End of Season Roller Round-Up 2017/18

Four Marks FC

I should really stop entering internet competitions. I've never won one. I never will.

There was one at the end of the season on a start-up site sponsored by a betting company. Why they set their website up in April, so close to the end of 2017/18, I don't know. Anyway, they were offering big prizes for a poetry competition:

Send us your poems about rollers and you could win £1,000 in cash, plus a season ticket for your favourite club!

Well, this competition looked too good to be true. I had to enter. No chance of winning, obviously, but if I didn't try, I'd regret it forever. Or at least 30 seconds, and then I'd forget all about it.

I had writer's block. I couldn't get beyond the following, extremely trite ditty:

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Rollers are rusty
And so are you!

Well, if they only had one entry, I would win, so why not?

AFC Stoneham

I logged in to the website, typed out my terrible poem (feeling a little embarrassed, to be honest) and forgot all about it.

A week later, I bumped in to an old friend. He told me he'd got a job with this betting company in the marketing department. Unbelievably, it had been him that had come up with the idea of the poetry competition! I bought him beers for the rest of the evening whilst he showed me the other entrants on his smartphone. For example, this effort about the roller at AFC Stoneham:

Misty, cadaverous, as old as Stonehenge
The haunted roller appears
Forgotten, desperate, seeking revenge
Coffin-bound for eight thousand years
Howling with hatred, tormenting the innocent
The haunted roller appears
The rusted zombie groundsman's equipment
Of your nightmares and day fears

I couldn't help it. I shouted out:

Who ya gonna call? Roller Busters!

My old friend laughed and agreed it was a bit of an overwrought effort.
 

Havant & Waterlooville

Then there was this one about the moppy rollers at National League Havant & Waterlooville:

Another wet day in Havant
The thirtieth day in a row
Another day for their rollers
To be our spongey heroes

Slurp it up and regurgitate
Like a parent hawk for its chick
This pitch needs to be puddle-free
We need it to be in good nick!

I didn't like the last line. I told my friend it didn't scan properly. He had no idea what I was talking about. He'd never read a poem in his life. He said he'd put it to one side. If there was nothing better, he'd consider it for the prize. I rolled my eyes.

Borth United

Then he showed me this one about the roller at Mid Wales League Borth United:

Come hippie missiles and fall on Borth
Loaded with unicorns and glitter and flowers
Give the team strength to rise up and finish fourth
And give the players wings and laser boots and other super powers

Well, that was so poor, I was beginning to think my trite effort had a chance. One thousand pounds! I could see me renting an open-topped bus for the day, buying myself a cheap trophy and riding up and down Shirley High Street waving my cup around as if I'd just personally won the Champions League.

Dream on, baby. There were more poems...

Bishop's Waltham Dynamos

The next one sounded quite meaningful. For the first time that evening, I was worried:

In a world of circles
He felt like a hexagon
Every divot judged as a jerk.
He wished he had feet and legs.
"I can't avoid the broken glass,
The fox, the goose, the dog shit,
The rancid lumps of bubblegum,
The rocks and stones and beercan lids"
Imagine if you had to roll instead of walk
To squeak squeak instead of talk
Squelching over slugs and spiders
Feeling like a reversed Midas.
In a world full of potholes
Don't be a roller (or a wheel)
In a world full of hot moles
 ...Now you know how they must feel.

But I saw a glimmer of hope. It was that penultimate line about the hot moles. It was rubbish! I bought my friend another beer and pointed this out to him. He was in agreement! I still had a chance.

Godalming Town

Another drink downed. Another two poems to go:

There's a bird called a roller
It doesn't ta-whit
It doesn't ta-whoo
It lets out more of a KWEEK!

There's a roller called a roller
It doesn't rotate
It barely moves at all
And when it does, it lets out a SQUEAK!

That's because it needs some oil.

Well, that clearly wasn't going to win anything, unless the betting company had some sort of Rotten Tomato Prize...

