Emergency wet weather cover

In my previous post, I suggested three positions clubs have on paying players - those who can afford to and do, those who cannot afford to and do not, and those who cannot afford to and still do in defiance of financial sense. I should have mentioned a fourth category, those who can afford to because of a financial backer, and suddenly stop doing so when the backer loses interest or has to devote funds to his business.

Tuesday's Doodson Sport Cup game against Warrington Town saw the first game for Prescot Cables since the return to amateur status, so the supporters who braved the weather were somewhat apprehensive as to who would be playing. Not falling into the fourth category above, there were no eye watering pay packets suddenly disappearing, so only a couple of players were missing. There will undoubtedly be other departures as some players obtain places at teams who are able to pay, or decide they can no longer afford to travel to training, but hopefully many will remain.

That the match was completed is a testament to the work of the groundsman, Doug Lace, and those who assist him, as the pitch responded well to the downpour that started a couple of minutes after kick off.

Conditions were far from pleasant, and both sides were quickly playing in brown, but there were none of the pools of standing water that we would have expected even a season or two ago, and which would have entailed abandoning the match.

Having forgotten my camera cover, and its being only shower proof anyway, I spent the first half in an unaccustomed position under cover near the half way line. Due to the weather and the game being a League Cup tie, the area in front of the bar was quite sparsely populated, allowing freedom of movement when the action disappeared behind a floodlight pylon.

This was also one of the best locations to get advantage of the new floodlights. I combined this with the technique I tried at Trafford a couple of weeks ago of trying not to extend my 70-300mm lens beyond about 200mm, and was rewarded with some pictures with less grain than I am used to, despite the weather.

This applied even to some of the longer range shots towards goal.

For the second half, I tried going up to the stand. I was not expecting this to work, thinking it would be too far away from the pitch under the floodlights, but found it worked surprisingly well, not just on the near touchline, as here...

... but also in the goal area...

... although we start to lose clarity towards the opposite side of the pitch, which becomes more apparent if you click on the picture below to see it in full size.

Of course, none of these pictures came out of the camera looking like this - how I enhance them still needs to be covered in another post.

The rest of the pictures from the game can be seen here.