My Matchday - 290 Broadfield Stadium

Crawley Town 3v2 AFC Wimbledon
League Cup Preliminary Round
Friday 29th July 2011

Five years after almost going out of business, Crawley Town kick off the 2011-12 season as a Football League club after winning the Conference title by a tatty field last season, 15 points ahead of fellow promotion winners AFC Wimbledon.
The two clubs renew rivalries straightaway in the preliminary round of the League Cup, the tie taking place due to relegated Birmingham City giving a bye in the competition because of their pending involvement in the Europa Cup, which also means I can quickly tick off Broadfield Stadium before the season gets into full swing.

The former market town of Crawley developed from the 13th century due to its location on the main road from London to Brighton. It served as a popular relocation for families moving out of over populated London, being designated as a new town in 1946.
Gatwick, the UK’s second busiest airport is located 3 miles north of the town, last year over 31.3 million passengers passed through Gatwick, making it the 9th largest in Europe for passenger traffic and the 12th busiest in terms of international users.
Apart from football my only previous knowledge of Crawley was being the location where The Cure, one of my favourite bands of all time were formed in 1976 by my long lost cousin Robert Smith, with Michael Dempsey and Lol Tolhurst when attending St Wilfrid's RC School.
Crawley FC played in the West Sussex League after their formation in 1896 before moving to the Mid-Sussex League in 1901. They went on to the Sussex County League then the Metropolitan League in the 1950s, a decade when the Town suffix was added to their name.
In 1962 the Red Devils turned semi-professional, joining the Southern League First Division the following year. In 1969 the club had a brief stint in the Southern Premier League before eventually winning promotion again in 1983-84, where they played for 20 years until winning the title and promotion to the Conference.
Over the last few years the club have battled with financial problems, flirting with administration in the late 1990s, then in March 2006 the players and staff wages were halved with the entire squad put up for sale, going into administration in June of that year with debts totalling £1.4m, due to the financial plight of club benefactors the Majeed brothers.
The struggle continued with the Red Devils hours from liquidation in August 2006, but the club survived, confirmed clear of debt in May 2007. Another setback came in February 2010 as they faced a winding up order in the High Court due to money being owed to HMRC, however the case was later dismissed by the High Court as the club proved the debt had been paid.

Last season saw a complete financial turnaround, totally transformed from a club living on the bones of its arse to being tagged the Man City of the Conference. Mysterious and anonymous financial clout saw big money signings and under the guidance of experienced manager Steve Evans the ambitious “Project Promotion” was achieved just as the supermarkets took stock of chocolate eggs and stuffed toy rabbits.
A memorable season will also be remembered for their giant killing exploits in the FA Cup, after knocking out League clubs Swindon Town, Derby County and Torquay United, they were a width of a post away from taking Manchester United back to Broadfield in the 5th round after a brave display in front of a near 75,000 crowd at Old Trafford.


Crawley Town moved a couple of miles across town to Broadfield Stadium, after 48 years at their previous home Town Mead which was sold to developers in 1997. Broadfield is the club’s sixth ground having previously played at Malthouse Farm, Victory Hall & Rectory Field, Yetmans Field and Ifield Recreation Ground.
The council owned stadium has a capacity of 4,996, dominated by the main West Stand which has a single tier capacity of 1,150 red seats. The stand looks more attractive by the triangular designed red tubing which supports the three floodlights on the roof. Spectator access is gained via staircases at the front and there’s also Perspex windshields at each side.
The North and South terraces’ are both fully covered with the roofs curving around in the corners to meet the main stand. At the far side the open East Terrace has a basic centrally positioned electric scoreboard and three floodlight pylons.
The record attendance is 4,522 against Weymouth in the club’s 2003-04 title winning season, witnessing a 2-1 victory against the eventual runners-up.

Crawley Town is now pushed into the same envelope as previous ground visits to Norwich City(19- 9-81) and Crystal Palace (29-11-97) as journeys from hell when circumstances beyond my control has meant I’ve missed the kick-off and a good chunk of the match.

