In Loco Footballis (or Norra match report)

As we know, this weekend’s football schedules were torn up and dispersed in the wind created by a storm (which DOES NOT NEED A NAME). It also did a lot of damage to people and property but as I’m shallow (unlike many football pitches) I’ll gloss over all that.

The Saltmen’s trip to the Potteries to play Abbey Hulton Utd in the third round of FA Vase was inevitably one of the many postponements. An early pitch inspection by Abbey officials found large areas of the pitch were flooded. To their great credit, they postponed the game in plenty of time before travelling supporters and players left home. I suspect our coach driver was pleased as I can only imagine what the M6 would have been like. I mean, the number of MANUre fans travelling up from the Home Counties for Mold Trafford must create a terrible smell of melting plastic!

The notoriously storm proof home of the self-styled biggest club in the world.

Anyway, all of a sudden I was presented with a bit of a problem. What to do with a vacant Saturday afternoon? I’ve spent every Saturday for the last four months following the Saltmen and I can’t remember what I did on Saturdays during the interminably long close season.

When I was a lad we had two options when the weather was too bad to play out on a Saturday afternoon. Grandstand or World of Sport. Frank Bough versus Dickie Davies. Football Focus or Saint and Greavesy. Eddie Waring or Kendo Nagasaki, both interspersed with a bit of National Hunt racing. In those distant days TV sport wasn’t just the big ticket events. You could see table tennis or motorbike and sidecar racing. Leigh versus Wakefield Trinity rugby league.

And proper Wrestling! The stuff involving fat blokes from northern industrial backwaters. Pantomime villain Giant Haystack taking on grannies’ favourite Big Daddy (born Shirley Crabtree) under the watchful gaze of Kent Walton. Of course it was all staged but nobody cared. The audience took it so seriously that the aforementioned Man of Mystery, Kendo Nagasaki upset an elderly lady to such a degree that she ran to ringside and struck our hapless hero with her handbag – previously laced with a house brick! Not the glamour of Las Vegas or LA for these lads either. Bouts would routinely be held at such prestigious venues as Cleckhuddersfax Town Hall or the Ramsbottom Opera House.

Sadly, this weekend offered no opportunity to see Rally Cross with Murray Walker, Show Jumping from Hickstead or Badminton from the National Sports Centre, Crystal Palace.

I had to make do with Bargain Hunt repeats. In a bid to alleviate the lighthearted antiques related boredom I remembered one activity I used to do when thankfully un-named storms kept me inside. Re-designing football kits. Back in the 1970s this involved paper and coloured pencils. No such basic tools are needed now. You can do it on tinternet. I found a German website called Spizer who will actually make whatever optical offence you create, but there are loads of other sites and apps available. Here’s what I came up with: