For April 24th I'm going back 14 years to 2007 and Racing Club Warwick's Midland Football Alliance game at Loughborough Dynamo. This game was the penultimate league game of the season and Racing Club went into the fixture in deep trouble at the foot of the table under new manager Bobby Hancock. Local football personality Bobby had been appointed just over a month earlier following the departure of Jose Ascensao (Portuguese managers named Jose just never seem to work out at the clubs that I follow). Whether it was by shrewd management or was just good fortune arising from a desperation to try something different I don't know but Bobby decided to throw in a few youngsters and see what happened. One seventeen year old youngster making a substitute appearance in this game was Matty Blair and I believe that this was Matty's first appearance in senior men's football. Matty lasted only one season at Racing Club before rightly seeking to progress and he steadily rose through the ranks to play for a number of clubs including Kidderminster Harriers, York City, Fleetwood Town, Mansfield Town, Doncaster Rovers and Cheltenham Town where the now 31 year old is still turning out in the Football League as a right back. Having been in at the beginning of his career, I was delighted when Matty joined York City and he made such an impact at the club in his two seasons there that he was recently voted into a fans all-time Bootham Crescent XI. Perhaps it was his happy knack of scoring crucial goals for the club including that goal against Luton that returned York to the football league in 2012? Established in 1955, Dynamo apparently took their name from Moscow Dynamo who played Wolverhampton Wanderers one of the famous floodlit Friendlies on 9th November 1955 (I have the programme from that game and it's the oldest programme that I own) which ushered in the European Cup which also began in 1955. Improving Dynamo were having a solid season and went on to finish in ninth place in the Midland Alliance. The following season they secured promotion to the Northern Premier League Division 1 South at which level they have remained ever since. They play at the rather splendidly named Nanpantan Sports Ground. Dynamo had beaten Warwick 2-0 in the reverse of this fixture only five days earlier and made light work of Racing Club in this game too finishing 5-2 to the good in front of just 50 fans. Interestingly they were a team full of Nurses having Matthew, Ricky and Kris Nurse all in the starting line-up! Warwick finished the game bottom of the table with just one game remaining and needing to win by five goals and for other results to go their way in the final game of the season. It wasn't going to happen. Was it?
CRB Match No. 1565
Comments
Post a Comment