Yesterday I mentioned that I was writing my posting at Edmonton International airport whilst waiting for my plane to Calgary. Annoyingly, due to a shortage of Westjet crew members, my plane ended up being almost 3 hours delayed and so the connection to Gatwick would have been missed and I was required to rebook my ticket. So I have another week in Canada folks! It's a good job that retirement allows me to be flexible eh? The late postponement got me thinking of situations where the same thing has happened to me in a football context. It is at around this time of year that you can't rely on fixtures going ahead, particularly the lower down the levels that you go. Some pitches seem to be prone to waterlogging. Hopefully, if a game is going to be postponed then you really want to know that the day before and certainly not after you've set off to the stadium concerned. The BBC is a pretty good resource when it comes to advising postponed fixtures but, in Non-League football, Twitter is an essential source of last minute news for smaller clubs at games below National League level (the 6th tier of English football).
However, no matter how much checking you do, there always seems to be some club somewhere whose super-optimism leads them to think that "it'll be alright" only for the match referee to turn up and offer a different opinion. Managers of the clubs involved often have a difference of view as to whether a game should go ahead which seems to be more about who is available for the game concerned rather than the conditions. Irrespective, for a devout groundhopper such as myself, a late postponement leaves me searching the fixtures for a game on at another nearby ground that I have yet to visit. The internet is indispensable for this and I find that a combination of the Futbology app (for the fixtures) and Twitter (to advise if the game remains "on") allows me to confirm a nearby game. Then there's the frantic drive to the previously unplanned new ground in time for kick off. As a tip for newer groundhoppers, I'd recommend avoiding visiting any club with a synthetic pitch when the weather is good as these grounds tend to be "Match on" when the bad weather hits and all around is being postponed. Just a thought but keep Racing Club Warwick in mind!
Today's featured game was yet another one having a very poor effort for a programme with the item shown being given away free to all paying spectators. It's interesting that whenever I've attended a match outside of the UK, if a programme has been produced for the game concerned, they are invariably given away free. that includes clubs such as Barcelona and indeed the Czech national side. So perhaps York City were actually the enlightened ones who were more in tune with the needs of the supporters? OK maybe not.
At least this particular programme was handy for the team line-ups and we've commented before about the likes of Peter Lorimer, Terry Eccles and Roy Kay (the man with the shortest name in English football). In the Newport side that day was Gary Plumley (see my Spurs v Watford FA Cup Semi-Final blog article) and future Liverpool and Republic of Ireland star John Aldridge. I'd like to focus on Tommy Tynan however. Tynan began his career at Liverpool in 1971 but never made an appearance for the Reds and eventually left to join a series of lower league clubs including Newport County, Plymouth Argyle, Rotherham United, Sheffield Wednesday and others where he put together a highly successful career that amounted to 646 League games scoring a highly respectable 259 goals including, famously, two for Newport in a European game at Carl Zeiss Jena in East Germany. Tynan is a legend at both Newport and Plymouth.
York won the game 2-1 but finished 17th in the Fourth Division that season. It proved to be a good season for Newport however who were promoted in third place as well as winning the Welsh Cup which gave them entry into the following season's European Cup Winners Cup.
CRB Match No. 74
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