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POSTPONED, SO LET'S PARTY 20-1-06
The Great British weather, a conversation starter, the national obsession.
The subject of many an early morning chat as you pass the time of day with dressing gown clad neighbours taking in their gold tops after letting the shit-machine out to piss up next door's roses, leaving a steaming welcome message on the door step of the miserable Old Fart opposite. Rain, ice, hail, sleet or snow, a winter in Blighty contains the lot and it's about as reliable as Bestie in his heyday turning up for training on time, and is as unpredictable as one of Radar Rochemback's swerving free-kicks.
"Hey you in row Z, duck!"
The four seasons can arrive during one single game of Association football and can have a very significant effect on the way a game can pan out. All the pre-match planning goes west and inclement weather can be a great leveller in the skill department. When the going becomes soft and heavy, it requires a totally different style of play and can markedly change the planned tactics and even the team-sheet. Certain players revel in the heavier stuff, perfecting thirty foot sliding tackles, and basic sugar-free football comes into its own when the midfield is a mud swamp quagmire.
Out go the fancy wall pass triangles, dribbles, nicks and flicks - in comes the order to go over the top.
"That'll be route one then Gaffer?" or Wimbledon style as it became known.
Not great viewing but I must admit there's nothing better than seeing a correctly executed sliding tackle on a wet muddy surface when the player gets the ball away then takes his opponent on a fairground pillion ride of mud wrestling proportions. Probably a bit of a lost art with the players of today, but Man City's boss 'Psycho' Stuart Pearce was absolutely brilliant at them. But not so good at penalty kicks!
The busy zone around the six-yard box usually degenerates into a surface not unlike a pig sty - many a goalkeeper has come a comical cropper - with the ball skidding past or actually sticking in the mud with players falling arse over tit in their attempts to score or clear their lines.
Effectively, the game revolves around weather and the conditions it creates can bring about such a treacherous playing surface that the outcome of even the most one-sided game on paper becomes a shock. There's nothing worse either for a purist, or indeed any fan, to watch the game with snow or rain billowing into your face. A bloody big disincentive if it's too cold and icy, to even leave the orange glow warmth of the gas fire and the toasty oxygen deficient sleepiness of the lounge. An evolutionary trait of human nature I suppose, derived from a survival instinct hewn over centuries of freezing one's bollocks off whilst searching for the next warm pub.
The so-called expert, the Weather Bureau Forecaster, nee some bloke who failed geography and physics at school and gazed at the clouds too long in the summer holidays, studiously analyses wiggly lines and iso-bars while playing with little cloud shapes and smiling suns with shades on. With all the available data he predicts, rather forecasts, the weather and all its twists and turns for a 24 hour period and sometimes even gets it right. But only sometimes. Most of the time the resultant climatic conditions are nowt like what Michael Fish predicted, and ten ton of rain falls in one hour flat, flooding the pitch and all the roads to the ground, finishing the game off before it started.
As unsung heroes, you have got to feel sorry for the groundstaff, spending the week nurturing and literally watching grass grow. Agonising over the right fertiliser, putting back the divots, sanding over bare patches, re-seeding only to have the pigeons eat the grass seed and shit on their heads in the process. A thankless task, they achieve perfection late Friday evening, green and flat like a billiard table, mown to perfection in ten foot wide rolled stripes, pitch lines re-marked, stadium bristling, ready for the fans and gladiators.
Then disaster. A few ton of snow and ice drops on the bugger overnight and the under-pitch heating struggles to cope, the electric heating blows a fuse or the pilot light goes out on the gas. The head groundsman is then given a verbal earful by the whisky addled chairman, calling him a useless bugger after a week of love and expert attention fathering every blade and religiously urinating in the goal area to get that sandy spot to green over. Worse still, the poor sod has to round up a legion of folk with shovels at very short notice to clear the white-out away so the referee can do a pitch inspection. Most of the time for nothing anyway, as the damage is well and truly done.
The worst sufferers of a postponed game are the away team and their supporters - as a totally fruitless long distance coach trip to the salubrious snow driven climes of Bolton by the sea recently demonstrated. Give me haemorrhoids any day.
It's a different scenario for the home fans meanwhile as the punters are in the boozer, getting in the mood thus by the time the news filters through, well where else would you rather be on a freezing cold, brass monkey bollocks British Saturday afternoon?
I remember one occasion meeting up at the White Rose for a few pre-match snorts when the weather had been particularly inclement, but the game was most definitely on. Ayresome Park had been cleared the night before and was a wee bit frost affected but we were told by local radio that the game would go ahead. The boozer was bulging to the rafters, more so than usual, and the atmosphere was brilliant. The type you only get around the winter period when people are full of cheer and always ready to party.
We noticed the snow falling softly and it didn't stop. The buzz started going round that the game didn't look too good and the referee was inspecting at present so we continued gargling ale. The place was rocking, and we all went into virtual New Year's Eve mode when the news filtered through that the game was officially postponed. Party well and truly on - with a bit more spare cash for ale as we didn't need it for a ticket, Bovril, rubber pie, Mars bar, match programme or the Pink Gazette.
Closing time saw a giant snowball fight, snowmen were built, buses were pelted, and all in good natured fun. Even a few of the constabulary joined in. So off every bugger went to the nearest club, the Dormans, and we continued the party. The rest of that day and night was a total blur but most of that crowd stayed there till last orders and then met back in town and went clubbing and eventually out for a parmo.
It would take me a week to get over a bender like that these days.
So some good can come from a postponed game.
Why didn't it snow at Highbury and the under-pitch heating fail last week!
Enough Said!
ErimusRed
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