Hitting the depths of non-league as Kidderminster look upwards

With Birmingham City playing on Good Friday and Easter Monday, I took the opportunity to watch some non-league football on Easter Saturday, and went along to watch Kidderminster Harriers take on Braintree Town. Here are my reflections on the game and the match-day experience. 

You know cabin fever has set in when going to watch non-league football sounds like a brilliant way to spend Easter Saturday. Beaten down by essays and living on my own for much of Easter, I went to check out Kidderminster Harriers, who have been in the news this week for being in a finer vein of form than Real Madrid.

For the uneducated, Kidderminster Harriers are Worcestershire's most premier football club, in a catchment area largely dominated by West Bromwich Albion. Their home ground, Aggborough, is more famous for its top quality food than for producing world class players, yet a quick look at the two stands on either flank would suggest this would not be a stadium out of place in the Football League.

This season, after an eight year absence, Harriers fans might just get their wish. Looking down the league table, there are some big names in this division. Hereford, Mansfield, Macclesfield, all have recent Football League pedigree. Without a meaningful promotion challenge in recent years, there can be little doubt that Kidderminster haven't punched their weight. This season, however, with Steve Burr in charge, Harriers are something of a juggernaut.

The league table, admittedly, has a strange look to it. Harriers lead second placed Mansfield by a solitary point, yet while Kidderminster have just four games left, Mansfield, on the other hand, have seven, symptomatic of this appalling winter. It looks to be a straight shoot-out between those two, with the loser of that race having to go through the play-offs.

If Kidderminster can grind out wins like this, then no-one will fancy them in that particular lottery. I cannot imagine this was anything like Harriers' best performance of the season, but whether you are Manchester United or Macclesfield Town, this stage of the season is all about winning.

The first forty minutes, against Braintree Town of Essex, marooned in mid-table, was a disjointed affair in which both defences were on top.

Or, in simple terms, it was utter shite.

The pitch, although hardly unplayable, bore all the scars of this most discontented of winters. The tension, with everyone aware of just how must-win this match was, filtered through onto the pitch. Mistakes were aplenty, and the final ball was non-existent.

Then, with five minutes remaining in the first half, Braintree got a deserved opening goal. Their bustling captain, Kenny Davis, got in front of his lackadaisical marker and buried a near post header. The thirty-seven travelling fans roared their approval in an audible Essex accent.

Half-time, and off I went to sample the famous Aggborough soup. Christ, what a treat. Simply the best £1.50 I've ever spent at a football ground, and one of the nicest soups I've ever tasted. No exaggeration. I don't want to get all patronising and talk about how lovely and quaint Kidderminster is as a ground, but this is the sort of hidden gem one discovers if you venture to parts of the country that only football fans could ever wish to visit.

Harriers were simply awful, and could only improve. Thankfully, they did. 'Marvellous' Marvin Johnson, a second half substitute, led a counter attack that top scorer Anthony Malbon merely had to tap home for the equaliser.

It's one of the quirks of this division that not every team has full-time players on its books. Harriers are full-time; Braintree are not. The disparity in fitness showed, in truth, and you sense that games such as this in the Blue Square Premier follow a similar pattern. Harriers were strikingly bigger and fitter than Braintree, and the centre-half pairing of Cheyenne Dunkley and Josh Gowling were a monster outfit.

Gowling, my Man of the Match (although the sponsors gave it to Johnson), resembled a cross between Marouane Fellaini, Don Goodman, and Curtis Davies. He was excellent, remaining on his feet, making inch-perfect interceptions, and keeping his side in it in the first half. It's not surprising to discover with a little bit of research that Gowling has over one hundred appearances in the Football League.

Three minutes after the equaliser, Harriers were in front. A dangerous cross into the 'corridor of uncertainty', an uncertain touch, and Braintree's Wells was putting the ball past his own 'keeper.

