Going Dutch

Keyworth United  2  Wollaton  2

Nottinghamshire Senior League – Premier Division

Admission / Programme – No / No

The message arrives from the Netherlands, the lads are coming over for a long weekend, and I’ve got two jobs, but two very important jobs.

Job One – collect them from Birmingham Airport, early on the Wednesday morning, and then get them back to Belper via some form of feeding station. 

Job Two – they want to go to a game on the Wednesday night, which is fine, but as monsoon season remains in full swing, I have my concerns that we’ll find anything.

Job One was easily dealt with, Job Two, well, as the day wore on all of the games close to home on grass were going by the wayside, and the only game I could realistically see being on, that wasn’t an unreasonable distance away was the Nottinghamshire Senior League at Keyworth United, where they were playing Wollaton on the plastic.

Theo and Rob have never been to Keyworth before, in fact they’ve never seen a game in the NSL before. In fact I could go on, we go to the Netherlands and end up at Ajax, Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen, they go to Keyworth, seems a fair reciprocal swap to me…..

So I picks the boys up from the hotel, then goes to collect Mr H senior who has also decided he wants to come as well. So, I know what to expect when it comes to the evening, to a degree, I’ve been watching stuff like this for years as you know, but what are my companions going to think? I’d worked on the principle that if they didn’t like, they had live football on the TVs in the bar!

So Keyworth United, I’ve been a couple of times before. The first time being in March 2008 on the old grass pitch at the very back of the Platt Lane complex, it was a 1-0 defeat to Clifton. They then installed the plastic pitch at the Platt Lane end of the complex and it would have been October 2010 when I saw them lose 2-1 to Nottinghamshire Police.

In Nottinghamshire football circles Keyworth United are quite a big name. I remember them from back in the old Notts Alliance days, when along with the likes of Rainworth Miners Welfare and Hucknall Colliery Welfare, they were one of the major players. Of course the league changed to become what it is now and many of the clubs moved in other directions, namely to the Central Midlands League and beyond, but Keyworth, other than a brief spell when they did move across to the CML, have always been associated with the County based league.

Keyworth, located just off the Nottingham ring road, to the South East of the City, is not a poor village by any means, and the football club are very much part of the community. When I say football club, it’s more of a sports club because Platt Lane is shared by both the football and the cricket. Teams are varying ages are based at the venue, and as we arrived it looked like the women’s team had just finished a training session on the floodlit 4G.

They have a decent sized car park and the centrepiece is the clubhouse and changing room complex, with it’s large bar and cafeteria area in the centre. The football was on the TV, if it was all too much for the Dutch boys, they would be ok!

You can access one side of the 4G to watch the games, and they don’t charge any admission to watch the games, which to be fair if they were still in the CML they would probably have to do. The NSL top flight is notionally Step 7, so the next step up would be within the National League System and based on their location it would mean Division One of the United Counties League. Sandiacre Town got promoted last season from the NSL and as is stands they are in danger of coming straight back down again.

Keyworth are probably more than happy plying their trade is the NSL, and to be fair this season they sat comfortably in a mid-table placing prior to the game against a visiting side who are probably not going to win the league, but they are well set for a top three finish.

The game, on a cold evening, and watched by a decent sized crowd including many of the women’s team, turned out to be an entertaining one.

The visitors looked the better side in the early stages, taking the lead through Joshua Stevenson, but just prior to half time a goal from Ajay Bentham levelled things up for the hosts. Jarrod Westcarr, who had looked a real handful, gave Wollaton a second half lead, and at that point you did wonder whether coming back a second time would be too much for Keyworth, but they had other ideas.

It was very late in the game, when after a spell of attacking from the home side, Scott Litchfield was the man on the spot to force home the equaliser, and to be fair no one could argue that they didn’t deserve a point out of the encounter.

So, a 2-2 draw, and you know what, other than a spell just after half time, everyone who travelled in the car with me watched the entire game. The lure of Arsenal v Brighton on the box at no stage was too great to prove to be a distraction.

Mind you, it could have been worse, had the weather been any good I was going to take them to watch Derby Singh Brothers on a park in Sinfin, and that might have been a step too far in hindsight!