment – with more intent, the Convo man would repeat the effort twice in the second half, but with just as little success.
Twenty minutes later, after the right winger Richy O’Brien had been scythed down right on the eighteen-yard line as he was about to burst into the penalty area, the #1 (who was very much in love with himself) remained rooted to the spot, helpless as a Jago free kick drifted inches wide of his right-hand upright.
His shorts billowing in the breeze like the flags at Royal Troon, the Scotsman was in the thick of it again shortly after that, when he took a quick throw-in to the same O’Brien who then whipped a delicious low cross into the British Steel goalmouth. In theory, the lurking Jones only had to touch the ball to find the back of the net, but unfortunately, and incredibly, from less than six yards out he somehow managed to put the ball wide of the right-hand post.
The teacher (yes, another one) clutched his head in his hands at the time, but if he was still feeling dispirited by his miss come the second half then Mason must have gone some way to making him feel a bit better, by clearing the crossbar from a similar cross and an equivalent distance. The fact that, seconds earlier (and we are talking less than a minute), the Scotsman had set up British Steel’s sixth goal with a suicidal own-defence-splitting pass, only made his miss seem even worse.
But while they were Convo’s best and more exotic chances to get something from the game (the goal they did score aside, obviously), it was the umpteen other efforts that they had, the ones that kept finding their way directly to the goalkeeper, which they will look back on and rue. Simon O’Brien and Ben Prince – who both played up front in the first half – Jelen, Richy O’Brien, Andy Willis and Dineen, all directed weak shots or headers straight at the gloved one, when a yard or two away from him in any direction would have been enough to score.
Well into the second half, after he had been moved up front, Willis would reprieve himself by netting the Convocation goal – much too late for it to make any difference to the outcome of the game – but by then he had done more than enough to have reason to make amends. Back at the scene of some of his most apoplectic outbursts, the game had barely been ten minutes old when he’d upset referee Aidy (in the ‘Dickson upset Aidy’ sense – i.e. he queried his integrity), before backing down when the official’s nostrils had flared and his eyes had glazed over.
To the despair of his goalkeeper, Keith Purcell, the centre half had steadfastly refused to cooperate with the rest of the back line when it came to playing offside (even justifying his actions at one point by informing the #1: “we’re not playing offside” – well that’s okay then!), and it was only by sheer luck that the home side didn’t take advantage of his vigilantism. Sheer luck and Aidy’s increasingly-bizarre interpretation of the offside law, that is (the referee would make some very peculiar judgements throughout the game).
Yet while the old legs may be the reason for him insisting on playing five yards behind everyone else in the defence, thus giving opposition forwards plenty of room to run into onside – regardless of how fast and young they may be – there’s nothing wrong with them when it comes to the so-called Convo Walk. The club’s much-maligned expression of pique was perfected by Willis at British Steel, and two minutes before the interval on Saturday he was at it again, flouncing off the pitch in indignation at a few ill-chosen words of ‘encouragement’ from Fairclough.
Willis’ second-half redeployment not only gave Prince a chance to shine at the heart of the defence –where the big man did join in the attempts to catch errant British Steel players offside, as well as subjecting them to a bit of heavy-handed ‘discipline’ as well – it was also integral to Convocation getting their goal. The other centre back, Kevin Schofield, gained possession on the edge of his own penalty area and played a long ball down the middle of the pitch that Mason leapt above his nearest opponents to nod down perfectly for Willis. With a burst of pace that he denies he’s even got when he’s playing in defence, the forward suddenly found himself one-on-one with the British Steel ‘keeper and, having rode the ineffectual challenge of one particular defender, looked to have a great chance to inject a sliver of a hope back into the game that was all but over at 4-0. With ice presumably coursing through his veins the Convo man refused to pull the trigger too early, bamboozling the #1 to the extent that, when he did finally shoot, inch perfectly into the slight gap between the man and his near post, the home player barely moved. In waiting for the ‘keeper to blink first Willis had pulled off a masterstroke, and thoroughly deserved his goal: only a cynic would suggest that he had delayed his shot because the ball had fallen perfectly for his right foot and as he ran he’d been trying desperately to get it onto his more favoured left.
It was an excellently-worked move, but one that seemed to rile the callow players of the home side. They began kicking the ball away whenever they were caught offside, and then took umbrage with any Convocation player who had the cheek to complain; ridiculous foul throws crept into their game that they somehow thought were the referee’s fault, for picking up on them, and one player made moves to throw the head on Mason after a tussle (although, due to the size of the two protagonists, it was the Convo man’s chest that was at most peril). That was too much for the watching McLaren – who would only come on for the final three minutes (for Schofield) due to his general queasiness – and he stormed down the line in his natty cardigan, exchanging insults and thinly-veiled threats with the narcissus in goal and anyone else who was willing.
Not surprisingly no one was, but by then the home side had let their feet do the talking, and more pertinently, their shooting boots. They had served notice of their intentions by forcing Purcell to twice tip the ball around his left-hand post while the game was still goalless, although his touch on the second was slight enough for the Aidy not to have noticed – the goalkeeper didn’t own up, and karma wasn’t about to forget it.
Moments later, British Steel won possession in the middle of the pitch, played the ball out to their right winger (being paid scant attention by Jones and Wheller), who then lobbed a first goal from well over thirty yards out, having noticed that the Convo #1 was way off his line.