Michelmersh & Timsbury FC

Just one more entry, according to my friend, who by now was on his seventh pint. I offered to buy him another one, and he told me how much he hated his job and all his insufferable workmates and how he'd like to hand in his notice and drop his trousers on his way out of the office and how he'd like to write exactly what he thought about them all on his bum cheeks as he disappeared for the last time...

When your skin flakes off
It becomes dust
When a roller's skin erodes
It becomes rust

I just laughed out loud at that last one. I told my friend that if he dropped his pants, I'd write my poem on his cheeks in permanent marker and it would be the perfect riposte to his awful colleagues...

Overton United FC

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Rollers are rusty
And so are you!

According to the stories I read on social media the next day, he actually carried out his threat! My poem, his arse, all over Twitter!

Needless to say, I didn't win the poetry competition. Nobody won. The betting company found some legal loophole which meant there would be no £1,000 prize, and no season ticket for the lucky winner. To be honest, I don't think anyone deserved to win, as the entries were so uniformly dire.

But I was so close, so close to victory for the first and only time in my life...

Michelmersh & Timsbury v Lyndhurst

"Football on Junction Box with Michelmersh & Timsbury FC Club Crest"

There's a word for it, probably taken straight from the original German, but I can't for the life of me think what that word is.

It's when you've spent your entire life dreaming about a city, imagining it's the most exquisite place in the world, where everything is perfect all the time - where all the houses are designed by Gauguin and Matisse; where all the men are rugged and handsome and sophisticated and all the women are clever and funny and have hourglass figures to die for; where the cafes and bars are full of these incredible, beautiful people who are all interested in you and your life and the beers are all perfectly golden and come with a frothing head and taste amazing. It's your own personal Utopia.

It could be anywhere, but let's just say you're a Japanese tourist visiting Europe for the first time, and the city you've always dreamt of is Paris. You get there and it's raining. The streets are filthy, the inhabitants are rude. The only people who want to know you are only nice to you because they want your money.

You realise that your personal Utopia doesn't exist and you go crazy, locking yourself in your Kyoto apartment for the next fifty years, only venturing out to stock up on supermarket sushi and cheap rice wine.

It's a bit of a trek from the changing rooms to the pitch.

Details:
Michelmersh & Timsbury FC (0) 0 v 7 (6) Lyndhurst FC
Saturday 17th February 2018
New Forest Care Hampshire Premier Football League Division One
Attendance: 7
Admission: None
Programme: No
Colours: Amber and black quarters / black / black and amber v Green and black hoops / black / green
National Grid reference: SU3425

The match carries on regardless as smoke billows from a garden on Mannyngham Way.

The same sort of situation could occur with football grounds. You've been to watch your own team at their own ground hundreds of times. You stand or sit with your friends, chewing the fat and swapping yarns every couple of weeks. You join in with the chants. You attempt to make up new songs, trying to rhyme your hard-tackling defensive midfielder's surname with your favourite cereals to the tune of Tom Hark. You clap the lads off the pitch after a narrow defeat despite the worthy performance against the league leaders. They clap you back. It's like your second home and you (mostly) enjoy your Saturdays with your football friends.

But you've always dreamed of that faraway ground, where firecrackers are not only allowed, but positively encouraged; where the tifosi make their own banners, unfurling them before kick-off where they cover the entire Curva Nord (if you made a banner for your team, it would be made out of an old bedsheet, just enough to cover you and your mates at the Tea Hut End).

So when your team are knocked out of the cup and have a blank Saturday, you get on a plane and fly off to Spain, to Barcelona, Bilbao or Betis, hoping for that ultimate football experience.

Kabir Brethen of Michelmersh and Gary Rogers of Lyndhurst battle over possession of the ball.

And then the Spanish TV company moves your game to 11 o'clock in the morning when nobody in the crowd is properly awake, it's raining for the first time in three years (there's no roof over your seat), and the ultras just couldn't be bothered with a pyrotechnic display this week, thank you very much.

You go home, cry, and lock yourself in your bedroom for the next fifty years.

A consoling pat on the back for Michelmersh's overworked keeper.

Groundhoppers are used to this scenario. They hear about "a little gem of a ground" in deepest Flanders, they save up for months for the trip, and they get there only to find the classic old stand has been knocked down.