You could see the confidence and fitness drain from Braintree, and they mustered little threat for the remaining half-hour. With Mansfield picking up three points at nearby Tamworth, this was a huge win for Harriers, and if they win their remaining four games, they'll take some catching. One thing's for certain- they'll have to improve from this performance.

Vital Facts
Final score: Kidderminster Harriers 2-1 Braintree Town
Attendance: 2,266
My Man of the Match: Josh Gowling (Kidderminster).
Match Rating: 5 (five minutes of inspiration, 85 of perspiration)
Soup Rating: 10

I didn't want this to become a patronising piece on how wonderful and homely Kidderminster and non-league football is, nor did I want it to be a rant on how Sky Sports is 'killing the game' and we should all go and support our non-league team like Bear Grylls crossed with Lenin. However, it was pleasant to stand on the terraces, giving a non-league game a far better atmosphere than most of the Birmingham games I've been to this season.

Less charming was the announcement advertising 'Ladies Night' in a couple of weeks. Strippers, drag queens, and an Ann Summers raffle. I think I'll stick to watching matches against Braintree, thanks. 

The Ed Delusion

10,500 words to write to pass second year.

Three essays.

On my own in Leamington's coldest student house.

No dance classes.

It'll be fun, right?

I give you...

Retro Football

I recently entered the David Welch Student Sportswriters' Award 2013, in which I had to write three 800-word pieces on any topic related to sport. I didn't win, but my Director of Studies liked the articles. A victory of sorts. Anyway, here is the first of those articles. This article is probably the most similar to my regular style of blogging, but any feedback would be appreciated as I attempt to seamlessly move from blogging into vaguely serious writing. Much obliged. Ed.

One of the joys of the Internet, when it isn’t being populated by Gangnam Style and misguided tweets, is the wonderful glimpse into a radically different time that a younger man can glean by watching a few videos of archive football, and exploring the context.

It was a few weeks ago, when I was reading about the intense Leeds v Chelsea rivalry of decades past, prior to their Capital One Cup clash, that I typed into the search filter the two words that anyone who grew up in the 1970s will be familiar with: ‘Dirty Leeds’.

            The entry that was thrown up was an FA Cup third round match from 1978, played between Manchester City and Jimmy Armfield’s Leeds at Elland Road. Admittedly, being fascinated by David Peace’s extraordinary novel, The Damned United, I was slightly disappointed not to stumble upon a relic from the Don Revie Empire that, thanks to Peace, feels so familiar. Nonetheless, what a world I encountered! I felt like Aeneas travelling to football’s Underworld.

            Six seconds into the seven-minute video, it’s quite clear we’re not in 2013 anymore, Toto. Gordon McQueen brings down a Manchester City forward with a tackle that is reminiscent of an uncontrollably frustrated nine-year-old in the playground. Five-match ban, it must be! He’s not given it! The evocative tones of Barry Davies ring out.

            ‘That surprises me, but the referee’s view is better than mine’.

            Already it’s hard not to laugh, yet be strangely admiring of the game. For a generation that, due to the gratuitous violence of films and video games, is supposed to be immune to the shock-factor, it’s quite an adventure to stumble upon a match of Association Football featuring the Brobdingnagian Leeds United of the 1970s.

 I should have known that things wouldn’t be quite as they seemed. For a start, the goalkeepers weren’t wearing gloves. In a match played in January. Like I said, it’s hard not to be admiring.

A minute later, the grainy video, like a war film with the soundtrack performed by Barry Davies, ratchets up another notch. McQueen punches his own goal-keeper, Peter Harvey, square in the jaw.

You can almost see the referee saying ‘that’s your first warning’. I’m not so sure Howard Webb would be so lenient.

Not long after Manchester City scramble (how else?) into a two-goal lead, an almighty pitch invasion occurs. It doesn’t seem to have the same violence and menace of pitch invasions performed in anger in the twenty-first century, nor does it have the same joyous outpouring of those carried out in celebration. It’s almost a Carry On Football approach to getting the game stopped, hundreds of parkas frivolously filling the pitch. And then the obligatory horse rides on.