The third goal was almost identical, although with the added bonus of Purcell back-pedalling furiously to try and keep the ball out, and nearly decapitating himself as he crashed into one of the rather unforgiving uprights. (Several minutes after that, and only a few before the break, the ‘keeper nearly snapped his neck when he slid out to claim a loose ball and his lower body’s momentum continued after his upper body had stopped.)
In between the two lobs the home side had scored a much more mundane effort, but came through the middle of the pitch, rather than using the flanks. Again they gained possession in the centre circle, the winner of the ball then knocking it to the feet of a colleague on the edge of the Convo penalty area. With a sublime piece of skill he flicked it to his right, first time, taking out Willis and Schofield behind him, and such was the deftness of his touch it was also perfectly weighted for a team mate who had slipped in behind Jago, and he netted past the advancing Purcell from an angle that was far from easy.
As advice goes, Schofield’s to Jelen moments before the home side’s fourth, ten minutes into the second half, was pretty unambiguous: “don’t dive in – stay on your feet”. It came after the ball had been played towards the left-hand side of the pitch, just outside the side of Convocation’s penalty area, and the midfielder went across to help out the flagging Wheller. Needless to say if Jelen had been told not to play on the railway line he’d have immediately started playing chicken with the locomotives, so once he’d slid in, lost any chance of winning the ball, and gifted a British Steel player a clear run into the eighteen-yard box, the signs looked ominous for the visitors – and they were. He put a cross into the goalmouth that was too high for Prince and then Schofield behind him, and though Jago (who once again looked as though he’d been playing with the club’s Van de Graaff generator) was running in with an opponent near the back of the goal, it was the blue-shirted player who was marginally faster, and he smashed the ball past a goal-line rooted Purcell.
Willis grabbed his consolation goal not long after that (and resisted the urge to run the length of the pitch and celebrate by sliding on his knees in front of the British Steel bench), and a ten-minute period of Convocation being in the ascendancy followed. But a fifth goal killed off any hopes of an unlikely comeback, when one of the home side’s forwards danced through a throng of Convo defenders, riding their challenges and tackles with an almost unearthly ease, before proving himself to be even more lethal than the archers who had been holding a tournament outside of the changing rooms, by clipping it magisterially past the out-coming Purcell. It was a fine individual goal.
By the time the hosts grabbed their sixth, Simon O’Brien was playing left back (replacing Wheller), Jones was on at right back (for Jago), and a great stink, which made the one that forced the abandonment of parliament in 1858 seem like a slight fart, had engulfed the pitch. It could only have been effluent: repugnant and not “that healthy manure smell” as Jelen would later put it. The goal itself was an easy tap-in at the back post by the highly-strung British Steel forward who had kept kicking the ball away when caught offside. But all the hard work had been done by Mason, who’d dropped back to help out when a mini-melee ensued inside the penalty area, and had successfully cleared the ball from in between the tangle of legs. Sadly he’d successfully cleared it across his own goalmouth, carving his own defence apart – at the other end of the pitch it would have been a super pass for a team mate.
The final word went to Richy O’Brien, who collapsed with cramp in the dying seconds and had to be replaced by Jago. While no footballing disablement is ever to be welcomed, a slight pleasure could be taken from the Convo man’s misfortune, as his pain proved that he’d given his all for the cause. And that’s all you can ask really – a vast improvement on last week.
So the chaps from Wyncote shouldn’t feel too downhearted by the final result. On a different day they may have bagged six themselves, and several of their opponents’ goals did have an element of good fortune about them – once again the gods weren’t smiling on Convocation. The British Steel players were extremely youthful, let us not forget, yet their counterparts continued to cope with their boyish ways right up until the final whistle. There was no shame in losing in the manner that they did, to the opposition that they did.
Having received a lift to Queensferry from Jelen, your correspondent was forced to make a detour to Cheshire Oaks on the way back to Liverpool, giving himself and Jago time to chew the cud nearby in The Old Hall Farm pub, while the midfield maestro went looking for some new curtains (or something). In one of those uncanny twists of fate that sometimes occur, the place was run by a former work colleague of the Scotsman – Steve Quinn – and the Convo men settled back to enjoy a complimentary pint, little knowing that as they did their skipper was chundering his way along the nation’s motorways. But while McLaren may have been resurfacing the 'macadam, the Seconds as a whole look much healthier than they have done for some time.
Man Of The Match: Nobody had a poor game, and though Convo only managed to score the one, everybody who played in the midfield or attack gets a nod for at least being in a position to miss or have their chances blocked by the opposition keeper – it’s more than almost anyone could be bothered doing in the previous game. At the same time, anyone who played in defence deserves credit for the way they frustrated the British Steel forwards with a well-marshalled offside trap, even if Willis only coped with a large dollop of luck. It was his second-half replacement who is this week’s MOTM though. Prince had a shot or two in the first half when he was up front, but it was the brawn and potential menace he injected into the back line after the break that was truly awesome. He doesn’t win as many headers as someone so tall should, but the way he can muscle opponents about and keep them quiet is part and parcel of being an effective defender. Ironically, it was during his spell at the back that Convo conceded the three most defendable goals, but he should lose no sleep over them as there was nothing he could have done any better.
Move Of The Match: Convo did play some attractive football at times, only for the final ball – whether it be a pass or a shot – to often let them down. But their goal was a joy to behold. It mightn't have pleased any watching footballing aesthetes – seeing as it was pure, unashamed route one – but it was so excellently worked, with every touch perfect, that it was a move the visitors only manage to pull off with success every now and again.
