Friends With Benefits

Long Bennington U18   1   Keyworth United U18   1

Notts Youth League (Saturday) – Division Two

I don’t have many friends, you may be unsurprised to hear.

I don’t have many friends because as I’ve got older I’ve become increasingly more intolerant of the human race in general, so those I choose to either engage in discourse with, or indeed meet, are a select group of individuals, and strangely enough, pretty like minded!

I’m not perfect by any means, in fact, if I was to meet myself I’d probably take an instant dislike. I used to describe myself as ‘private’, but thinking about it, I’m deep down just completely anti-social and downright selfish!

Anyway, I can kind of live with that, and what I do know is that the handful of friends I do have are both loyal, and indeed helpful. However, more importantly, a few of them have reached a point in life where they care not about anything at all that us mere working and mortgaged folk toil over, largely due to the fact that they no longer need to get out of bed in a morning anymore!

The beauty of this select group is they also have significant time on their hands, and their use of that time can come in incredibly handy, especially when it comes to hunting out obscure football fixtures.

A couple of years ago, I would sit down at the start of the season and look at my list of grounds to visit, and then quite simply have a look at the fixtures for the teams that played on the said ground. 90% of those games would be on a Saturday afternoon, the remainder on a midweek night.

What I hadn’t considered at that stage was the Plan B option, it was Steve (he of socially distanced fame, and now Bargain Hunt!) that got me onto Sunday League games, and that to be fair has been a great source of entertainment and indeed of new grounds. However, you can sink much deeper than that, and being respectful, I don’t mean in terms of standards, I mean places you would not have imagined existed outside of a normal universe of Saturday afternoon’s and Tuesday nights!

For example, there are a whole raft of games that take place on a Wednesday afternoon, not just the ones in the Northern Premier League Academy, but also another competition who’s name escapes me, whereby some weird and wonderful venues are seeing action. This sort of football viewing very much caters for the unwaged and unemployable types, with many of the fixtures very kindly posted on Malc Storer’s ‘On The Road’ blog for easy access.

You also have Universities and Colleges, they play at all kinds of weird times, and we all know the kind of hours students keep, they start soon, but of course the current climate might put the kybosh on some of those games taking place, certainly with spectators.

Saturday morning adult football is also becoming more popular, you’ve got the Sheffield Fair Play League, and of course the Derby Churches League (keep your eyes peeled over the next couple of weeks for that one!)

Finally, and it was Steve who put me onto this, you have youth football, and in Nottinghamshire, they have three leagues. One playing on midweek nights, one playing on a Sunday morning, and one playing on a Saturday morning. This isn’t the academy Wednesday afternoon stuff with a college course involved, this is Saturday morning because the adults play on the pitch in the afternoon, and, we’ve got tickets for the Forest game so need to be done early! We are talking under 19’s / 18’s here, and it just so happened that in Division Two of the Notts Youth League sat a team called Long Bennington, a club who have just put a men’s team in the Notts Senior League.

Fixtures were advertised at 10.30am on Full Time, which meant ample time to get to an afternoon game, and with Steve providing the trial run the other week and confirming all went to plan, I decided to give it a go for a game against Keyworth United.

I’d got it in mind to head up to Bessacarr afterwards, an hour or so journey up the A1, given Long Bennington’s proximity to said road, but a couple of days before the game a curveball hit me.

The kick off had been moved to 12.30pm (probably because you can’t get a ticket for Football League games now), so I had to have a re-think for my afternoon game, but more on that later.

Long Bennington is a very attractive village that sits almost exactly between Grantham and Newark on the A1. I got to it via the Nottingham ring road and then going across country from the A46 via Elston. The ground could hardly be nearer the A1, with just a line of trees separating the pitch from the road, while the complex where the ground sits is just off the slip road when you leave in a Southbound direction.

Long Bennington Playing Fields comprises of a modern dressing room and office block, which was seemingly out of bounds today, while adjacent is a kids play park and some enclosed artificial surface areas. The grassed areas comprise of a couple of small sided pitches, and then down at the bottom of the complex is the full sized pitch, and very nice it is too.

The surface was very good, while one side had some natural banking that gave an elevated view of the proceedings. With trees lining half of the banked side, all of the opposite side and also behind one of the goals, it had quite an enclosed feel to it as well. Add in a couple of permanent dug outs and it very much felt like a football ground as opposed to a roped off pitch in a park.

It was bloody windy though, and that certainly had an impact on the game. I’ll be honest, the first half was very little to write home about as both sides rarely troubled the goalkeepers, but, as legs tired in the second period in the tricky conditions, chances started to come.

I did think a 0-0 was on the cards but then in the 76^th minute the hosts George Patrinos found enough space in the penalty area to compose himself and rifle the ball home. With time then running out it looked like three points were staying in Long Bennington, but as we moved into time added on, Gregor Howell produced a superb finish for the visitors to take a share of the points. In fairness, it was probably the right outcome.

As I made my way back to the car, the players of Long Bennington’s men’s team and those of Ruddington Village Reserves were preparing at the side of the pitch for the 3pm kick off. I didn’t hang around though, I had to make the journey back across country to meet my mate Steve at the next game.

One of my very few mates that is, although he does come in handy!