Viral Wombwell

Wombwell Main  1  Dodworth Miners Welfare  2

Sheffield & Hallamshire County Senior League – Premier Division

Admission / Programme – No / No

Wombwell Main are like, reyt famous!

They have a YouTube channel, the videos they post regularly get over 1000 views, and one of them struck a chord with so many people.

Manager Terry Simon was filmed walking over the pitch just over a month ago, bemoaning the quite horrendous weather we’ve had consistently since October, and his comment was “The football club won’t finish the season, and the cricket club won’t be able to start the season!”

He talked about a Junior Tournament that is due to be hosted in a few weeks time, and if that doesn’t happen, financially the junior section of the football club would be in a real mess because it relies on it to fund the season.

“I’m getting up in the middle of the night to see if it’s raining.”, Terry said in the video, he was genuinely concerned about the situation, this is something in all of his years of being involved with Wombwell Main, he’s never experienced.

At the point where that video was made, Wombwell had not played a home game since the 11th of November, they finally got back on their home pitch on the 23rd March, four and a half months later! 

Thankfully, it very much looks now like Wombwell Main will finish the season. Since 23rd March, of the ten games they’ve had, nine have been at home, and even after the recent run of decent weather, we sit as I type (11th May) and they still have two home and two away games still to play.

However, it was the video of Terry Simon that truly resonated with so many people, he’s been involved with Wombwell Main for more years than many of us have been around, but he’s never seen anything like it, and for Terry, there are volunteers at clubs up and down the land who have had similar situations to have to deal with.

But it was Wombwell Main’s video that went viral, and of course it was their Warhol moment, but it highlighted a very serious problem, that may well be something we have to live with moving forward.

Wombwell has been quite an interesting place from a footballing point of view. Perhaps the easiest way to explain it is to think about the venues before the clubs. Down in the East side of the town, on Station Road is the home ground of Wombwell Town, a club that have raced through the levels over recent seasons and now find themselves in Step 6, competing in the Northern Counties East League. 

The ground has been used before by other clubs, namely Wombwell Sporting Association who competed in the Yorkshire League and the NCEL in it’s early years, before dropping into the Central Midlands League and then the Sheffield County Senior League, by which time they had renamed themselves as Wombwell Town. The current Wombwell Town is no relation, the original club disappeared in 2000, with the new one arriving in 2018.

On the West side of Wombwell, very close to the railway station is the sports ground that the cricket club and Wombwell Main FC share. They joined the Sheffield County Senior League in 1996 and quickly got promoted to the top flight, where they’ve remained ever since, having won it three times in the late nineties and early noughties, and, been runners up a couple of times since.

The ground at Wombwell Main comprises of a clubhouse on the main road, and the cricket pitch directly in front of it. As you reach the edges of the football pitch a dressing room sits on the right hand side, and in terms of the football pitch itself, it has some banking on one side with a barrier in front of it, whereas on the side that runs up beyond the dressing rooms, you’ve got a bit of hard standing with another barrier.

It's a grand place to watch football, especially on a nice night, and having been before for an end of season game, I was pretty familiar with the layout, although the barriers on both sides look like a relatively new addition as I can’t recall them from previously.

A decent crowd rocked up for the game against neighbouring Dodworth Miners Welfare and they were treated to a very good spectacle indeed. 

Bailey Cowsell gave a depleted Main side the lead, but Jordan Kershaw equalised for the visitors who are set for a second placed finish in the table behind Penistone Church Reserves. It was heartbreak though for Main in injury time when Jack Wilson scored the winner for the visitors.

But, for Wombwell Main it’s about finishing the season, and that was something Terry Simon genuinely thought wouldn’t be possible at one stage.