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; Wheller, Willis, Schofield K, Jago; Jones G, Fairclough, Jelen, O’Brien R; O’Brien S, Prince; Subs: Dineen, Mason, McLaren
Bobby Mimms reports
It didn’t take long to become apparent that the game was a mismatch of epic proportions. Under leaden skies that threatened, and would soon deliver, rain, it took less than two minutes for the darker-shirted team to work the heavy leather ball between the posts for the first goal; a second followed an equivalent length of time after that. Of the pale-swathed underdogs, it was difficult to determine who was the busier: the goal custodian continually kicking the ball back to the centre circle after yet another concession, or the forwards receiving it to restart the game. Quite quickly, the few spectators who had braved the elements lost track of the score, and even the referee seemed a bit unsure after a while – especially having disallowed a couple of notches, perhaps in sympathy. The only time that play switched direction was at half time, when the two teams swapped ends, and at one point in the second period the marauding team’s bored ‘keeper took shelter from the drizzle under an umbrella that he’d borrowed.
Not so much annihilation, this was footballing Armageddon.
For those who were at Wyncote on Saturday to see the Seconds’ latest tonking, this time at the hands (and feet) of St. Martin’s from Fazakerley, it probably didn’t seem quite as wet as that. And it wasn’t. The sun was beaming in a near cloudless sky, yet a slight breeze cooled anyone in its glare, the two combining to provide ideal conditions for a game of association football; ‘twas such a beautiful late-summer’s afternoon. Watching the home side play though, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it was the depths of winter, such was the frigidity of their performance. They were disjointed and disunited; their touch cold, and their temperament frosty.
This was never going to be an easy fixture for Convo, regardless of their disposition. Nice lads that the side from next-door-to-the-old-nuthouse are, they’re a tad on the young side and their hosts had never beaten them in umpteen attempts, although they had held their own against them in the past, and occasionally even threatened to snatch a victory. But those opportunities had been when they’d played with a bit of team spirit and a consideration for the collective cause. On Saturday there was none of that – or at least, too little to make a difference – and not long after the home side fell behind, heads dropped, convictions waned, and most of the Convo white shirts wanted to be elsewhere.
Of course it didn’t help matters that, as if afflicted by their own self-imposed transfer embargo, they could only just scrape together enough players to put a side out. With Paul Dickson away in Greece (it’s where they invented it, y’know), Andy McLaren took up the Second Team reins and initially thought he had thirteen at his disposal, until the Parrys – Terry and Tony Jnr – cried off (in the ‘just didn’t turn up’ sense of the phrase) leaving him with the bare eleven.
The Bear Eleven.
With everybody knowing that they would have to play the full ninety minutes you might have expected more of a clamour for the goalkeeper’s gloves than there was (none). But everybody also knew that the opposition hadn’t just turned up to inspect Wyncote’s new boot brushes, and that being in the nets was probably the most toxic of the afternoon’s poisoned chalices. So in the absence of any competition for his place, Keith Purcell was once again the last line of defence. Ahead of him, Chris McNally partnered Kevin Schofield at the heart of the back line, while the vest-wearing Joel Jelen was joined by Mike Edwards in the centre of the midfield, and the pairing of Simon Lineton and Simon O’Brien led the attack. The flanks were a little unbalanced weight-wise, seeing as Richy O’Brien was in front of Sid Driver (the Adam Ant wannabe) on the right, while Barry Wheller trailed a blaze ahead of McLaren on the left – hindsight would show that it hadn’t gone unnoticed in the opposition ranks.
Even before the blue-and-yellow hooped visitors took the lead, they gave plenty of notice that the Convo back line were in for ninety minutes of sheer hell (just like Tranmere supporters). Having decided which of the players had the nicest legs, the lady referee got proceedings underway with a barely-audible peep of the whistle, and St. Martin’s took the game to their opponents straight from the off. To be fair though, the home side did look comfortable under moderate pressure in the initial stages, and played the ball intelligently out of defence – but even at that early stage it was worrying they had ample opportunity to do so. The back line, when they weren’t pinging troublesome back passes at their own ‘keeper, were seeing an awful lot of the ball, while the two Simons, at the other end of the pitch, were not.
Their legs still fresh, McNally and Schofield coped well with the visitors’ sprightly forwards, while McLaren, under no false illusions as to his capabilities against much more ‘aerodynamic’ opponents, hesitated not a second in putting the ball out of play if he thought it necessary. On the other side of the defence Driver was looking quite competent – one of the few players who would throughout the game – and it was he who was determining the back line’s positioning, rather than the usual marshal, Schofield.
However, under so much pressure from their opponents, nobody was deluding themselves that Convo could hold out indefinitely, and indeed they didn’t. It was no less annoying though, that when they did fall behind the concession was self-inflicted and avoidable. St. Martin’s won possession in the middle of the park and lobbed a ball forward that Schofield looked ready to take care of himself, on the edge of the penalty area. But, hearing a shout from Purcell the defender left it, only to turn around to see one of the visitors’ pacy forwards nip in and tap the ball away from the #1’s clutches, round him, and stroke it home into the empty net. The ‘keeper’s reactions suggested that the ball may have taken an odd bounce on its way through to him, but his body language and movement beforehand was so woefully lackadaisical that he would have had to have had some cheek to blame the goal on anything but (his) human error.
Considering that the visitors had already show more appetite and ability than their lumbering hosts, it goes without saying that Convo could have done without the concession. Full-blown self destruct was still twenty minutes away, but even at only one down you never got the impression that they could fight their way back, and St. Martin’s looked completely in control of the game (St. Martin’s were completely in control of the game).
