Of wins and woe
Posted on Aug 12 2007 | Tagged as: Sport
The Match of the Day theme tune heralded a new football season last night — finally. I’ve been waiting to hear that music signal the end of a long, boring, football-less1 summer for months. That and the theme from Local Hero, played at Spennymoor Town FC.
Football in the dizzy heights of the Arngrove Northern League Division One is never going to be the most thrilling of sporting occasions, and the middle 80 minutes of yesterday’s game were pretty dire. But the team won (despite some questionable officiating) — but it’ll do precious little good if the club gets evicted from the ground.
The Town Council wants a whole season’s rent for the ground (at £300 per month2) in advance — money that the club simply doesn’t have. Perhaps if the clubhouse wasn’t still a pile of rubble after the fire nearly four years ago, pint-and-pie sales would quickly make it. But they can’t knock the remains down and rebuild it, because there’s newts living in it.
The club doesn’t have a happy history with authority. In its pre-2005 incarnation as Spennymoor United, they were forced to withdraw from the (much higher) Unibond League after being repeatedly fined for failing to fulfill fixtures. The money problems had led to being unable to pay some players, who obviously then refused to play. But the club couldn’t take on any more — even fat fans who would play for free and take a hammering just to avoid the fines — because the transfer deadline had passed. The transfer window was ostensibly designed originally to harmonise the international transfer market. Footballing authorities often display even less common sense than political ones.
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1 The Copa America doesn’t count.
2 The cricket club’s rent is inexplicably £29 per year.
