Only One Kimberley

Kimberley Miners Welfare   5   Barrow Town   0

East Midlands Counties League

As far as crappy days go, this was a crappy day, not because I was feeing especially crappy, not at all, it was more to do with the crappiness of the tasks I had to do and the equally crappy wet weather!

We’ve closed an office, and in the basement of that office are all our old client files, going back years. As a result the responsibility falls upon me to sort and re-house the said files, I spent pretty much most of the day in a mouldy basement, probably catching various diseases like Cholera, Typhoid and almost certainly Legionnaires Disease, either bagging them up for confidential waste, or boxing them up to be shipped to another storage centre.

I was shagged by 4pm, I needed to vacate the premises, my arms ached, I was fed up and it had wazzed it down most of the day, I needed to go and watch some football.

Conscious that I was a bit early for heading to a game, and mindful of the fact I still had loads of calls to make my team to ensure they’d all done what they had supposed to do in terms of the business week, I decided to get in the car and head down from Sheffield City Centre to somewhere in the East Midlands. Then I was going to park up, and take stock of matters.

I had one or two games to choose from, but there was a caveat, Mrs H was going to watch Belper Town play at Stocksbridge Park Steels, so I had to be back at a reasonable hour to collect young Master H from his Grandmothers. I was toying with Loughborough Dynamo, but then I spotted the East Midlands Counties League games were all kicking off at the earlier time of 7.30pm.

I’d not been to Kimberley for a few years, so I kind of said to myself that it was always going to be Plan A, so it was off the M1 at junction 27, down through Underwood and Watnall, before parking up on Nottingham Road, adjacent to the entrance of the Stag Ground. All looked ok for the game in terms of social media, but, if there was a problem I was placed for the M1 again and Loughborough if need be.

With calls made, and noting the arrival of players from both sides, I could relax for a while, try and get some feeling back into my arms, and, do a bit of research into football in Kimberley, a subject matter that I’ve not paid an awful lot of attention to over recent years.

Let’s start with the town, well it is home to something in the region of 7,000 people, and is perhaps best known for the old Kimberley Brewery, or, as it was also known, Hardys & Hansons. The brewery was sold to Greene King in 2006 and subsequently closed, with the site being developed for housing.

Otherwise, alongside brewing, it was coal mining and hosiery that were the major employers in the town, all are now gone, and Kimberley nowadays has the usual mix of national and local shops, plus of course just down the road in Giltbrook you’ve got IKEA and the surrounding retail park.

Football wise, well Kimberley Town were Central Alliance League members until 1971 when they joined the Midland Counties League. When the merger with the Yorkshire League took place in 1982 they were founder members of the Northern Counties East League where they remained until 1986.

When the Central Midlands League went on a mission to create a Midlands Premier League in 1986, Kimberley moved to the new Supreme Division, and from that point until 2012, albeit in differing divisions over the years, that was the competition they remained in.

In 2012, the club resigned from the league and folded, but just down the road from the Stag Ground, on Digby Street, another club was looking upwardly mobile. Kimberley Miners Welfare have been around since 1926, playing in local leagues until 1995 when they joined the Nottinghamshire Alliance League. This league of course become the Nottinghamshire Senior League in 2005, and Kimberley were placed in the top tier, the Senior Division.

When Town vacated the Stag, Miners Welfare moved to the ground on Nottingham Road, and within a season they’d finished runners up and with it came promotion to the East Midlands Counties League. They’ve remained in this division since, more than holding their own, albeit when last season was curtailed they had been having a tough time.

I first went to the old Digby Street ground back in August 2008, watching Miners Welfare lose 2-0 to Wollaton. My memories of the place are sketchy, but I do remember it sits almost right on the roundabout of the A610 at IKEA, hemmed in by the road, housing and commercial units.

The Stag Ground is somewhere I’ve been a few times though to see Town play. I first went towards the end of the 1994-95 season and saw a cracking 4-3 win over neighbours Heanor Town, and since then I’ve been back on several occasions. Once to see Belper Town in a pre-season game, but more memorably, they used to play on Thursday nights for a period in the Critchley family days, when the team was largely made up of Sheffield based students.

Since Miners Welfare moved to the Stag, I’ve only been the once though and that was for a FA Vase replay against Heanor Town that finished 2-0 to the visitors, and had the added entertainment of a scrap between both sets of players as the teams left the pitch at half time!

The Stag doesn’t change much in terms of it’s furniture, I’ll be honest. As you walk in through the gate, the tea bar / clubhouse sits behind the goal, along with the dressing rooms, and the small stand extends from just beyond the goal to the far touch line. Otherwise it’s open to the elements, with hard standing down one side, and a grass bank on the other. That said, they have done an awful lot of work over the past few months to smarten the place up and to improve the playing surface.

One thing that also doesn’t change is the friendly welcome. From Chairman Neil Johnson through to General Manager Danny Staley, and all of the other helpers at the ground, Kimberley is a welcoming place to visit, I was soon forgetting my crappy day!

I saw Kimberley play at Belper United a couple of days earlier in the FA Vase and to be fair, they were a touch unfortunate to lose the game 2-1. But, with rock bottom Barrow Town the visitors, who themselves had a record of shipping goal aplenty since the season started, you sensed this was an opportunity to get back on the winning trail.

It was a comfortable 5-0 win in the end, and to be fair, had Kimberley got a more clinical edge and not squandered so many chances, it could easily have been double figures, they were that dominant.

Nathan Beaton opened the scoring before Isaac Stones got a second ten minutes before the break. Further goals from Samuel Brown, Luis Parkes and Carl Okojie sealed the win in front of 53 spectators. Interestingly though, the following Friday night the reserves of Kimberley entertained Hucknall Town Reserves, the crowd at that was 187!

With a quick getaway at the end, feeling more damp than achy now, I was soon in the car and heading back to pick Master H up well within the specified time curfew!

I’ve got to finish off clearing the basement next Tuesday now, I’ll need to find myself another Kimberley afterwards to cheer me up. But of course, as the chaps at the Stag Ground will tell you, there is only one Kimberley, well, maybe not ten years ago, but their certainly is now!