But whilst individual defensive blundering had been directly responsible for the goal – and would be for most of the rest, as well – the death sentence had been passed on Convocation’s chances of getting anything from the game when the midfield failed to gel (which was roughly about ten touches into the game). There can be no complaints about the work rate of the quartet, as all four ran themselves into the ground for the majority of the ninety minutes, but in displaying all the familiarity of strangers on a bus they stood little chance of clicking with each other, and their counterparts took control of the territory.
Wheller showed occasional flashes of brilliance on his wing – including one swivelling dummy in the first half that completely took an opponent out of a move – but more often than not could be heard beating himself up for minor mistakes (“Oh, fack orf Barry”), whilst the newly-married O’Brien on the other side was his usual hyperactive self, although without ever seeming to get anywhere.
But it was in the centre of the midfield that Convo were really losing out to their guests. Like a round hole and a square peg, Edwards and Jelen are perfectly competent and able entities in their own rights, but incompatible as a partnership; maybe they’re too similar, as they certainly seemed to think the same game on Saturday. At times both would go for the same ball, while at others neither would bother, and as their inability to make it work in the middle of the pitch provided more and more rope for their defence to hang themselves with, St. Martin’s’ grip on the match tightened.
(Giving their opponents an average age of around twenty years probably didn’t help matters either.)
The visitors’ second goal arrived with about twenty minutes remaining until the interval, and would become depressingly familiar before the end of the game due to a number of the others being almost identical. A St. Martin’s player won possession in the middle of the pitch and played the ball out to his right wing (Convo’s left – they’d spotted the Achilles heel), from where a colleague knocked it past McLaren before crossing into the reasonably populated penalty area. Hardly believing his luck at being left completely unmarked, despite being the only hooped shirt in amongst the Convo whites, another St. Martin’s man only had to worry about keeping the ball down, as he side-footed it past the flailing Purcell to double his team’s advantage.
Just as the fox and the rabbit are equally aware of each other’s place in the food chain, as the game restarted both teams knew that Convo were there for the taking. A sense of gloomy resignation threatened to engulf the home side, while it was all that their guests could do to remain calm with the prospect of a veritable goal feast laid out before them.
But then, having barely been able to get out of their own half, let alone anywhere near the St. Martin’s goal, Convo went and turned the game on its head by puling a goal back, completely against the run of play. A bouncing ball was played forward towards the visitors’ penalty area and O’Brien the forward did exceptionally well to not only time his run to stay onside (considering he’d barely been involved in the game), but also to hold off the defender who was challenging him on his shoulder. He then complemented his good work by skilfully lobbing the advancing goalkeeper from twenty yards out so that the ball dropped just under the crossbar to pull the score back to two-one.
It could have been a springboard for Convo to claw their way back into the game; it could have been a turning point at which the momentum swung in the home side’s favour. Instead it just seemed to annoy St. Martin’s, and they scored two goals in quick succession, just before the break, to reaffirm who was in charge.
For the second game in succession Schofield was caught out trying to be too clever in his own penalty area, for the third, being dispossessed as he dribbled indifferently out of the six-yard box (presumably having left his senses in the bin bag on the side line that was serving as a vallies bag), before his mugger laid the ball off to a team mate to blast into the Convo goal from fifteen yards out.
The fourth, moments later, was a low drive from a similar spot that Purcell parried away to his right, only to watch in disbelief from where he lay on the ground, as the whole of the home side’s defence stood motionless while an opponent ran in to blast the loose ball into the roof of the net from a tight angle.
The half-time pep talk was almost as acerbic as the orange slices that had been brought out and passed around, and a latent vexation simmered behind the words of encouragement that would ultimately prove to be so futile. But while the poor defending, particularly at the end of the half, had given Convo a mountain to climb, it can only have been the sloppiness of those two late goals that rankled, as the visitors had been so dominant that the score line was hardly unjust. Indeed, such had been St. Martin’s superiority, the home side might well have considered themselves fortunate to only be three behind; but for their inexplicable penchant for shooting from distance, and almost always missing by great margins, the Fazakerley team could have been out of sight.
With all of the Convocation players shielding their eyes from the sun behind their opponents’ goal, the omens didn’t bode well for them at the start of the second period. And the omens were proved absolutely spot on within ten minutes as the home side conceded two almost identical goals, which saw the ball being crossed into the box from the left-hand side, and an unmarked St. Martin’s player running in and tapping it past Purcell (a la, the second St. Martin’s goal).
Enough was enough for the goalkeeper. After the sixth had been conceded he let fly with a torrent of invective that, although directed at no one in particular, seemed to strike a nerve in the under-performers, who didst protest too much for their retorts not to betray their guilty consciences.
Whether it was a case of the visitors considering their afternoon’s work to be done and taking their foot off the pedal, or their opponents realising that they were allowed to put up some resistance and genuinely upping their performance, Convocation enjoyed their best spell of the game in the ten minutes following their sixth concession, and for a while experimented with the concept of keeping the ball. The back four were given a much needed (but not deserved or well earned) break, as Wheller and the younger O’Brien came alive and put a few useful crosses into the opposition box, that neither the white-socked Lineton or the elder O’Brien could do anything useful with. Even Jelen and Edwards put their footballing conflicts of interest aside for a while, and gave the St. Martin’s defence something to think about.
