Elland Back

Greetland  6  Golcar United Reserves  2

Yorkshire Amateur League – Premier Division

Admission / Programme – No / No

So, we get back from Ealandians on a Wednesday night and thoughts turn to Saturday over a can of Carling.

The Yorkshire Amateur League was looking good again, and a quick glance at the fixtures tells me Greetland are playing at home, and a win would give them the league title and presumably promotion to the top flight.

Simple enough then, I’m going to Greetland, but where exactly is Greetland and where does the football team play. A school it appears, Brooksbank School, and thanks to Google Maps I found it pretty quickly, turns out it’s in Elland, and is only a five minute walk from the home of Ealandians.

Greetland were playing Golcar United Reserves with a 2pm kick off, and in short I was turning right about fifty yards before I turned right a few days earlier, and this time it was to take me to the sports facilities at the back of the said school.

I arrived nice and early, just as the players were arriving, and with little around of the refreshment variety it gave me a chance to do a little bit of research into the club. Greetland itself is a small village set just to the North West of the centre of Elland, and apparently, bearing in mind I referenced this in my last blog about Ealandians, the Tour de France passed through the village in 2014 as the cyclists went from York to Sheffield.

The football club though, well it appears they are over 50 years old, and as a club they have teams right through from juniors, to ladies, to disability teams and of course the senior men’s teams. The clubs base is the Community Centre in the village, but the first team, presumably to meet league requirements, play on the 4G at the school.

They only joined the Yorkshire Amateur League at the start of the current season, having won the Premier Division of the Halifax & District League the season before, going the full campaign unbeaten. The clubs performances clearly warranted being parachuted into the second tier of the YAL, a competition that boasts seven divisions which in this day and age is some feat.

They’ve taken it by storm to be fair, only two defeats all campaign is impressive stuff and with the Supreme Division beckoning, you wouldn’t put it past them to make another challenge for the honours.

So what’s Brooksbank School like then? Well, you can probably imagine, it’s a big old complex with a mix of traditional style buildings where headmasters in mortar boards and gowns would patrol, along with more modern structures, where teachers in jeans, sporting beards and tattoo’s wander the corridors insisting they are addressed by the pupils by their christian names! Not in my day, I can tell you…….

Anyway, to the rear of the school are the sports facilities, while on a plateau, on the edges of a hillside which looks up towards Ainley Top, is the floodlit cage that contains the football pitch. Like many of it’s type it has a viewing area down one side, and with a league title at stake, by kick off a good number of locals had made their way to watch the proceedings.

The game didn’t start overly well for the hosts, finding themselves behind in the game early on against the second string side of the Huddersfield based club, but once Greetland got into their stride they put on an impressive display of pace and movement, running out 6-2 victors, with the star of the show being Reece Wilby who netted a hat-trick.

As we moved into the closing stages, Greetland officials clad in smart club tracksuit tops went to their cars to collect various alcoholic substances, which were clearly going to be shaken and opened (over each other) at the final whistle by the players. As the celebrations began I made my way to my car and set off back up the hill to the M62.

As you get close to the motorway junction you are pretty high up, and a glance to your left gives you the view down onto the football pitch, and as I did this, I could see the celebrations were still under way on the synthetic surface.

Greetland are on the up, they are one to keep an eye on, and as for Elland, well it’s becoming a bit of a footballing hotbed isn’t it?