football rambles

January 2013 tunes by jim_bomb on Grooveshark Nothing to with football but here is what I have been listening to this month. 1 I am Kloot - Over my shoulder I haven't listened to this band for a while, but for some reason I had a run on them this month. I think that they have a new album out, but this is taken from 'Gods and Monsters' 2 Charles De Goal - Synchro Track from the French post rock band who are still going strong after 33 years. 3 The Bodines - Synchro C86 band who made some nice tunes, but never got much commercial success even by C86 standards 4 Metro Luminal - Ainult Rottidele An Estonian punk rock ditty that translates as 'Only Rats' 5 Aphex Twin - Didgeridoo A bit of what they call IDM nowadays from back in the day 6 Tequilajazzz - Воздушный шар A song called 'Hot air balloon' by one of my favourite Russian indie rock bands 7 Mixel Pixel - You're the kind of girl Poppy track from New York weirdos 8 We are Scien

The cold snap finally finished and despite a few games in the area being off because of waterlogged pitch the hard work at Ely on Saturday finally paid dividends even if it didn't quite work out on Saturday. Finally the much awaited 4th round match of the FA Vase against Spalding United was on. Ely got off to a good start and started off by taking the game to the visitors. Attack was definitely going to be the best way forward for the Robins, as although their opponents play in a league at the same level most of their players had experience at a higher level and their budget is about ten times more than Ely's. The Robins' first chance came on 6 minutes when Austen Diaper put the ball just over the bar. On 10 minutes he had the ball in the back of the net when a well worked move saw Ely take the lead. Ely continued to dominate for the first 20 minutes, but a misplaced back pass from Darren Coe saw Ely put under pressure for the first time. After this they lost the moment

I am beginning to regret not going to Thetford a couple of weeks ago, as since then there has been no football at all locally. Football God has been punishing me with a vengeance. On that day Ely drew with CRC away, Thetford went down to Wisbech and King's Lynn crashed out of the FA Trophy against Southport. There hasn't been any local football since then after freezing conditions, snow and now probably waterlogged pitches nothing has been going on. The vase game between Ely and Spalding was off last week and despite a gargantuan effort to get the game on today it's now been postponed until Tuesday. I really hope that they can get it on on Tuesday, as next Saturday will also be football-less as I'm at work. Things have been going from bad to worse at Villa too. After surrendering a 2-0 lead to draw 2-2 with West Brom, they crashed out of the League Cup against Bradford and then lost 2-1 to Millwall in the FA Cup last night. It certainly looks like it will be the Cha

Next up at the Unwin Ground, if the weather permits are Spalding United in the FA Vase. It is going to be one of the biggest games in Ely's history after they reached the 4th round for the first time ever. Hopefully there will be a big crowd and some of the people who turn up will actually bother turning up to some other games. Anyway, that's enough of that, as it's supposed to be a look at Spalding United. The Tulips (their nickname reminds me of C86 types 'the Fat Tulips')play in the United Counties League, which to be honest is a bit stronger than the Eastern Counties, and are currently second. They are probably favourites for the tie and their officials at the Histon game seemed quite confident despite a good performance by the Robins. The club were formed in 1921 as Spalding Town and started life out, like a lot of teams in the UCL, in the Peterborough and District League. In 1954 they tried to join the Eastern Counties League, but weren't accepted. Ho

It's not often that I miss a chance to watch some football, but in an uncharacteristic sign of wimpiness,that's exactly what I did on Saturday. I went to kids' football in the morning and it was bloody freezing, so I shelved my plans, which may have been foolish. After complaining about the lack of football recently due to weather and work I had the choice of a couple of games on Saturday. The most logical one was CRC V Ely at the Shabby Abbey. However, there wasn't the chance of a lift and the thought of messing around in Cambridge on a day when I wasn't getting paid to mess around in Cambridge was a bit off-putting. The other option and was to go to Thetford for the first time this season, but with the mercury hovering around zero and the fact that they were playing Wisbech, who were likely to win didn't exactly excite me either. Ely drew 2-2 and Thetford lost 4-1. It might have been a mistake missing out on the opportunity to go, as the snow has now started t

Ely were back in action at the Unwin last night when they took on Histon in the Cambridgeshire Invitation Cup. The Robins won the cup last season, so they were given a bye all the way to the quarter final where they were drawn at home to the Blue Square North team. It was always going to be a hard game and Ely as they are accustomed to doing made heavy work of the cup tie. Put it this way I spent ages there last night, but as I hadn't been to a match at the Unwin for 2 months, mainly due to work and the weather I couldn't complain. The first 15 minutes were a pretty uneventful affair and not much happened. Ely had the better of it and the Histon defence seemed to be determined to make things difficult for themselves, but there were no real chances. The first real chance came on 18 minutes when Josh Bridgeman had a couple of shots cut out, but made sure with the third shot as he put the ball into the back of the net to give Ely the lead. Ely seemed content to contain Histon