It wouldn’t last though, and the schoolboy errors returned in the final quarter of the game. Not long after Wheller had revived the footballing world’s issue du jour, diving, by flinging himself to the ground just inside the St. Martin’s’ penalty area in a, shall we say, slightly dramatic manner, the visitors went down the other end of the pitch and made it seven-one with another well taken, but poorly defended, goal.
However, the visitors weren’t content with just making a show of their hosts on the goal scoring front, as they then gave them a master class in how to dive in the penalty area as well, when one of the few maturer players in their ranks was sent clear through on the Convo goal, and somehow managed to trip himself up (with nobody anywhere near him) as he crossed the eighteen-yard line. His colleagues suggested that he was looking at a two-match ban for his efforts.
The final whistle couldn’t come soon enough for the Convo players, and in harking for it and nothing else, the ponderous back line edged closer to anarchy and every-man-for-himself. Nobody was talking or listening to each other, a malady epitomised by McNally kicking the ball out of Purcell’s grasp, Schofield and McLaren going for the same ball, and everybody standing still as a St. Martin’s man ran in, unmarked, to tap a in a cross from out on the left wing (sound familiar?). Due to yet another inaudible blow from the referee, it took several seconds before anyone realised that she had disallowed it for offside.
An eighth did arrive five minutes from the end, when one of the visitors battled with Schofield along the inside-left channel before scuffing a shot across the face of the goal that dribbled into the net off the back post.
But time eventually ran out on St. Martin’s’ attempt to break the world record score line, and Convocation’s crack at being the most lamentable opponents in the history of the game – records that are held by Arbroath and Bon Accord respectively, whose 1885 ‘mismatch of epic proportions’ finished 36-0.
Presumably that’s why, one hundred and twenty four years to the day, Convo went some way to recreating the experience. Only without the rain.
Man Of The Match: Only two players can even consider themselves worthy of such an accolade. Simon O’Brien tried his hardest to motivate his indifferent colleagues, took his goal well, and somehow remained positive throughout the game when it would have been so much easier to go with the flow and go missing. But Driver probably just pips him to the post. Incredibly, considering he was in a back line that shipped eight goals, he barely put a foot wrong all game – there was nothing he could have done about any of the concessions – and it seemed at times that it was only his bossing of the back line, redolent of a Boer War major, that prevented the kind of Armageddon suffered by those nineteenth century Scots.
Move Of The Match: In the final minute of the first half, with Convo already 4-1 down, St. Martin’s broke out of defence along their right flank, while the right back and right winger streaked simultaneously down the other wing. It was akin to blitzkrieg on a football pitch, but while the defence and midfield battened down the hatches to try and repel their attack, one player in red (who shall remain nameless, and odd socked) was sauntering around insouciantly in the centre circle with his hands on his hips. It was anything but the best move of the match, but one that summed up the general attitude of the team most aptly.
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; McLaren, McNally, Schofield K, Driver; Wheller, Jelen, Edwards, O’Brien R; O’Brien S, Lineton
Bobby Mimms reports
The questions that this game put to Convocation – concerning their performance on the day, and of their prospects for the season to come – will, in time, probably be remembered as of secondary importance to other affairs of a non-footballing persuasion, which came with the package on the day. That’s if they aren’t already. The goals aside, there was little to recommend this match to a neutral (or some of the players, for that matter), and as it progressed your correspondent became more and more persuaded as to the merits of euthanasia. The bare statistics show that Haroldians had six shots on target and scored from five of them, while Convo had one and netted one, but otherwise it was bleak, grey football; a soulless episode that was to the sport what Douglas Hurd would be to a Dizzee Rascal tour.
So anyone hoping to rummage around in its entrails looking for clues as to what the future holds for the Seconds will be disappointed – what the upcoming campaign has in store for the team from Mather Avenue is no less a mystery now, than it was at kick off on Sunday morning. That’s because, though the visitors created more chances than their hosts, and took them, there’s no way that they were as greatly superior as the final score line suggests; they benefitted from one or two breaks that their steady-working opponents yearned for, and, once the home side never got them, a subsequent second-half loss of interest ensued. The more deserving team did win, but outside of the penalty areas the two sides were pretty much indistinguishable, and on a different day the outcome could easily have been so much different.
In short, this was such an odd, dull little affair that it fashioned more conundrums than it solved (if that was any).
With Ben Prince partnering Joel Jelen up front, Lee Campbell and Paul Fairclough in the middle of the park being flanked by Barry Wheller and Tim Jago (l and r respectively), and Kevin Schofield and Justin Shanahan starting between Andy McLaren and Paul Dickson (l and r respectively) in the defence, the home side did appear to have a reasonably strong line up. Indeed, for the majority of the first half they more than held their own against their guests, and might even have been the better of the two teams, if Keith Purcell’s lack of involvement in the game was any pointer. For while, at times, Convo looked as likely to threaten the Haroldians goal as Ryan Babel does to keep his gob shut in international week, there was little cause for complaint in their build-up play. Jelen busied himself against his brethren, Prince would often drop deep in search of a pass, the two middle men were energetic and full of running, while the two wingers complemented their fellow midfielders’ enthusiasm admirably.
But then, as is so often the way when Convocation look to have everything under control, it all went pear shaped. A low ball through the heart of their back line should have been dealt with easily by the out-rushing Purcell, but Shanahan hindered his ‘keeper slightly, and the clearance was poor and straight to an opponent. The man in possession still had a lot to do to take advantage of the mistake, but with inevitable accuracy he managed to lob the #1 and Shanahan (who had run in to cover the goal line) and find the top left-hand corner of the target from thirty yards out. There was nothing lucky about the finish, but you couldn’t help but feel that if the shooter tried it again another ninety-nine times, he would miss every one.