This is what YouTube was made for. It’s not just an insight into the raucous behaviour of football fans and players alike in the era; it’s a history lesson for those who study the game. Full-backs don’t simply ‘jockey’ their winger into the corner in the manner of today, they dive straight in. The pace of the turnover from defence into attack is at times frightening. And the back-passes! The first time I watched The Big Match Revisited with my father, I ended up inadvertently blurting out my shock at the unpunished back-passes, until I bashfully discovered their outlawing in 1992.

Meanwhile, back with the pitch invasion and facing increasing levels of parkas, the referee wanders over to the side of the pitch. He takes up the PA’s microphone. Maybe he’s going to sing? The Wings’ Mull of Kintyre was number one at the time. That might appease the hordes of parkas. Alas, no. He implores them all to get back in the stands, and after a while, the video informs us, they do. It’s a pitch invasion with a touch of respectfulness.

The match ends, thankfully, without another mention of Gordon McQueen, and the venture into 1978 sadly ends there. But what good is this without context?

I turn my attentions to that other great font of knowledge for any slightly obsessive football fan, Wikipedia, and follow the rest of the rounds with a few clicks of the computer mouse. Manchester City were knocked out in the next round, which seems to make my attention on the match at Elland Road disappointingly futile.

Scanning to the bottom, Ipswich Town were the winners of that FA Cup. Their first ever, and, to date, only triumph. Another nugget of trivia that sports fans obsess over like no other.

After writing up my trip down memory lane, I check the scores on 2013’s FA Cup (with Budweiser) Third Round Saturday. Leeds are drawing 1-1 with Birmingham in the nondescript tie of the round.

Reliving the 1978 FA Cup easily beats living in the present.

The Continued Family Love Affair with Cheltenham

Everyone who knows me will know of my family's borderline obsession with Birmingham City, and football in general. Most of you will know about our love for cricket, and the days spent at New Road and Edgbaston with friends and family respectively. But it's a little known fact that horse-racing is a love that has been passed down from generation to generation, and on the eve of my first trip to the Cheltenham Festival, it seemed appropriate that I should write this blog on some of the stories that have made me laugh and cry so much over the years, the little anecdotes that make each family what it is.

I won't pretend to be an expert on horse-racing, first of all, lest you all start hanging on my every word for tips and subsequently slashing my tyres when it falls at the first hurdle. My gambling expertise doesn't go much beyond following Cornelius Lysaght on Twitter and picking a horse called Franklin Roosevelt on the day that I'd spent writing an essay on the Presidency (it won, by the way. One in the eye for the over-analysts). That honour went to my Dad. He always insisted his specialist subject, should he ever go on Mastermind, would be the Cheltenham Gold Cup, or horse-racing in general. A subject this broad would no doubt have put to shame Myleene Klass's efforts at answering posers on Sex and the City (Series Two). Not that he ever really used his knowledge for financial gain. He'd bet on the Grand National, out of tradition (although he was always fairly disdainful of its merits as a race), and of course, any day he went to the races, usually once a year. He followed jockeys, and tended to bet on them, as opposed to the horse. The up-and-comers. It was telling, in fact, that we ran a donation for the Injured Jockeys Fund at his funeral, for which we received a beautiful card thanking us.

A delicate subject, but other members of my family have fallen foul of the curse of horse-racing, something which my Dad stayed well clear of. He watched it simply for pleasure, interest, and, what's more, to doctor the work of Rudyard Kipling, he 'never breathed a word about his winnings'. That was to us anyway...

'How did you do today?'
'Broke even, really'.

It was always slightly baffling when, therefore, the next fortnight he might have taken us out for dinner.

His love for horse-racing, as far as I know, stemmed from my Great Uncle Mick, the eccentric fella with the flat cap who's looked out for us immeasurably over the last two years. At 82 (I think), he still seems to know the best tip for the 3:10 at Chepstow, usually thanks to his mate down at the fish market. And to think you all thought I was from thoroughly middle class stock...