This trip was split into the two parts. The first leg of the journey was with the breadknife and kids, as we were staying with family in Lincolnshire for the weekend, then Mariners fan, Squad#88 and fellow radio star from The Completists - Graham Precious picked me up in Grantham at 3.30pm.

The drive south takes around three hours, allowing plenty of time to negotiate the nightmare on tarmac; the M25, however Graham got caught up in heavy traffic in Lincoln so didn’t turn up until 415pm, but there was still sufficient time left to get to the match and maybe have a pre-match pint.

The journey was going swimmingly until we came to a sudden halt in the middle of the M25, roadwork’s stretching 10 miles on the north side of the Dartford Toll Crossing meant it took a good one and a half hours to do the last 13 mile before crossing the Thames.

When we finally got to the toll, the digital display clock at the cash point read 7:38 in bright red digits. It was as if the clock was taunting me, telling me we still had a good 40 miles left with only seven minutes until kick-off.

Full marks to Graham though, his bully-boy tactical driving meant he made up good time, reaching the stadium just as I heard a loud cheer and the match MC announcing that the scorer of AFC Wimbledon’s goal is Luke Moore.
We discovered we had just missed the first goal of the game, but after we finally settled on the South Terrace, I overheard a Crawley fan saying he wasn’t impressed with his team’s performance and also stating what a poor game it had been, maybe the players were waiting for our arrival because the match I watched was a cracking game with both teams hungry for a place in the First Round of the League Cup.
Crawley equalised on 38 minutes when a left wing cross found Akdan in the box unmarked with time to rifle in a right foot shot into the far corner, only for Dons new summer signing Jack Midson to restore the advantage straight from the restart.
It was nice to see a goal from Torres, but this was Sergio not Fernando, who again drew the home side level, seizing on a loose ball before placing his shot with precision past keeper Brown.
Both teams went all out for a winner and it was last seasons top scorer in the Conference, Matt Tubbs who grabbed it with a superb piece of skill, showing great control to bring the ball down on his chest and volley the ball home to book a date with Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park on the 9th August.
Broadfield Stadium will be a welcome addition to the Football League and I can see both clubs doing well this coming season and I wouldn't be surprised if Crawley Town manage to repeat the feat of Stevenage last term, by winning promotion in their first season in League Two.
After the game we went to the club shop for a programme and after a bit of a wait, we were informed they had sold out, but they’ll most likely do a reprint. I also tried to get a pin badge but they had none of these either, reason being they had to send them back due to a spelling mistake.( Crowley Town or Red Evils perhaps?…Eddy)
The return journey went smoothly, back at my weekend headquarters at Ann and Malcolm’s for 1215am. Malc has built his very own pub at the top of his garden which is named(by yours truly) ‘The Man Cave’ I had a quick pint of Guinness before finally going to bed (which was inside the man made pub) pleased I’d quickly ticked off the newcomers to the 92 and I also having another match to look forward to at Gainsborough Trinity later in the day.

Matchday stats CTFC 3(Akpan 38,Torres 53, Tubbs 64) AFCW 2(L Moore 26, Midson 46)

Admission £16 Programme:sold out

att.3,204

Ground no.290 Broadfield Stadium - Matchday Web album(18 pictures)

Sluggo, You Have to Eat!

One of the scary things about reptiles, at least to me, is that they can go a very long time without eating. And they do. It's never good when a patient won't eat. For someone like me, who loves her charges and her babies, her friends and family with food, it's doubly upsetting.

Every day for two weeks I put tempting food right in front of that turtle. Twice a day. He'd look at it, sometimes even crane his neck, but he stolidly refused to take a bite. I tried bananas, peaches, watermelon, mealworms, earthworms, black raspberries, blueberries and slugs. Slugs are like candy to box turtles.

I went out with my headlamp, breathing the clouds of midges and gnats who were attracted to it, and hunted slugs at night. I put melon rinds out as bait and gathered them, keeping them in a little slug farm in the living room. You have one, don't you? I feed mine lettuce and spent daylily flowers.

