It's Murder, On The Orient Express ....

[Ally]

Village of the Jammed.

[cromwell]

the self-styled “Village of The Jammed”

i

Boscombe Polonia, what a nice name. 5-5! You don't see many of those.

And you don't see many 9-3's either! You're a goal magnet Os!

[Kaz]

Village of the Jammed.

[TheOstrich]

27/04 –After last week’s goal-fest, back to Earth on Easter Monday. I had been thinking of a visit to Somerset League Castle Cary but they confirmed early that their game was postponed, so I settled for a jaunt “up the road” to Warminster Town. The trouble is, the “road” in question is the A350 (Poole/Bournemouth to the M4 motorway and points north), and I am always a bit concerned as to how busy it might me with holiday traffic – certainly in the past I’ve been involved in long queues trying to get out onto it at Longbridge Deverill, my normal route.

So I planned an off-the-cuff long detour round country lanes to emerge on the A350 at about the only set of traffic lights on it between the coast and Chippenham – the junction with the Mere to Hindon B road. After a tortuous journey, I arrived at the lights, turned left with a sigh of relief – and found the A350 completely deserted! I drove in solitary splendour up to Warminster and arrived about one and half hours before kick-off, but perhaps that was not a bad thing because I got one of the last three remaining parking spaces on the road outside the ground. That was nothing to do with Warminster’s #makeit 200 campaign (their usual attendance is often less than half that) and everything to do with the fact it was a gloriously sunny afternoon and everyone was down in the adjacent town park!

The game itself between two middle of the table sides was nothing to write home about, 88 minutes of fairly inconsequential stuff sandwiching a purple patch of two goals in two minutes just before half-time, Warminster full-back Harry Barnes curling a lovely direct free kick away from the keeper and into the top corner of the net, and Devizes full back Matt Russell scoring an almost identical goal from open play just a minute later.

Western League Division 1 (Step 6): Warminster Town 1 Devizes Town 1
Admission: just £2.50 for an Ancient Ostrich and £1 for a decent programme.
Refreshments: decent batch of freshly cooked chips at half time £1
Attendance: announced as 237! There were indeed a lot of folk there, but that’s higher than I would have personally thought …..

Saturday brought Storm Hannah, and a very interesting game just over the border in Somerset. We’ve been intermittently following the fortunes of Sherborne RFC this season, who have carried all before them in storming to the Southern Counties South championship. Well, two weeks ago, they needed to win their final match to make it a 100% record in league games – but travelled to second-place Frome and lost 23-20! Commiserations to Sherborne, but that set me up nicely with Frome achieving home ground advantage in a winner-takes-all promotion play-off game against the Southern Counties North runners-up, Buckingham RFC.

So, off to Gypsy Lane, avoiding at least three large branches blocking the carriageway en-route , for my first visit to the ground. It’s not easy to get at, involving travelling the length of the town’s bypass, and cutting back in through a rabbit-warren of a large housing estate before exiting back into the countryside. Not knowing what sort of crowd they’d get, I made the traditional early arrival, only to find, rather disconcertingly, a lot of cars leaving the ground in convoy, but that turned out to be to do with the Juniors who’s been playing in the morning.

It’s a large campus with either 4 or 5 subsidiary pitches (I counted 9 sets of goalposts! ) and the main pitch in front of the clubhouse, which looked large on the outside but was quite pokey on the inside, although illusions of size might have been distorted by the 150 or so folk queuing in front of the bar ! I forsook that to investigate the “Pasta and Chilli Room”, which was serving neither pasta nor chilli, just teas and possibly more beer, and also playing host to the local radio DJ and his sound system (plaintive quote: “Does anyone actually know the rules of rugby?”, to which I would think most rugby fans might have a bit of sympathy. So I finished up outside, bellowing over the 100-decibel Indie Music mix at the people running the barbeque for something hot and tasty.

For the game, I wandered round the far side of the pitch to avoid the intermittent glare of the sun, but promptly encountered another hazard – the wind was gusting so strong that the Ostrich twice nearly lost his spectacles!! However, being on the far side of the pitch meant that I could at least now see the electronic score-board and timer that was situated up in the clubhouse rafters, and not visible to anyone on the main side of the ground .

Frome started the encounter like a train, and from the outset employed a hard-running, close-passing forward game that had Buckingham at full stretch. After a lengthy siege, they did eventually score a try on the half-hour mark, and wisely notched a penalty just before the break to turn around 10-0 up. Buckingham upped their game in the second half and looked more of an attacking side – again wisely, half way through the final period, they opted for a fairly long-range kick at goal rather than finding touch; everyone around me thought they should have gone for touch to get a better position, but my feeling was getting on the board, and getting within one score of Frome’s tally with 20-odd minutes to go, was a pretty astute psychological move. And they duly scored it to make it 10-3.

