Tamil Eelam v Cascadia

ST PAUL'S SPORTS GROUND

CONIFA WORLD CUP

JUNE 3, 2018

GROUND NO 209

IF St Paul's Sports Ground were a pair of trousers, you'd have to squeeze them on, breathe in for at least a minute while you're doing your top button up and the most pleasurable experience you'll have all day is undoing it again before you go to bed and letting your belly flop out.

Tightly packed into a plot surrounded by homes, trees, a road and a school, there's just enough space to fit in the bare essentials needed for a football ground.

That it's there at all. of course, is something to be hugely grateful for.

Fisher Athletic thought they were only groundsharing with Dulwich Hamlet while the Surrey Docks Stadium - which stood some 200 yards from St Paul's - was being done up. But the debts were piling up and Athletic became a former football club without ever returning home.

From the fans' point of view it was like moving in with a mate while the builders were in, staying until you'd finished the last jar of peanut butter in the cupboard and then finding your own gaff had been bulldozed when you popped in to see how the new kitchen was coming along.

Quick as a flash, though, the supporters founded Fisher FC, a phoenix club, and in 2016 they moved into their new ground.

The dark green turnstile blocks are a little uninviting, to be honest, and the compact little ground ins functional rather than homely.

With very little space between the plastic pitch and the perimeter wall, it's as though someone has picked the ground up and pushed and prodded it into a hole that's barely big enough to fit it in.

A simple, small prefabricated stand sits on the other side of the Salter Road perimeter wall, with the changing rooms and modest clubhouse - don't ask for a beer, it's not licensed.

There's a small covered stand behind one goal - offering a great view of Canary Wharf rising up impressively behind the far goal - and dugouts on the side opposite side to the stand and that's that really.

The ground is managed by Millwall's Community Trust so the branding around the pitch is almost exclusively for the Lionesses, who play their Women's Super League matches there.

But it was neither Fisher nor Millwall Ladies who were playing on this occasion - the match pitched Cascadia against Tamil Eelam in the CONIFA World Cup, a sort of non-league World Cup.

CONIFA is the voluntary body which brings together non-recognised states, regions, cultural entities and peoples and gives them a platform on which to play international football - and the result is a glorious carnival of culture, a sporting tournament and a geography lesson all rolled into one,

I decided to support Cascadia because they sounded like a stage at Glastonbury (it's actually an area of the USA and Canada) and the free stickers given out by their merch dude only reinforced that view.

The locals threw their support behind them too, with songs like "Cascadia is wonderful, it's got weed, coffee and Frasier" ringing out around the ground.

And the boys on the pitch responded, banging in six goals without reply despite finishing with ten men, to progress to the quarter-finals on goal difference.

Football in the sun, nations you've never heard of and a club back from the dead - what's not to like?