These are Arion subfuscus, an imported European slug. Don't ask me why we have imported slugs here. We just do. Not surprisingly, they vastly outnumber our old gray slugs. 

And the turkle would look at them and let them crawl right by. Until the day when I offered two slugs on a nice piece of bark from the forest floor, which was covered with fresh earthy-smelling loam. The turtle's head shot out and he craned his neck and bam! he grabbed a slug. And then a second.

I was so excited I took these photos from across the room with my 300 mm. lens, just to document this Gandhi of turtles, digging in. He was so skittish I couldn't let him see me.

After that magic moment, no slug was safe around Sluggo. My theory is that the scent of fresh loam reminded him of home, and stimulated his appetite. 

Goo-byeeeee!

I was one relieved turtle nurse when Sluggo finally lived up to his name.

Meet Sluggo

I have kind of an unusual Ohio wildlife rehabilitator's permit. It's for songbirds, bats and reptiles, specifically box turtles. Boxies get on the wrong end of our machines more often than I'd like to see. Cars, well, they usually don't survive an argument with a wheel. Lawnmowers are bad, too. Turtles' shells often save them, but lawnmowers can inflict some truly grievous injuries.

This handsome older gentleman came to me in late June 2011 from a wooded yard in Athens, Ohio, where the caller had accidentally hit him with a rider mower. I hate getting turtle calls because it's so hard to gauge how badly hurt the animal is from a verbal description. Is he bright? Crawling? How big is the wound? Where is it? Any limbs missing? That kind of thing. I still shudder when I remember the female boxy a couple of sweet young hippies brought me. They were very vague on the phone. Her shell was in pieces, apparently. "Yes, all the pieces are there." What they neglected to tell me, because they wanted so badly for me to somehow wave my wand and magically fix this hurt animal, was that the pieces were no longer connected to the turtle. They were rattling around in the shoebox with her. 

I could instantly see that this turtle had a better prognosis. Hey, he had a prognosis. What you're seeing here is not exposed flesh but pink shell bone, crushed and compressed, with the colored scutes knocked off. Oh, it had to hurt. The callers had done just the right thing--cleaned him up with some disinfectant and put Band-aids over the wound until they could bring him to Marietta. I took the Band-aids off and soaked a paper towel in Betadine, and let him crawl around  while the disinfectant soaked the grass and dirt loose.

Part of the protocol for turtles with bad shell wounds is eight days of Baytril (antibiotic) injections, at about $10 a day. Ouch for turtle and rehabber. These are administered in the back legs, one every other day, with a very fine needle. Still, it hurts, and the turtle purely hates it. This is the second boxy I've had who learned within a day to keep his hinders tucked and to crawl away from me using only his front legs.  That's what he's doing in the photo above--booking with his hind legs tucked.

I picked all the grass and dirt off, washed him, disinfected him again, and let him dry. I couldn't even budge the smashed-in shell pieces so I decided to let them heal as they were. He still had control over his back legs, though they and his tail were quite bruised, and I thought I could probably do more harm than good by messing about with the shell. 

Time for some spackle.

The white Crisco-like substance is Silvodine cream, an antibiotic cream for burns and deep wounds. I packed the wound with cream and got some Tegaderm, which is a surgical membrane that acts a bit like skin. Silvodine, unfortunately, needs a prescription, but Chet's veterinarian, Dr. Lutz, was happy to help with that and the Baytril, too.

Peeling off the white backing and laying the clear Tegaderm over the cream. It's adhesive.

Smoothing the Tegaderm.

Better. Not all better, but on the road to recovery without risk of infection.

Next: Sluggo, you HAVE to eat something.

Berry Greedy Pickers

 I can tell you that $41 worth of blueberries will just about break your arm. So we bring auxiliary containers  (plastic buckets) to dump the booty into so we can keep picking with our light little Easter baskets.

I wanted a shot of Liam walking his berries up to the garage to be counted.  But I had to stop in the middle of shooting. "Don't swing a full basket, Liam!"

"Okay!"

 

  And here goes Phoebe with hers.