Now, I'm a bit of a groundhopper when I'm not watching the teams that I actively follow. Long-time readers will know that over the years, I've featured all of the clubs in Hampshire down to Step 6 (Wessex League Division One), plus the rest of the Wessex League in Dorset and Wiltshire. I like to think that I've given you an interesting photographic record of football in the county since 2011 (plus some slightly odd articles on rusty rollers).

But once I've featured all of the clubs at their home grounds at least once (and I've featured many clubs two or three times on their own patch), where do I go next? The answer is to delve deeper, to go lower down the pyramid. Hence, I've been ticking off grounds in the Hampshire Premier Football League over the past couple of seasons. I realised the other day that I only have another eleven grounds to go until I've completed the whole league.

Michelmersh & Timsbury was one of those places.

My cunning plan is to show you the home grounds of Colden Common, QK Southampton, Hedge End Rangers, Infinity, Overton United, AFC Petersfield, Four Marks, Lyndhurst, Headley United and South Wonston Swifts by the end of next season (assuming the clubs all survive - not a given).

No idea what's going on here. I hope everyone involved is okay now.

I have no illusions about what any of these grounds will be like. I know full well that there won't be any ultras lobbing fireworks - there won't even be anywhere to keep dry if it rains, so I'm not going to go home and cry if I find myself in a roped off field. I don't mind, so long as there's a bit of fresh air and some entertainment.

I'd not seen any photos of Michelmersh & Timsbury's home before I went there on Saturday, but what I found was not unexpected. There's a small car park which was full when I arrived 15 minutes before kick-off, but there's plenty of space to park on Mannyngham Way. Next to the car park is a wooden building which houses the dressing rooms. There's a verandah with an overhang there, so you could keep dry whilst watching the football. However, there is a practice pitch and a cricket pitch between the dressing rooms and the roped off main pitch, so you'd need binoculars to watch the match from there.

On the south side of the main pitch are tall trees separating it from more council pitches at Hunts Farm (not in use on Saturday). On the west are some bushes which prevent stray shots from landing on the main road beyond (there's also a tall net here for the same purpose). There are large houses to the north, whose residents would no doubt complain if Michelmersh & Timsbury ever wanted to erect floodlights.

There are two large rusty rollers lying around, who may well feature in a far-fetched story at the end of the season.

Invasion of the spaniels!

I don't want to embarrass the home side by writing about the match too much. I knew it was going to be Bottom v Top, but they had played each other recently and the game had ended up 6-3 to Lyndhurst, so I was hoping for more of the same on Saturday. However, it was never close at any point during the game, as the visitors took the lead after two minutes through Paul Abrahams, and then added four more goals at roughly ten minute intervals, with the sixth coming quickly after the fifth just before half-time.

Michelmersh improved after the break and looked as though they would draw the half 0-0 until Lyndhurst scored their seventh via a Josh Bench header seven minutes from the end.

The match could have been abandoned after 89 minutes as there were no balls left - there were only two or three to start with, and at least one was flat, so when the last remaining ball got stuck up a tree, there was a minor panic for a few minutes until one of the lost balls was retrieved from the bushes, where it had lain forgotten about for half the match.

In the time remaining, Michelmersh did score a consolation, but Hassan Felah was flagged offside. So Lyndhurst improved their goal difference by seven, and Chris Pye, who scored a hat-trick, went top of the divisional scoring charts (James Attwood and Josh Daley were their other scorers).

End of match handshakes outside the wooden changing rooms.

I wish I could have visited Michelmersh & Timsbury on a day when they hadn't been beaten so heavily, but there's always another day, another match when they can go again and hope for better.

I shall upload more photos from the game on the Hopping Around Hampshire Facebook page on Monday evening. I hope I've got everybody's names right on here, but if I haven't, please forgive me - I do it all the time, but not intentionally.

The next HAH will be in three weeks (March 10th). It will feature another Hampshire League match. Having looked at the fixtures, four of my unvisited clubs are at home, so it will be one from either Hedge End Rangers, Infinity, Overton United or Four Marks (although the latter are playing Lyndhurst!). Perhaps one of these places will resemble my own personal Utopia? I can only dream...