Frome kept pressing but handling errors were slowly starting to creep in, and the Buckingham defence was pulling off some excellent saving tackles when they needed to. With 10 minutes or so left, Buckingham scored (and converted) the crucial try to level the scores, and all of a sudden extra-time started looming! But then, with just two minutes left, a disastrous mistake by Frome, giving away an easy penalty in front of the posts for Buckingham to nudge in front 10-13. In added time for stoppages, Frome started panicking – two awfully mis-placed kicks for touch gave possession back to Buckingham, and they capitalised by scoring two late, late tries to win the game 10-23 – a scoreline that ultimately was no reflection at all of the game we’d just witnessed!

Southern Counties Divisional Play-Off 2018/19: Frome RFC 10 Buckingham RFC 23
Admission free and no programme.
Refreshments: Bellowing incomprehensibly at the barbeque for a hot-dog rewarded me with a boerewors (£2.50)! No, I had no idea either! Internet research shows it’s a South African Cumberland-type sausage. Strange taste; it’s supposed to be beef, but it could have been impala or even Ostrich for all I knew ….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boerewors
Attendance: I walked round the ground at half-time for a bit of entertainment, as I was never going to get anywhere near the bar, and came up with 687, give or take 50 or so either way ....

[cromwell]

Warminster sounds reasonable, especially the chips.

Bad luck on Sherborne. It can happen like that. Go hard attacking and you get caught by the counter when you lose possession. Two late tries sounds hard on them.

I hope there have been no aftereffects from the South African banger!

[TheOstrich]

04/05/19 – the Ostrich’s footie season is now inexorably winding down, and it has been very much a hit-and miss affair this year with some dubiously noticeable highlights such as the storm-soaked Hamble-le-Rice fiasco, and the signalling-failure dominated trip, through gritted teeth, to Barnes Rugby Club.

The bird’s penultimate game on Saturday saw Wincanton Town Reserves take on Chickerell United. Wincanton seem to have an ongoing identity crisis as no-one knows if they are the Winkies, the Wasps, the Yellow and Blacks or the Black and Yellows! Nevertheless, rolling up with enough time to divert to Stalbridge should there be any problems, I was reassured by the cheery groundsman bellowing above the noise of his motor mower that the match was definitely on, despite the fact the goal nets weren’t in place. Chickerell arrived not long afterwards, or at least several cars and a Heating and Plumbing van from Weymouth did; Chickerell is just along the Chesil Beach coastline in the direction of Abbotsbury. The pitch looked in pretty good nick (which is a first for Wincanton ) but a foray into the Sports Centre found that they’d removed the two 50p bag of sweets machines.

We started entertainingly with a series of missed chances, largely by the visitors, but that gave me some hope that there would at least be some goals in it. Chickerell had this strange knack of firing dangerous balls into the home penalty area, only to then do the defenders’ jobs for them and clear the balls out of the danger area themselves. That said, the Chickens took a 10m lead, their no.4 directing a neat header at the far post back over the keeper into the net, and doubled it with a neat move into the penalty area wrong-footing the Winkies defence.

My Yorkshire-based friend and fellow footie fanatic P. has recently coined an acronym “NHITSH” meaning “Nothing Happened In The Second Half” and we looked destined for that today as Wincanton, for all their hard work, never looked like scoring, but on 69m, they did pull one back through an unfortunate own goal – the Chicks no.4 stretched to clear a hopeful looking low ball into the box and only succeeded in looping it high over his own keeper’s head to fall back just under the bar. Chickerell made the game safe with a third goal after 78m, a defensive error, but then the game ended in the most bewildering of circumstances with a burst of three goals in three minutes, followed immediately by the referee blowing up for full time (as we subsequently pointed out to him) some 5 minutes early!

And on that note, I think it is now time to end Ossie’s seasonal account, albeit slightly early! I have only one further fixture planned – last year there was a huge raft of previously-postponed games which were played in May (including memorably seven home games for Trowbridge Town ) but that’s not the case this year as the winter weather has by-and-large been kind. It’s been a funny old season, what with the rail strikes and last minute venue-changes, but there we are.

And after all that - I never did get to see Leyton Orient!

Dorset Senior League (Step 8): Wincanton Town Reserves 2 Chickerell United 5
Admission free and no programme
Refreshments: Anticipating the Sports Centre café wouldn’t open for a Reserves match, I was pre-armed with a slice of Gala Pie from the butchers in Gillingham High Street for 99p. Mind you, I thought Gala Pie had to have a hard-boiled egg in it. Correct me if I’m wrong!
Attendance: 15

[Kaz]

Thanks so much for all of these "blogs" Ossie, so funny and informative Looking forward to next season

[cromwell]

Well that sounds an entertaining match Os, even if it was a short one.
Thanks for the reports, they are always a good read and I look forward to them.
Leyton Orient.
That puts me in mind of a line from the old sitcom Citizen Smith of Tooting Liberation Front fame.
Kevin "Wolfie, we could travel the world, we could see the Orient!".
Wolfie "Why, who they playin'?"...