Full marks then to Woking who realised, very late last week, that Watford were sending their reserves, not the Premiership squad, for their advertised friendly, and hurriedly reduced the admission fee from £15 to £10. And indeed, Westbury United were advertising today’s game against Swindon Town as if it were a full-blooded affair, but I picked up a rumour from elsewhere that it was going to be Swindon’s Under 18 Development squad .....Anyway, having spent most of yesterday evening trying to plot a roundabout route from here to Westbury avoiding as many main roads as possible (the A350 through that town is a bit of a north – south holiday route if you’re heading to Purbeck or Bournemouth), the whole project was suddenly ejected straight out of the window when a late trawl of local clubs’ fixtures suddenly produced a fair old surprise
– Shepton Mallet were hosting a South West Peninsula League side, Torpoint Athletic who reside just over on the Cornish side of the River Tamar, across from Plymouth. Now why on earth a SWPL club were prepared to make a 215 mile round trip for a friendly, I have no idea, and neither , strangely, did any of the Shepton officials I spoke to, including the manager, who replied “don’t ask me, I’m just the coach – I leave all that to the committee!” 
Because of their geographical location, South West Peninsula League clubs (Cornwall and Devon) rarely venture off their own patch and don’t tend to look for promotion to higher leagues because of the travelling. They do enter the FA Cup and FA Vase competitions (and generally perform quite well against sides outside their region) but opportunities to see teams from this league are as rare as hens’ teeth. So, a hasty revision of the Ostrich’s plans, and a trip over the Somerset border to The Playing Fields, Old Wells Road, which turned out to be located up a track in the middle of an estate on the west side of town.
Shepton Mallet’s ground looked spruce and tidy, ready for the new season. It’s in an attractive setting, surrounded, but not hemmed in, by tall fir trees (and one huge sweet chestnut) with the main buildings painted to highlight the club colours of black and white. There’s three eclectic stands of varying age – The Dean Gregory Memorial Stand, the Tony Wolff Memorial Pavilion, and a slightly decrepit, unnamed one on the half way line which Ossie set up shop in. It rained consistently throughout the match, with intensity varying between drizzle and downpour, so the broken guttering didn’t help!
Nor did the 8 year old brats pounding backwards and forwards at the back of the stand, giggling hysterically 
, but there you go.Despite these tribulations, it was a pretty good game for the spectator. Both sides played competitively; it could have been a cup tie rather than a mere friendly. Chances abounded at either end, and with more than a few sitters missed, a 1-1 draw was an eminently fair result. Torpoint’s no.9, who scored a second-half equaliser, celebrated with a long knee-slide on the wet turf that I shouldn’t think endeared him particularly with the groundsman.
A friendly club, Shepton Mallet, and I think I’ll be back there again before too long.Pre-season Friendly: Shepton Mallet 1 Torpoint Athletic 1
£3 admission, no programme, 70p for a Mars bar, £2 for an orange J2O, and £3.80 for a Shepton Whopper (cheeseburger, bacon, onion and chips in a large bap!), attendance 48.
The inclement weather lasted the first 5 miles or so of the journey, but by the time I was motoring through Mere, the sun was out. What should have been a reasonably straightforward journey ground to a halt on the Frome by-pass with a mile-long tailback through roadworks and temporary traffic-lights, and then a key road closure in Frome itself left me to find my own way round it and back onto the Radstock road, an exercise which lost me 20-30 minutes overall. No further problems were encountered, however, and I drove down the track into the football club’s spacious carpark well in time for a 2:30 kick-off. Like last week, it was a bit perturbing to find the place virtually deserted but the clubhouse was open, the pasties were hot, and shortly after I settled down, the opposition arrived in a 50-seater coach with tales of getting lost on the motorway and having to drive through the centre of Bristol - and promptly headed for the bar! 
Eventually two more were rounded up, one went on the bench, and an Afan player was seconded into the home team’s starting line-up (we wondered why one player on Bishop Sutton’s team was wearing red socks when all the rest of the team were yellow – then we realised what had happened!). For the first half hour, it was a pretty evenly-contested game, then Afan’s Josh Webber got clean through the middle and clinically shot past the keeper. One minute later, Jones repeated the feat! And the star striker scored his second before half-time with a tap in.
, with one faction wanting to sell at £3 a pop, while others were horrified at a price exceeding £2. I left them debating the relative merits of £2.30 or £2.50 …. 
. Free kick just outside the area, the no.9 received permission from the referee to take it quickly, and lobbed it unchallenged into the net while the Downton goalie was still trying to organise his defensive wall. Boy was that goalkeeper not a happy bunny!