My Dad also always said that the first thing he'd do if he won the lottery would be to buy a racehorse. Not that this would have been our family's first foray into owning a four-legged running thing, as the following anecdote will display. I already know it's many of my friends' favourite anecdotes ever, so bear with me if you've heard it before.

Mick: 'Have I told you about the time me and your Dad and some friends got a really highly regarded greyhound over from Ireland between us and ran it over here?'
Me: 'I don't think so... is this going to be another made up story, like Mr Isles who shaved the cat?'
Mick: 'Well, basically, we brought it over for its first race, and it's really sad but... well, in Ireland it had been used to running on straight tracks... on its first race on an oval track, it kept on running and went straight into the wall at the end'.

The best thing about that story is I have absolutely no idea if it's true or not.

On what I think was my thirteenth birthday, my Dad took me to Warwick races, where we proceeded to lose every single race. He reminisced further that day.

Great Uncle Mick- Conman Extraordinaire and Scourge of Greyhounds

Dad: 'There's the trainers' car park... Mick always looked like a trainer in his flat cap so almost every time we came here we just got him to tip the peak of his cap, say 'cheers mate' to the attendant and got in for free.'
Me: 'We're not doing that today are we?'
Dad: 'I've got a flat cap in the boot to be fair...'

It's some coincidence that my grandparents, on my Mum's side, live a stone's throw from Cheltenham Races. - a neatness that knits this wonderful family affair together. The local knowledge of the area has led to my Nan and her friends either taking in Irish lodgers in their beautiful Cotswold village, or gladly informing with pride anyone brave enough to ask for a short-cut to the races. On his first trip to their new house, I'm told my Dad looked out the window and did a little jig of childish glee when he surveyed the Cotswolds and pointed at the Grandstand far in the distance. From then on, he would always take the week of the Cheltenham Festival off work, even if it was just to sit in front of the telly.

A great photo of my Dad in amongst the throng- I'm assured my Mum wasn't checking how much he was putting on...

Horse-racing gets a lot of bad press, especially with a spate of recent Grand National deaths, with the race regrettably often coinciding with unusually hot days. But accidents do happen in almost every sport, and every walk of life. The adulation and love these horses receive almost makes up for those tragedies, and to have the sight of a true thorough-bred galloping down the home strait tarnished, or even taken away, would be a great shame to all those race-goers: a strange mix of shady bettors, wealthy owners and trainers, hard-working stable-hands doing it for the love of the horse, and of course those looking to make a quick buck or just have a right old laugh.

The Times' Simon Barnes, probably the finest sports journalist around (although he has recently turned his hand more to nature articles, in my view a shame), wrote a wonderfully powerful piece in the wake of the tiresome horse-meat scandal about why the nation was in such a pitchfork-wielding state. It was a love for horses that had been butchered- the noble steed, the beautiful thorough-bred- and the line had been crossed. It explains why there has been so much uproar in certain circles as to why Kauto Star, two-time Gold Cup winner, won't be allowed to live out his retirement in glorious, studding peace, and instead must be made to traipse down to the other end of the country as little more than a show-pony.

It's fitting, really, that in a sport where winning and losing can have such high stakes, I 'won' my tickets (VIP!) for tomorrow's day of racing in a competition on Twitter. I doubt I'll sleep tonight, and am immensely looking forward to taking a good friend of mine with me. He won't mind me saying that if my Dad was still around, he'd have knocked Matt over in the rush to take the ticket, there with his boots black and a copy of the Racing Post under his arm. Indeed, I felt a very strange twinge when I won the tickets, desperate to text that extra person my good news.

Doubtless there'll be one or two tears shed by this blogger when the famous Cheltenham roar rises up, as the curtain lifts on another year of 'The Greatest Show on Turf'.