Upham v Michelmersh & Timsbury

Upham FC ready for action.

As a child, I would regularly have nightmares. Always the same thing...ghosts. I would wake up screaming because I was convinced I'd seen a headless highwayman in my room. Whilst my eyes were adjusting to the light, the ghost would merge with the patterns in my bedroom wallpaper so that it would look like it was passing through the wall.

Backlit tree branches swaying in the wind would be visible through my thin curtains. But they weren't tree branches, they would be long-dead Cavaliers waving their arms in surrender as they were being captured by ruthless Roundheads prior to imprisonment and hanging.

The view from the teepees.

Details:
Upham FC (0) 1 v 1 (1) Michelmersh & Timsbury FC
Saturday 11th March 2017
Puma Engineering Hampshire Premier Football League Division One
Attendance: 10-15  (varied throughout)
Admission: Free
Programme: None
Colours: All red v Gold and black quarters / black / black
National Grid reference: SU5320

Letting fly in the first half, but Upham had to wait until the last few minutes to score.

I thought these childhood nightmares had long since gone, to be replaced by more adult night-worries. And so they had until this week, when I stayed up late doing my homework on Upham prior to my visit for the football on Saturday.

I was reading about the pub in Upham known as the Brushmaker's Arms, when I must have nodded off, so that the last thing I remembered was the story of Mr Chickett the miserly brushmaker, brutally murdered for his horde of gold coins in 1545. It was said that his killer escaped with Chickett's gold and embarked upon the Mary Rose for her maiden voyage (which, of course, was also her last, as she sank at the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour).

Chickett then haunted the Brushmaker's Arms until the day that the Mary Rose was recovered in 1982, at which point his ghostly moaning and midnight coin rattling suddenly stopped.

Upham's Keiran Shalloe shields the ball from his opponent.

My broken dream began. Had I read enough about Upham? Would the locals demand that I answer questions about the village before I could enter? Would I have to fill in an 85 page questionnaire before the match? One wrong box ticked, and I would be sent home?

There was the entrance to Upham Recreation Ground...but who was that standing by the slide in the playground? A rather dishevelled man dressed in hessian rags...it couldn't be? Was that Chickett the Brushmaker? And what was he waving?

I could see the footballers warming up. The match was due to start in ten minutes, but Chickett was beckoning to me...

He had a sheaf of paper. He was indicating that I had to fill in this great wad of forms before I would be allowed to watch the match!

Fetching a stray ball from the field next door.

Okay, okay, let's have a look...I must know enough, it'll be fine, I'll play along...

Name, Age, Sex, Profession...yeah, yeah, I can do this...what else? Ah, here's the bit about the football club:

• Upham FC was founded in...Oh, when was it? 1974! I remembered!
• Name at least three trophies that the club has won...Tough question, let's think...How about the Winchester League Division 1 in 1992, 2002, 2003, 2008 and 2010? Does that count as 5? You want two more, Mr Chickett? Okay, they were Hampshire League (2004) Trophyman Cup winners in 2005, 2012 and 2013, and Northbrook Cup winners on five occasions. I could name the years if you wish, but the players will be leaving the dressing rooms ready for kick-off shortly!

Please, please, Mr Chickett, isn't that enough?! No? Okay, just one more then...

•  Highest league position since they joined the Hampshire League? Okay, the Hampshire League was split in to two rival competitions between 2004 and 2013. During this period, Upham finished as runners-up (twice) in the Hants League (2004). Since the leagues were merged, the best they've done is 5th (last season). They look certain to better that this season, going in to the match against lowly Michelmersh & Timsbury in third place. They still have a chance of promotion, although losing 4-0 in each of their last two matches against their main rivals (Sway and Four Marks) has severely dented their ambitions. Nothing less than a win would do today.

Will that do? Will you let me go now, Mr Chickett? No? You want a desperately feeble anecdote before you let me go? Well, I'll never forget the time I was listening to the Hairy Cornflake's show on Radio 1 in the 1970s, and a listener rang in to enter one of his competitions. When the listener said he was from Lower Upham, the DJ roared with laughter. I've no idea why. I guess it was different times back then.

