About Me

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Hammersmith, London, United Kingdom
I'm a director of Maidenhead United Football Club. For ten seasons one of my roles at the club was to produce the match programme. The aim of this blog was to write football related articles for publication in the match programme. In particular I like to write about the representation of football in popular culture, specifically music, film/TV and literature. I also write about matches I attend which generally feature Maidenhead United.

Sunday 12 December 2010

Dover hangover

Great afternoon in Kent yesterday. I eschewed the modern rapidity of High Speed one preferring to take the leisurely stopping service to the coast, which allowed me to alight at Kearsney and take a pleasant walk to Crabble through the chocolate box village of River.  With the sun shining, the laidback rural idyll was complemented with the smell of a Camberwell carrot wafting out of one of the cottages on the banks of the River  Dour.
This proved to be a fitting metaphor for an entertaining game played at a lilting tempo which held the attention throughout.  Although all the goals came in a mad thirteen minute spell at the end, if they had been more evenly spread it would have only been a more accurate reflection of the game.
With Maidenhead missing the talents of Bobby Behzadi, Mark Nisbet and Will Hendry through suspension, this outcome was hardly what the travelling Magpies had expected with opponents Dover playing their first home game since beating Aldershot in Kent in the FA Cup.  Perhaps all the pre match talk of air travel to the next round, along with announcements about ticket sales went to the players heads and contributed to an FA Cup hangover as they scarcely looked like a team that had between two Football League teams in recent weeks.    Certainly the locals seemed to anticpate this with over 3,000 going missing in the fortnight since the Cup shock to produce a season's low crowd of 754. Still mustn't grumble as this entertaining game played out in front of Crabble's countryside backdrop raised the spirits and gave me hope that I will see the team in red deliver against opponents in Black & White for the third Saturday running next weekend.

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