football rambles

 Saturday saw me take a trip with Dean to Top Fields in Hitchin to see the Southern Premier Central match between Hitchin and Kettering. After seeing Maidstone beat Ipswich in Molly Malone's near the station we made our way to the ground. I had been to Hitchin before and it is an impressive ground and being able to race their lineage back to 1865 makes them amongst the oldest teams in the world. They started off the season pretty well, but a run of 5 (now 6 ) injuries has seen them start to plummet down the table, although they still are comfortable mid-table. Speaking to locals this seemed to be due to the fact that they have an ever growing injury list and more youngsters are having to be recruited to the first team. Kettering on the other hand have been facing a relegation struggle, however the result today did manage to raise them out of the relegation places. With Nuneaton Borough going bankrupt this week too there are question marks over what will happen to the teams at the b...

Yesterday we went to see Kettering Town play Cambridge United, so I thought it might be good to look at a club who have hit the headlines on several occassions over the last few years. Poppies chairman Imraan Ladak must be saddened to see that Mark Cooper will be moving to replace Darren Ferguson in his role of manager at Peterborough. Especially as Cooper got Kettering promoted from the Conference North and has now fired them to the higher echelons of the Conference National. This was after a couple of ill fated managers who seemed like pblicity stunts filling the role at Rockingham Park with both ex player Ron Atkinson and Paul Gascoigne failing to ignite anything on the field. In fact the 39 days that Gazza was in charge at Kettering were perhaps some of the most bizarre and he was finall made to quit after one bottle of booze too many. A little known fact is that Kettering are one of the oldest clubs in the World being formed in 1872. They climbed through 12 divisions to reach the ...

Yesterday me and Sean finally got to what many others wouldn't term as proper football, but when you have suffered so many games at the Unwin, it's definitely what we would term proper football. The game was Cambridge United v Kettering and it was an entertaining game even if the result and the weather conditions weren't exactly ideal. Just before the game started I saw a few bos with Sky cameras and someone who looked like Barry the barstad Fry stood out side the place for the suits. Now Barry Fry is not the most popular person at Cambridge United, so I took no notice and thought that I had been mistaken. However, it turns out that it was the last game in charge of Kettering for manager Mark Cooper, who will be joining Barry and the boys at the not very posh Peterborough club as of today. Anyway, his team gave him a fairly decent send off and went 1-0 up on 90 seconds with an own goal bouncing over the unfortunate Danny Potter's head. Cambridge tried to hit back at Ket...