 Not until I got this shot on the screen did I notice I'd captured a priceless moment in Liam's sweet life. Craack! Whump! Dump!


Classic! Look at his mouth, wide open. Ohhh! Dang!

Phoebe, of course, stopped to help him recover his fruit.

There was a little fellow at the cash register who was only too happy to ring us up. His mom had a terrible time keeping those fingers at bay. He wanted to punch all the keys at once, and he came at that little adding machine like a baby octopus. "I try! I try!" And she let him punch in our sale.

 Needless to say the Thomas the Tank Engine PJ's, worn all day long, endeared him to me forever. Not to mention his passionate desire to help his mom. I remembered Liam always punching keys on the credit card machine at the grocery store. He'd get so frustrated when nothing happened. His momma's a cash type.

 

 Too soon, it was time to turn for home. We could have picked until nightfall, but I was out of money. And truth to tell, I made a cobbler with the last of the frozen berries from June 2010 to make room for 2011 fruit in the freezer!  That's what happens when you have helpful kids (one of whom once wore his Thomas pajamas all day long, too)

and beautiful blueberries, with the greenywhite promise of more to come. Ahh, Summer. Could you just linger awhile longer, spread out your gifts through the long dull winter?

100FgC 5th Birthday.

It’s 5 years to the day that The 100 Football Grounds Club was launched.

On the 25th July 2006 I posted my list of grounds, as well and my mate Ian Patrick’s details and linked this site to a couple of websites. Within an hour Rev Nick Percival from Barnsley, Jack Warner from Perth, Australia(who I haven’t heard from since) and Blyth Spartans supporter Alastair Gibbs-Barton left a blog comment with their own ground statistics, so the 100FgC was officially born with five founder members. The membership has steadily grown over the last five years to the point where the squad is near full capacity, with only 3 squad numbers left before it finally closes.

During this time I’ve covered matches at 191 grounds featuring 251 different clubs. I originally intended to just post pictures of my ground visits, but then decided to write a small piece to accompany the pictures, but I got a bit carried away and began to enjoy writing, My Matchday articles covering club and ground histories, match report, travelling and of course, the most important part of a match day; pubs and bevvy.

Thanks to all the members who have joined and made this little club of ours a success and it’s been a great thrill to meet up with some of the squad and make new friendships over the last few years. I get the impression that some seasoned groundhoppers belittle this organisation, but so what, it is what it is, and I’ve achieved exactly what I set out to do in 2006, which was bring together a set of football fans from different clubs from all over the world, all with the same passion and common interest. So here’s hoping the 100FgC continues on and in 5 years time I’ll be celebrating a groundhopping decade. Cheers!

21st Century Hunter-Gatherers

 I believe I was a crazy good hunter-gatherer in another life. I love to pick things and I'm fast at it. My kids have inherited the gene, although they tend to look for the premium fruit rather than mass volumes of it. They pride themselves not on having the most berries, but the biggest and fattest.  I pick three times faster than they do, but their berries are Super Premium.

The blueberries at Rolling Ridge Berry Farm are more the size of grapes this year. 

 

And they are sooo beautiful. I love the ones with the heavy bloom, like these:

 

They remind me of the powdery sheen on a pigeon's feather. 

All around us the songs of Baltimore orioles, scarlet tanagers, robins, cedar waxwings and yellow-breasted chats rang out from the woods and blueberry rows. You won't see crop netting here, or hear cannons or nasty recordings of starling distress calls. The Winders grow enough for the birds and us.

 

View from the backmost berry row, where I like to pick and bird at the same time. It's alive with yellowthroats, white-eyed vireos, chats, robins and the like.

The habitat all around is rich and birdy to start with and then this farm sets a smorgasbird. You can imagine. Lots of parent birds bring their fledglings to the farm to fatten them up and get a break from the babies' incessant demands for food.

Phoebe and Liam noticed that the sweetest berries were most likely to have a couple pierced by the triangular pecks of birds. They know where the best ones are.

