Insurance

Cribbs  3  Royal Wootton Bassett Town  1

Hellenic Football League  – Premier Division

Admission / Programme - £8 / Online

It’s the time of year when I start to look closely at the league tables.

By the time we get into mid to late March you can start to get a rough idea of who is in the shake up for promotion, and the area that interests me is those clubs who look likely to move from Step 5 to Step 4.

This season, every winner of a Step 5 league gets promoted, whereas every runner up will go into a single legged play off against a side from Step 4, so you could be looking at anything between 16 and 32 new entrants moving into Step 4.

I’d had a look to see who were in the pole positions and one league that was quite interesting was the Hellenic League. For the large part of the season it’s been very much a two horse race between Malvern Town and Cribbs, but it was the Bristol based club who have seemingly had the slight edge all the way along. Corsham Town, the FA Vase semi-finalists have games in hand but it would take a monumental effort for them to propel themselves into the mix.

As it stood, if I was to place a bet on a club at Step 5 (where I’d not been previously) to get a top spot and a direct promotion, I would stick my money on Cribbs to keep Malvern at bay and move into what is likely to be the Southern League. So that’s them jinxed, sorry guys!

Cribbs v Royal Wootton Bassett Town, now that had a nice ring about it, and with the sun shining on a Saturday morning, I made the decision to give them a visit, and of course re-familiarise myself with the M42 and the M5 which I will be making use of at Easter when it comes to the family holiday in Devon.

For those not familiar with their Bristol based geography, Cribbs are located in the Western suburb of Cribbs Causeway which sits right at the side of the M5, before you get to the Avonmouth Bridge. So getting to it is a proverbial doddle, other than the traffic issues you can encounter by the large shopping area at Cribbs Causeway, and what appears to be a large new housing development adjacent to the ground that means you have to take a little detour to get to it.

The journey was a comfortable one, and once I’d located the ground, it was apparent that it was part of a larger area of sporting complexes, with a couple of rugby clubs, a hockey pitch and tennis courts all being within very close proximity. The Cribbs Sports & Social Club element where the football club is located, contains, as you would expect, a large two story club house with dressing rooms underneath, but, it has a former life that is close to my heart….insurance!

I work in the Financial Services industry and one thing my team of highly motivated, trained and talented consultants excels at is selling insurance that is linked to mortgages and housing transactions. Now the Cribbs Sports & Social Club has previously been the sports and social bases of insurance companies AXA, Sun Life and Friends Life, so much so the football club has previously had names that has been associated with these insurers. They started out as AXA Sun Life, before becoming plain and simple AXA. The AXA bit then went and the club became known as Cribbs Friends Life, before finally becoming plain old Cribbs are recently as 2013.

We deal with AXA, and we dealt with Friends Life before they were taken over by Aviva, so I am pretty familiar with these companies and their products, but because I wasn't directly employed by any of these organisations, it turns out that I wasn’t allowed any free beer or the opportunity to run out with the team as a mascot for the day!

Disappointment aside, with a pint in hand, I had a scan at the clubs history and having worked out the timeline of different names, I could see that they were formed in 1976 and started in the Bristol & Avon League, before a twenty year spell in the Bristol Combination which ended in 1999 when they won promotion to the Gloucestershire County League.

The league was won for a first time in 2012 and with it came promotion to the Western League First Division, which in turn was won at the first attempt. With Step 5 attained, the club did end its ties with the insurers in 2013 (at a cost), but undeterred they maintained their position and at the start of 2021 they were moved laterally to the Hellenic League, due to the Western League footprint moving further South West.

Under the stewardship of Richard Luffman, the club finished fourth last season, but as I said earlier, this time around the championship is within their gift, and a dream promotion to Step 4 that it brings.

The ground is a tidy venue. Located on something of a plateau, it’s fully enclosed, it has hard standing all round, with two areas of cover sitting on what can best be described as the M5 side of the pitch. A seated stand sits at the stop of the bank to one side of the dugouts, while a smaller covered area containing seats and a standing area sits on the other side of the dugouts albeit much closer to the touchline.

The game was a good one. The hosts took the lead as early as the 3^rd minute through David Duru, but the battlers from the well known Royal town in Wiltshire equalised on the 14^th minute through Matthew Jones. It didn’t take long for Cribbs to re-take the lead though and in the 26^th minute through Aysa Corrick, and to be fair when Sonny Harnett-Balkwill got a third for the league leaders just before half time you felt the game was pretty much done and dusted.

No more goals came in the second period, and with news coming through that Malvern Town were winning comfortably against Longlevens, the race for the title moved on with the points advantage remaining the same as it had prior to the game. Since the game though, Cribbs did win comfortably the following midweek and are now in a position whereby they need eight points from four games to clinch the crown.

I'm pretty confident I've called this one right, but Cribbs probably don't want to be reading that right now....