A few years ago when I wasn't living in Britain, I wrote about fanzines and the importance they had played and speculated about their decline: (http://footballrambles.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/football-culture-fanzine-culture.html) However since my return I hadn't bought a fanzine until yesterday. Back in the day I read them pretty religiously and never missed a copy of 'Heroes and Villains' or later 'Never loved Ellis'. In fact I went as far as to write my dissertation on it and with the social change that was going on in football they had an important role to play culturally as a whole or dealt with issues affecting certain clubs, i.e. 'The Mag' (Newcastle), 'Not the View' (Celtic) and 'King of the Kippax' (Manchester City) or were just plainly hilarious 'A love Supreme' (Sunderland), 'Forever Blowing Bubbles' (West Ham) and 'Bernard of the Bantams' (Bradford City). Nowadays football fanzines are less in evidence

Yesterday we went to see Villa take on Ipswich in the FA Cup. Things haven't been great for Villa of late, so the wisdom of getting the tickets after Villa won at Anfield looked like we might have wasted our money. It wasn't the ticket prices that were a problem, but the price of getting their by train, as train tickets went up in price again. Anyway, the morning started off on a train full of Norwich fans, who had got on the pop early in the morning. We had thought that we would have had to share a train with the Ipswich fans, but the Norwich fans had decided to get an early start despite the 3 o'clock kick off and thankfully things were a lot less eventful once they got off at Peterborough. That said my phone gave up at Peterborough, so finding out the football news from Ely was put on hold, but never mind. We were in the North Stand Lower, a place in the ground I've never been in the ground before. In the old days I had a season for the Holte End and since the N

The first professional football team in Washington DC were the Washington Darts. They were originally formed as Washington Britannica in 1963 by Scottish immigrant Norman Sutherland. In 1967 the team went professional, became the Darts and joined the American Soccer League. They won the title twice and then moved to the NASL in 1969. They spent 2 years there before moving the team to Miami where they became the Miami Gatos. After this they had several reincarnations as different franchises in different cities including Fort Lauderdale and Minnesota. While Britannica were becoming the Darts and turning professional in the American Soccer League across the city some other Scots were up to shenanigans. In the rival United Soccer Association in 1967 Aberdeen masqueraded as the Whips and won the Eastern Division. In the short league which was a forerunner to the NASL, where it was expected the Whips would continue with a 'proper' team they lost in the Final to LA Wolves, who wer

The United Soccer Association as the name suggests (look at the initials)was a professional football league in the USA. It employed a somewhat strange model, which took franchising to the max,although it only operated for one year,in 1967 before merging with the National Professional Soccer League to format the NASL. What was so unusual about the league was that all of the teams were imported from overseas and just took the names of the cities that they were playing in that season. Some of the teams like Dallas Tornado went on to get their own teams together for the NASL and others managed to reinvent themselves as new clubs, for example Washington Whips laid down the foundation for a franchise that later entered Washington as the Diplomats, but many of the teams from that era have disappeared into the ether. One of the main reasons for this rather odd model was that the founders of the league wanted to start the league in 1968, as they had the franchises ready, but not the squads. H

Next up is Villa v Ipswich in the much maligned FA Cup. I caught a couple of FA Cup games in the qualifying rounds when Ely destroyed Rothwell Corinthians and then came up short against Bugbrooke. However, this week is what was traditionally one of the biggest weekends of the calendar when the teams from the top 2 divisions join in. The cup has lost a lot of its shine over the last few years, which hasn't been helped by the fact it has now lost its traditional slot at the start of the season and with more Champions League finals scheduled at Wembley it could be a while before it gets back. Mind you with discounted ticket prices (this one was £10 for adults and £5 for kids) at least it gives people a chance to see their team who don't normally get the chance. In this game Villa, who also have a Semi Final against Bradford in the League Cup to look forward to will be looking to put a miserable Christmas behind them, but with the number of injuries accrued they are going

A New Year, but the same old story as far as football in Winter is concerned. Today Ely's game against Wisbech was off. In the morning the game looked like it was on, but then after another day of rain the game was off. Christmas is often billed as a football bonanza and for the higher leagues it is, but once you get below the Conference it seems that nearly all the games are off and even higher up in the pyramid the games are at the mercy of the gods. Enough has been printed about Premier League clubs wanting a Winter break, probably mainly because their foreign players would like one and I once read an interview with Platini, where he stated that he once turned down a move to Spurs as he didn't want to play over Christmas! However, after a fourth year of games being called off all over Winter I reckon that it is time for a change lower down. Firstly, the bad weather can punish success; for example, King's Lynn a couple of years ago ended up playing 12 games in April due