So seduced were we by the abundance and ease of picking that before we knew it we had FORTY-ONE BUCKS WORTH OF BLUEBERRIES. Yiiikes. Which would have been well over $100 worth in the grocery store, only not even a tenth as fresh and delicious. To those of you who are wondering what you do with that many blueberries, we gorge on them fresh and freeze what we can't eat. We give them to friends and family, make cobblers and throw blueberries into smoothies and yogurt and over cereal. We have a blueberry ball. I'm thankful for Rolling Ridge Berry Farm. A visit there is the perfect way to spend a summer afternoon with the kids.

LIttle Towns, Narrow Roads and Old Houses

People who visit us for the first time often comment that we live in the middle of nowhere. No, we don't, but you can see nowhere from here. And that's exactly how we like it. Every single day I thank my lucky stars that I get to live in the middle of nowhere.

Sometimes there's a day when the sky's intensity matches the land's, and somehow my Canon G-11 is able to capture the vivid blue of the sky and the shapes of the clouds without making the landforms too dark. This was such a day. A perfect summer day.  I was so happy that my photos were coming out as beautifully as the day was.

 As you can see, Bethel Twp Rd. 340 is not much more than a little driveway. That's how I like my roads. Doesn't this make you want to snoop around, see what's up there? Or more importantly, what's not up there? I've been doing that lately, taking country roads that have heretofore only been names or numbers to me. And I am never disappointed. Sometimes there's a sandhill crane or a fox or a bobcat waiting for me down these roads.

Lucky to live here, that's all.

The hamlet of Lebanon. There are several Lebanon, Ohios. This happens to be my Lebanon Ohio. It's probably the littlest one. That's how I like my towns, too.

 I think this old house is still being lived in, though I'm not sure. Maybe it's just storage. But it's untouched from how it would have looked fifty years ago. I like my old houses like that.

 It has a little shed friend. Oh how I would love to have a shed like this, a place to store the lawnchairs and bicycles. I've asked for one for my birthday. It will be a new one, but we will love it no less.

From the back porch of the old house, this is the view:

 Yucca and lilac: the two steadfast friends of little old buildings, keeping them company through the decades.

And across the road stands another shed, with a beautiful old water pump. Looking at it took me right back to the breathless anticipation of pumping my grandma Ruigh's creaky old pump, waiting and waiting for the rush of cool, iron-tinged water to come gushing into my tin cup. I didn't much like the taste of the water, but I loved that I could bring it up all by myself if I worked hard enough.

The sky was moody and blue, but our spirits were undampened. Speaking of breathless anticipation, all these vistas were ours on the way to Rolling Ridge Berry Farm, our favorite you-pick establishment of all time.

 

On the other side of this field lay Berry Valhalla.

Chet Baker and the Mystery Box

Years ago, my friend Shila gifted me with a mysterious box which, when turned upside down and then righted again, makes a delightful pinging sound at random intervals. The mechanism is a sticky ceiling, a bunch of BB’s, and three miniature brass cymbals. When you turn it upside down, the BB’s stick on the ceiling, then release randomly, pinging on the cymbals as they fall.  I really like it.

So one day I turned it over and left it there on the floor where it attracted the immediate attention of Chet Baker, who was sure there were hoodoos or perhaps very small animals inside playing the cymbals. 

Because dogs trust their noses more than any other sense, Chet tried to smell whomever might be making music in the Mystery Box.

His trusty nose providing no information whatsoever (metal has very little smell), Chet listened and looked.

 

He sniffed and sniffed again. Nope, no clues. But the musical pinging kept occurring, randomly. If it had been a regular sound he'd have found it easier to ignore. 

 

 

Our muffled snickers notwithstanding, Chet kept at the mystery, as a bulldog will. He doesn't give up easily. Just ask the chiptymunks he corners under a big flowerpot near the Bird Spa. 

He's good for a couple of hours of waiting. He's like an Eskimo waiting for the harp seal to come up for  a breath of air.

 

My favorite photo of him listening. He looks like Ferdinand the Bull, sniffing flowers.

 

 

Finally he'd heard enough. With a thoughtful look, he turned on his heel and was done with the Mystery Box.