Boundaries

Eaton Socon  1  Raunds Town  0

Spartan South Midlands League  – First Division

Admission / Programme - £5 / No

As league boundaries have shifted over the past couple of years due to the expansions at various steps in the football pyramid, it’s fair to say that one league who’s footprint has moved significantly is the United Counties League.

Back in the day, and by that we are talking the mid-eighties, the UCL was a league that started around the Daventry area and worked it’s way down the M1 corridor to the Bedford area. It would also meander in an Easterly direction as well and pick up the A1 corridor as well from Peterborough to the Northern edges of Stevenage.

Not any more though, at Step 5 it now starts in the Mansfield area, and across its two divisions it runs down past Leicester to Northampton and slightly beyond to Milton Keynes. At Step 6 though it is very much an East Midlands league, not venturing any further South of Leicester.

Picking up the mantle, especially at Step 6 is the Spartan South Midlands League, which now encompasses clubs based on the South side of Leicester, and runs all the way down to the M25. Distance wise it’s pretty vast, but as long as the roads are clear, the journeys to be fair are not that onerous.

I was also a ‘doer’ of the UCL, but not so the SSML, so now we are seeing clubs coming into the pyramid from Northampton southwards that ordinarily would drop onto the ‘to do’ list, but not any more. Earlier this season Moulton was one of those clubs I randomly chose to pay a visit to one midweek, but to be fair I’d not made any plans to get to any other.

That was until my old mate Pete, while sat in the bar one evening at Selston, told me he fancied a visit to Eaton Socon, and they had a few midweek games pencilled in. I kind of jumped on it and suggested that we might travel down together as I’d not been and from a journey perspective it wasn’t a bad one.

You could be forgiven for wondering where Eaton Socon is? Well, it’s a village conjoined to St Neots, just off the A1, not far from where the A14 and the A1 converge. I’ve been to St Neots Town, and I’ve been to Eynesbury Rovers which is also conjoined, but Eaton Socon who only came to Step 6 this season, well that was a new one. 

Eaton Socon were promoted from the Cambridgeshire County League at the end of last season, and have acquitted themselves well in their inaugural elevated campaign, sitting in a top six position before the game. Visiting Raunds Town are a club who I’ve seen play in an FA Vase semi-final, and, reach the lofty heights of the Southern League, but these days they are plying a modest existence.

We landed in Eaton Socon in good time, finding the ground, which sits just off the main road that runs through the village, with ease. It was early, nothing was doing, so we decamped to a pub down the road to kill some time, before returning an hour or so before kick off.

The rain had been falling steadily most of the afternoon but we had no issues with the game being on, the pitch looked in very good shape and appeared to be firm. It turns out that to gain promotion the club had to turn the pitch ninety degrees as it wasn’t initially long enough. This was done, floodlights were installed, and two areas of covers that would have originally been along one side, were now behind the goal. One of these was a small shelter over some flat standing, while another larger variant contained the materials to construct some wooden bench seating.

Also behind the goals were the dressing rooms, which linked onto a large indoor bowls centre, and a clubhouse that wasn’t open. When I say not open, they did have a small temporary looking building (also behind the goal), which did warm drinks and cans of beer if you so wished, and I have to day while it may have been small and basic, the welcome itself from the club officials was both warm and friendly.

So, we move onto the game, and I have to be honest, it won’t live long in the memory. It had a goalless draw written all over it until late in the second period when Callan Irvine netted for the hosts to give them a 1-0 lead, that they saw through to the final whistle. Was it a fair result? Probably, just about, but there wasn’t an awful lot in it.

The roads back to Derbyshire were largely quiet so I was dropping Pete off at his Borrowash homestead just after 11pm, and arriving back myself not long after quarter past. The thought of a United Counties League midweek game a few years ago wouldn’t have appealed greatly given the time and the distance involved, let alone a Spartan South Midlands League game, which in all fairness I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near under any circumstances. But how times, and football, changes.

Eaton Socon though, a good little club with big ambition. They talked about the costs involved just to get into Step 6, and they were considerable. The move from County League to the National League System is not an easy one, but both on and off the pitch they can be very proud of what they’ve achieved.