Prince George's Fields
Surrey South-East Combination
March 12, 2016
Ground No 186
**** me, I'm in the first team!
That was the first line of the message I received which made up my mind how I'd be spending my Saturday afternoon - being a proud dad watching the lad do his thing at the highest level he'd ever played at.
He did alright too! Maybe I'm biased but he didn't look out of place and you wouldn't have known he'd never been near the first team before. Okay, his side got tonked 4-0, but two of those goals were dodgy penalties and Wanderers held their own for long periods.
I'll come back to Raynes Park Vale to watch the first team and give it the usual Streetspavedwithgoals treatment in due course but since I was only there to see Wanderers on that occasion, let's throw the spotlight on them.
Today I made up exactly on third of the attendance. With none of the usual entrances open, the route into the ground wasn't especially obvious and I ended up following the players after they'd warmed up on an adjacent training pitch, then threw a right down the tunnel and into the spectator areas.
I wondered why the players were instructed not to warm up on the playing surface and all quickly became obvious - the pitch was a mudbath!
Who'd have thought, then, that the club playing on a pudding of a pitch in front of three people were approaching a momentous anniversary?
But it's true. For just five days later Wanderers marked 140 years since they won the FA Cup for the third time. They'd drawn 1-1 with Old Etonians on March 11 in the final, 1876 and then roared to a 3-0 win in the replay at Kennington Oval in front of 3,500 people a week later.
And that FA Cup victory was the springboard for an historic run of three successive triumphs in the world's greatest knockout competition - something Arsenal couldn't do this year and only Blackburn have managed since.
Far from being the start of a long of domination, however, pretty soon it started to go belly up. Those pesky public schools started forming their own teams so the posh lads all left and played for Sir's side instead.
By the end they were reduced to playing one match a year - a festive Christmas fixture against Harrow School - and by 1887 is was all over.
All over, that is, until 2009 when, with the blessing of descendants of people involved with the original club, Wanderers were reborn.
The aim of the 21st century Wanderers is to ensure the legacy of the original club lives on and to raise money for worthy causes and so far they have handed over more than three grand.
Sometimes there's more to football than 22 blokes kicking a ball about on a pudding of a pitch in front of a crowd of three.
No comments:
Post a Comment