Jelen equalised for the home side five minutes later (even though the Second Team captain believed he should have been at home fasting for Ramadam-a-ding-dong), stroking the ball home from a narrow angle despite a Haroldians player almost sliding in and clearing off the line, but shortly after Jon Kearney had replaced Dickson at right back, the visitors were back in front. Schofield tried to be a bit too clever for his own good when he attempted to control a cross into the Convo penalty area with his chest, but his far-from-cushioned effort bounced too far and ran away from him, straight to an opponent who had run in unchecked past McLaren. He knocked the ball on and from about eight or ten yards out, smashed a shot past Purcell, who actually seemed to dive out of the way of the near-post drive.
It was a tad unfortunate for the goalkeeper, who had earlier made a fantastic save to his right to palm a shot from barely six yards out around the post, but otherwise that just about summed the first half up.
Making his long-anticipated return from injury, Sid Driver replaced McLaren at the interval, but Haroldians scored an instantly forgettable third sixty seconds after the restart and from there on it was always going to be an uphill battle for the home side. But to give credit where it’s due, they didn’t fall to pieces as looked possible, and as they have so many time previously, and continued to play reasonable football, albeit, without ever getting into a truly threatening position. One by one though, players gave up and drifted out of the game until, by the end, few seemed interested.
A red mist seemed to hover over the midfield, descending intermittently into the regions inhabited by Wheller and Campbell: the latter berating his team mates while snarling at every little touch from an opposition player, however legal; the former kicking lumps out of opponents, in almost comedic fashion, often for nothing more than having the temerity to dispossess him. Wheller’s far-from-surprising flare up – he has form with Haroldians, having picked a fight with one of their players last season – was followed by accusations of unsavoury name calling (see below*).
(Still, at least he wasn’t guilty of anything truly heinous, like dropping his kids off at nursery for example.)
The home side held out until the last twenty minutes before conceding a fourth, a goal that was as inexorable as night following day once Purcell instructed Kearney to get tight to the man he was supposed to be marking. There will be no prizes for guessing which Haroldians player nipped in at the Convo back post, seconds later, to head home a cross from out on the left flank.
The fifth and final goal, several minutes after that, was the one that exposed the home side’s defensive frailties more than any of the others. As the visiting players toyed with their hosts and passed the ball back and forth across the edge of their penalty area, the Convo back line seemed to clump together into a tight pack, following it as one, until by the time one of the Haroldians players finally slotted the thing under the advancing Purcell all that the defenders were missing were truncheons to wave and they could have passed themselves off as the Keystone Cops.
That’s as good as the game got, as the two teams then got down to the serious business of boring those desperate enough to be watching into submission. But, as intimated at in the opening paragraph, the football’s unlikely to be what this game will be remembered for in years to come. Having already been sent unto the breach with horrific images of McLaren’s “anal flap” burnt into his mind’s eye (as was everyone else – no wonder the game was so lacklustre), Schofield was then subjected to further orifice horrors at a second-half corner when one of the Haroldians players proved himself to be just as genteel as gentile. In a variation on the usual pushing and shoving at a penalty-area dead ball, the man in question attempted to engage his Convo counterpart in a spot of exploratory fisting, earning himself a stern warning of “we’ll have none of that” from referee Bargery, followed by a yellow card presumably for ‘ungentlemanly gibbering’.
Not long after that – the biggest of all the game’s bum notes – the final whistle brought the tedious proceedings to an end, and the chaps retired to the changing room and its mocking motivational signs that had been taped to the walls by some previous occupant. As if to rub salt into their wounds, the first one that they saw as they all walked in proclaimed: “mediocrity and failure is easy to achieve”.
Maybe that’s the forecast for the season.
Man Of The Match: Nobody stunk, but no one really stood out either. So Dickson gets this week's award, on the basis that, during his time on the pitch both teams scored a goal a piece (in other words – his words – he didn’t ‘lose’), and for the way he effortlessly managed to start the rumour that Wheller had directed racist slurs at the visitors, when he hadn’t* (you sometimes wonder how he sleeps at night). He’s not around for the next couple of weeks as he’s in Greece with the club chairman – it’s where they invented it, you know.
Move Of The Match: It was once said, tongue in cheek, that portly Micky Quinn was the ‘fastest player over a yard’. Well shove a thumb up Kevin Schofield’s rectum and you’ll soon see someone move quicker in such a short stretch.
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; McLaren, Shanahan, Schofield K, Dickson; Wheller, Campbell, Fairclough, Jago; Jelen, Prince; Subs: Driver, Kearney
Bobby Mimms reports
This game was to the Seconds’ football credentials, what waking up after a fantastic dream to discover that it’s the first Monday morning back in work after a two-week holiday would be to life in general: a bit of a fucking bummer, really. After all of last season’s exploits – the unbeaten run, the air of invincibility, the cup triumph – the new campaign was always going to struggle to live up to the players’ (and probably, commentators’) over-inflated expectations. But those unrealistic hopes, those windmills in the sky, are to forget one vital truth: this is Convocation, so what happened was almost certainly a freakish blip; for the sake of keeping a tenuous place at the table marked ‘sanity’, it is necessary for everyone to put spring’s adventures down to an enjoyable fluke, and return to the more conventional wisdom that the side from Wyncote are not going to start many games as favourites. Indeed, as they have proven time-and-again that they are a team who seem to consider the first half of any season as some sort of warm-up routine for its finale, it’s probably best not to expect too much more than half-decent performances and keeping score-lines respectable until, at least, after the Christmas decorations have been packed away again.