Peeking through the ghostly vortex.

For some reason, Chickett thought my anecdote was hilarious. As his ghostly cackle went on and on, sounding more and more like a series of desperate miaows, I realised that I was laughing too, and that I'd woken myself up. Or was it one of my cats asking for its breakfast that had awoken me?

Either way, it was Saturday morning and it was match day! As I came round, I realised that I wouldn't have to fill in any questionnaires upon my arrival at Upham after all, so the morning flew by without any worries.

Arriving at Upham's Ray's Farm Recreation Ground, there was nowhere to leave my car in the tiny car park, so I drove a couple of hundred yards down Shoe Lane and parked next to the village duck pond instead (no ducks were seen). I then walked back up the narrow lane strewn with fresh horse poo, admiring the roadside daffodils as I went.

There were no ghosts at the recreation ground. Instead, there were children playing in the playground immediately by the entrance with their mums, dads and grandparents. Ahead of me, Upham FC and Michelmersh & Timsbury were warming up on the roped off pitch. To my left as I walked towards the football pitch was the Tommy Steele Pavilion, opened in 1997, which contains the changing rooms and toilets. There's a verandah at the front of the pavilion which would provide the only cover at the ground in the event of rain. Unfortunately, as the pavilion is at right-angles to the pitch, only one person could stand there keeping dry and be able to see the whole pitch at the same time.

I guess that if you're short enough, you could stand inside one of the teepees and keep dry whilst watching the match. Teepees? Yes, there are wooden teepees for children to play in at the top end of the pitch! And when I say "top end", I mean it. There is a ten foot slope from the far end of the pitch, down towards the near end, and it varies in intensity as you go down.

Michelmersh & Timsbury on the attack.

Michelmersh & Timsbury, who contained several players from the Burridge club which disbanded earlier in the season, kicked down the slope in the first half. They nearly scored after three minutes from a goalmouth scramble, but the ball was cleared off the line and booted upfield. Upham then nearly took the lead after 26 minutes when Michelmersh's defender, Joshua Woodward, sent a header crashing against his own bar with goalkeeper Adam Woodford stranded.

With the majority of the attacking threat coming from the home side, Michelmersh took the lead slightly against the run of play on 37 minutes when Ben Wakefield ran on to a through ball and tucked home from twelve yards.

This wasn't going to plan for Upham. They knew that if they failed to win today and Sway won their match against Lyndhurst, Sway would be promoted and that the only team left that they could overhaul was Four Marks*.

Kicking downhill in the second half, Upham became more and more desperate to equalise. Eventually they did, Keiran Shalloe volleying home from 15 yards with a minute left of normal time.

The away team were then reduced to ten men as Ryan Gonyora was booked for a foul, then immediately booked a second time, presumably for protesting the original decision as the ref stood with his finger pressed to his mouth. A minute later, Upham nearly scrambled the ball over the line for a last second winner, but man of the match Wakefield cleared off the line to preserve the scoreline at 1-1, which was probably fair on the balance of play.

As the players left the field, one or two cleaned their boots on an old boot-brush near the dressing room doors. I wondered if Mr Chickett was looking on, pleased that one of his precious brushes was still being used, 472 years after his untimely death.

*Sway won 4-1 to secure promotion. Four Marks have five home matches to come and require seven points to guarantee a place in the top two.

Tidying up time.

I shall post another forty or so photos from Upham on the HAH group page later this evening.

I'll be back next week, and for the first time, I shall be putting the next report to the vote. If you go to either my Twitter account (here), or the Facebook group page (here) from tomorrow (Tuesday) evening, you can help to decide whether I go to another Hampshire League Division One match this coming Saturday, or if I travel to the Isle of Wight for a Wessex League game. I'll combine the votes from both polls and go with the majority.

If no-one votes at all, I shall toss a coin.

And cry myself to sleep.

And try not to dream of Mr Chickett and his annoying questionnaire.