The Last Bastion?

Broadheath Central   3   Garswood United   3 

Cheshire Football League – Premier Division

I first got in touch with Broadheath Central at the start of last season.

They’d been promoted to the top flight of the Cheshire League (my favourite Step 7 league as readers will have noted), but I was a touch confused as to where they were going to be playing.

In some quarters they were listed as being at Salisbury Fields in Broadheath, but it was also reported that they were playing at the old Flixton FC ground on Valley Road.

Anyway, I contacted them and they did duly confirm that it was to be Flixton, but, hopefully by the start of the following season they would indeed be back at their ‘proper’ home just to the North of the centre of Altrincham.

I’ll be honest, they kind of fell off the radar after that, but then, once the fixtures dropped onto Full Time I spotted that they were indeed listed at Salisbury Fields, cue contact again, cue confirmation, visit planned!

Now this is a funny one, because on a well known football forum much debate took place about Salisbury Fields, and indeed the access to the said venue. I had a look on Google and it looked quite simple, drive down Salisbury Road and the pitch was directly in front of you in a public park. Quite what was complicated about that I don’t know? Anyway, it all stemmed from the fact that the ground used to be listed as being on Viaduct Road, which, sits on the opposite side of a viaduct from the pitch, but I shall explain a bit more about that in a minute.

I did think about driving up through the Hope Valley but when I did some research I was just as quick shooting over to Stoke, going up the M6 and then taking the A56 all the way into Altrincham, and then heading out a short way to the other side of the town to the ground.

The journey was painless, punctuated by a few calls to my football mates to see where they had ended up. Captain Piles was at Vulcan as part of a two match double, Socially Distanced Steve was at Derby United while Martin (Clay Cross’s answer to Forrest Gump – he loves to travel on foot!), was walking to Ashover!

Now then, I’ve been to Alty a couple of times before for games at Moss Lane, but this was the first time I’d travelled in via this specific route, and by crikey, it looks quite an expensive place to live, and from seeing the edges of the town centre, it looked like it might be quite a good place for a drink!

Oh how I long for the good old days of travelling by train, consuming a fair quantity of soup, and then heading to the football. Clearly in the current climate, you’ve got to be masked up on a train, be choosy with your pubs, and, be sure the game is taking place and a club hasn’t been lurgy infected. So, in short, it’s the car for the foreseeable…..

Right, quite literally, I turned right down Salisbury Road, and there in front of me was a large park, with a railed pitch tucked into the bottom corner. But, that was when I had a moment of befuddlement, where is the ‘football club’? I mean, this is Step 7, you can’t just have a pitch and nothing else, can you?

But then, I spotted it, tucked in one of the arches under the viaduct, like Phil Mitchell’s garage off of Eastenders, was a door with a sign above it ‘Broadheath Central JFC’. Bingo, we had a room, so off I trotted and it was then that the confusion that had originally arisen on the forum became clear. You walked through the archway, out of another door onto Viaduct Road, where the clubs Social Club sat.

It was a very nice social club as well, I frequented it and was warmly welcomed in a Covid compliant style, but, and this is the slightly confusing bit if you didn’t know what you were doing, or you were ten pints deep after a day on the train. As you approach the viaduct from the social club side, there isn’t any signage for the football club, so you could end up in stumbling into a serial killers torture chamber if you weren’t careful! I was careful, I was soon back at pitch side.

Salisbury Fields on a glorious day, as it was, is a very nice place to watch football. With the viaduct at one end and houses down one side, the rest of the park is spacious and full of greenery. They do have some dugouts that are secured on non-match days, but otherwise, I suspect any chance of future progress would be severely hampered by the fact it’s almost impossible to enclose and installing any kind of furniture and indeed lights would not be easy. To this day I still don’t know where the dressing rooms are, the players changed on the pitch!

As for the game, well I’d seen Garswood lose to Lostock Gralam the previous week and on the day they’d been poor, whereas this was to be the season opener for Broadheath, it was a tough one to call beforehand.

What a cracking match it turned out to be.

Broadheath took the lead three times in the game, thanks to goals from Karmal Nelson, James Phillips and Cian Donahue, but three times Garswood showed resilience and forced an equaliser. The Garswood goals coming from Joseph Burkes, Daniel Clarke and Matt Robinson. On balance, I think Broadheath will be the more disappointed side having been in the lead so many times and letting it slip, plus, for the final stages of the game they were the side in the ascendancy.

All was good in the World as I got back in my car, which by now I’d moved to behind the viaduct end goal. The journey back was painless and the reports on Five Live of behind closed doors games in the professional game just didn’t sound right, or indeed sit right with me. Football is for the fans as much as it’s for the players, and that’s why the last bastion of this already fragile season may well be the parks pitches that the likes of Broadheath Central call home.