Be thankful that on Thursday Convo managed the latter half of that bargain, if nothing else. This was definitely a ‘first day back at school’ showing from the visitors – an easing back into the swing of things, without ever really breaking into a sweat or trying too hard. It was Pimms o’clock, and it showed. The Sealand Cup holders were toothless up front and only marginally better in midfield, and but for a competent display at the back, throughout the duration of the game, the end result could well have matched the horrors of last year’s seasonal debut.
There had been signs back in May and June that Convo’s trophy-winning star had burnt itself out, as they lost the last two games in that wearisome Chaps’ Derby trilogy. But while this defeat took the run to three, it was much more to do with a rustiness and a mal-condition that didn’t seem to affect their hosts, rather than campaign fatigue brought on, in no small measure, by playing the same opposition seven times in one season. It was clear that for most of the players, just getting on the pitch was more important than whatever they did on it.
In fairness though, at these incipient stages of a season that is hardly a cardinal sin, but by the time the tired visitors almost collapsed to the ground at the final whistle, a few having given their all just to keep their numerically disadvantaged opponents within sight, it didn’t feel like much of an endearing virtue either. Fourteen Convo players had made the oh-so-familiar journey to Moor Lane for this curtain raising encounter, while several others (including Barry Wheller and Ian Mitchell) became the first non-shows of the new season. Captain Paul Dickson started with himself at right back, and Simon O’Brien at the other end of a defence that was completed by Simon Lineton and John Littler, in between. Paul Fairclough and John Flamson began in the middle of the midfield, flanked by the two Richys, O’Brien and Schofield (left and right respectively), whilst Joel Jelen partnered a very relaxed-looking Andy Willis up front, and Keith Purcell donned the gloves. Waiting on the side lines were Tim Jago, Simon Stanforth and Jon Kearney – although the latter did guest for ten-man Ramblers for a couple of minutes while they waited for the last of their stragglers to arrive (and even managed to get a shot in on the Convo goal).
By the time those three substitutions made their bows, midway through the forty-minute first half, Convocation were two goals adrift and in danger of being seriously overwhelmed by the home side. The passing and moving of the Ramblers players made a mockery of the notion that they hadn’t played for two months, and another, of the flailing performances of their leaden-footed opponents. Constantly overlapping, looking for space, and playing the ball to team mates they were too much for the Convo midfield to handle, and only a solid display by the back line prevented the game from being over by the interval.
Lineton and Littler were far from infallible, but their occasional slips were never crucial and by-and-large they coped with what was thrown at them. They – and the rest of the Convo players – should probably have closed down the scorer of the first goal quicker, when his shot from the edge of the penalty area whistled through a throng of players and past an unsighted Purcell, but perhaps they can be forgiven for expecting the effort to have gotten some sort of deflection off one of the dozen men in between, on its way into the back of the net.
The left back O’Brien was another who could be relatively pleased with his evening’s work, and constantly made himself available for short(ish) goal kicks once it became obvious that there was little point expecting anything played into the midfield to be attacked or won by a red Convocation shirt. However, his persistence in trying to pass the ball out of defence, and more pertinently, through his namesake, did indirectly lead to the second Ramblers goal.
Despite Richy under-hitting everything with recidivistic abandon, Simon continued to ply his brother with passes up the flank when it might well have been wiser to just hoof the ball up the wing and give him something to run for. So when, just before the twenty-minute mark, the younger man played yet another awful return pass that was easily intercepted by a Ramblers player, it was almost inevitable that the deep cross into the visitors’ penalty area that followed, which forced Dickson to head a poor clearance straight to an opponent twelve yards out, saw the ball being whacked first time back past the defender and his static ‘keeper.
But if O’Brien could have done with getting behind his passes and making sure that they actually reached their intended recipients, at least he was trying to pick out players on his own side – for a time in the first period Flamson was easily Ramblers most creative outlet, setting up numerous attacks with some truly appalling misdirected balls meant for team mates (toe pokes that did stay on the ground). And when you consider that each of the midfield quartet seemed to have some sort of pathological aversion to heading the ball, casually allowing their opponents to win every Convo clearance or goal kick before the interval, it’s a wonder that the defence was only breached twice.
A lobbed effort when one-on-one with Purcell could so easily have made it three for the home side – the top of the crossbar came to Convocation’s rescue on that occasion – but, in fairness, as the half wore on the visitors did begin to look a little less like rabbits in the headlights. Stanforth came on at left wing, pushing Richy O’Brien up front to replace the ineffective Willis, while Kearney and Jago relieved the other OB and Dickson of their duties in the back line. (The Scotsman had earlier become enmeshed in a newly-erected wire fence while retrieving the ball from a wild Ramblers shot, and had been overheard suggesting that it would have given the late Harry Patch nightmares, as he did a passable impression of a Tommy caught up in No-Man’s Land barbed wire.)
At one point Richy Schofield played a pin-point cross-field diagonal ball for Jelen to chase towards the left-hand Ramblers corner flag (which ‘Porky’ somehow managed to be shoulder barged off, despite appearing to be twice the weight of his opponent), and not long before half time the younger O’Brien forced a good save out of the home side’s ‘keeper with a near-post flick from a low drive into the box from the same player.
But it still needed an excellently timed block from Lineton, and two good saves from Purcell – one a reflex to his right, the other low to his left – to keep the deficit to just two at the interval.
The individual performances after the break were greatly improved for Convocation, but strangely, the effect that they had on the overall team was one of disabling degeneration. Simon O’Brien and Richy Schofield moved into centre-midfield in an attempt to wrest control of proceedings from their Ramblers equivalents, but without either player showing any deterioration from their first-half execution, the partnership contrived to be even less effective than that of Fairclough and Flamson. They did combine for what was probably the (Convocation) move of the game, when the former played a delightful reverse pass from his own half for the latter to chase into the opposition penalty area (and then ruin all the good work by getting caught trying to manoeuvre the ball onto his right foot), but otherwise they couldn’t get to grips with the relentless passing and moving of their counterparts either.
It couldn’t have helped matters though, that their attacking options were nigh-on non existent. Lineton had been dispatched up front during the break, in a straight swap with Willis, but despite all of his huffing, puffing and hard work he proved to be just as ineffective, while Richy O’Brien had obviously come to the conclusion that the answer to the problem of his lacklustre passing was to avoid the ball at all costs so that he didn’t have to do any. And with Stanforth and Jago willing workers on the wings, but falling victims to regular Ramblers muggings, the ball couldn’t escape the Convo half for long.
The visitors’ back line must have felt like some sort of footballing King Canutes as they constantly tried to repel the tide of their hosts’ advances, but with unrelenting determination Ramblers would send the ball back towards the Convo goal every time it was half cleared, and it seemed only a matter of time before the defensive wall was submerged. But with Willis making several vital last-ditch headed interceptions, Littler tackling with all the strength and controlled aggression for which he is renowned, and Kearney and Flamson continually clearing their lines with the minimum of fuss (admittedly a thankless task, as the ball kept coming back anyway) they somehow held out. On the one occasion that it looked as though the home side had managed to wriggle through the red-shirted imbroglio, Purcell was quick off his line to make a fine save with an outstretched leg.
So regardless of all of their pressure and snazzy passing, Ramblers’ inability to break down the determined rearguard of their flagging opponents meant that they were limited to trying their luck from distance, and on that score they were found wanting. On numerous occasions balls were sent whizzing high over the Convo crossbar: twice, never to be seen again (despite search parties being dispatched into the neighbouring fields – annoyingly, both of the balls belonged to Convo as well), while the home side’s replacement spheres (flat) also spent a fair bit of time in the foliage, but beside the pitch. As they tried to work the peripheries of the playing surface in a way of going around the visitors’ back line, Ramblers’ passes began to find the adjacent trees and bushes with increasing regularity, and the sight of Dickson trying to retrieve the ball (having replaced Flamson at right back), scrabbling around furtively in the undergrowth like some ruddy-cheeked dogger, is an image that will take a while to expunge from the memory; a much more dignified Simon O’Brien managed to get bitten by the copious midges when he ventured into the greenery.
Fairclough (on up front for Richy O’Brien) should have pulled a goal back for Convo with five minutes to go, when Schofield played a delightful waist-height ball into the Ramblers six-yard box that only needed a touch from his team mate, but somehow the Wiganer fluffed his lines and failed to make any contact. At the other end the home side also had a gilt-edged chance to end the game on a high, when a looping cross from the right wing towards the back post eluded the half-arsed efforts of Dickson, and fell perfectly for an unmarked quartered shirt just behind him, ten yards out. The forward’s first time strike, back across the face of the goal, in the direction from where the ball had come, looked destined to make it three-nil to Ramblers, but Purcell’s reflexes don’t seem to have been dulled by the summer break, and despite being caught wrong footed the goalkeeper made a great save low to his left to retain the statistical stasis.
In the dying seconds of the game the referee – who up until then had had a quiet, uncomplicated evening – suffered some sort of Willisesque moment and booked (as in ‘yellow carded!) a Ramblers player for nothing more than questioning a decision. Having had enough of the defensive exertions at the back, and possibly the complete lack of an attack at the other end of the pitch, Littler went for a wander with the ball and eventually found himself at the side edge of the opposition penalty area where, much to his chagrin, he was easily expropriated. Exhausted by his push upfield, the centre-half could do little more than wrestle his dispossessor to the ground in a manner that Kendo Nagasaki would have been proud of, but bizarrely the official penalised the home player. Understandably amazed, the Ramblers man asked if it was a joke – hardly a Phil Collins moment – at which point the ref’s face turned a shade of purple that’s never been observed before, and he threatened to quash the impudence with a sending off. With the spectre of the whiskey/luger scenario lurking the home player didn’t push the situation, but it was a strangely heated end to an otherwise characteristically amicable affair.
So, with the exception of playing football in August, normality and relative sanity have returned to the Seconds’ proceedings. It’s nigh on impossible to read anything into this performance as the game itself is such an anomaly – akin to being woken in the middle of the night and then returning to sleep afterwards. You’re never really sure if it was real or just a dream, and you don’t give a toss either.
Man Of The Match: Simon O’Brien played well in the first half, as did Willis in the second (both men while in defence), and Purcell made a number of fine saves throughout the match. But Littler gets the nod for a strong, resolute display full of sangfroid, which shows why he is still one of the First Team’s most valuable players, even though he is gradually becoming one of the club’s elder statesmen.
Convocation (4-4-2): Purcell; O’Brien S, Lineton, Littler, Dickson; O’Brien R, Fairclough, Flamson, Schofield R; Jelen, Willis; Subs: Jago, Kearney, Stanforth
