Boxing Day internationals

On an otherwise dull Boxing Day, there is nothing like a bit of international football. On the pitch, Prescot Cables' game at home to Colwyn Bay was not much like international football - the accents of most of the visiting players suggested they came from the traditional recruiting grounds for many North Wales coast clubs of Liverpool and Manchester. Then again, when going there, I notice a majority of the television aerials point to Winter Hill rather than Moel-y-Parc.

I arrived in plenty of time after a surprisingly smooth journey - the margin being added to by ten minutes' delay to kick off caused by a power failure to the dressing rooms and board room. Although the sunset has been getting later for a couple of weeks, at this time of year the light depends a lot more on cloud cover. The floodlights were on and I used shutter priority from the beginning. Some were keen to add a splash of colour to an otherwise grey day.

The eyes of the crowd are on Brian Richardson's socks

Holiday time often means changes are required, and couple of players were keen to impress on their first start for a while.

Andy Scarisbrick

Once again we made no delay opening the scoring, with a goal from Chris Almond after six minutes.

Chris Almond shoots for goal

The visitors replied about five minutes later. I followed my usual practice of spending about twenty minutes on one side of the goal, then swapping sides.

Jordan Wynne

During this period, I sensed I was being watched, and looked up to see a large dog, of friendly demeanour, with its paws on the pitch perimeter fence, carefully inspecting my exposures. The dog's owner introduced herself: Samantha Heaps of Cryotherapy Liverpool, who offers treatment for sports injuries. It is a similar principle to ice packs, but uses a more intense cold to improve recovery times from injuries. Josh Klein-Davies had been the first to try it, and Samantha was looking for a few pictures to promote the service.

On the field, Chris Almond continued his run of goals to restore our advantage.

With the poor light and late start, most of the pictures in the final collection came from the first half. For the second, I went straight to the side of the pitch.

Reece McNally

A headed goal from Lloyd Dean ten minutes from time made the lead secure. I thought I had not got a particularly good picture, but it worked out reasonably well.

In any event, I got the ball in the net.

The rest of the pictures from the game can be seen on the club website here, and on Google Photos here.

Final score: Prescot Cables 3 (Almond 2, Dean) Colwyn Bay 1

Welsh and techie stuff

To alleviate any alarm, I am not taking the opportunity of Prescot Cables' game against Colwyn Bay to create a technical blog in Welsh. My knowledge of the language is limited to stock phrases like "Dim ysmygu", of no use to me as I do not smoke, "Dim parcio", likewise as I do not drive, and North Wales Police's Bobbies on buses scheme, deploying officers to combat crime and anti social behavour on public transport, "Bobbis ar bysys". I am sure that should be "Bobbiau ar bysiau", but we will let that pass. With a relatively uneventful game, I thought I would follow up my comments about file sizes with a couple of examples of the position in the evening.

This was an important game to see how the team recovered from the heavy defeat at the weekend. For a note of pessimism, we were joined by Dr Jon, attending his first game of the season, discussing whether he had ever seen us win a game. Well, they say it is the hope that kills you ...

We looked last time at pictures of play in front of the advertising. I do not get much from this angle at evening games, as I go to the Gasworks Side, so I am standing behind it. However, before I went round, I captured this shot. Saturday's pristine white has been replaced by a darker shade, and there is plenty of grain.

Joe Herbert

We can see the same in this shot of our goal. The inside of the stand looks black at lower resolutions, but at a bigger size we can quickly see the grain.

Tom Brocklehurst

All this makes for a bigger file, and therefore those extra seconds waiting for it to load for processing, adding up over 100 or so images, and working all the way through to the time to upload. The album, with 60 or so pictures, from this game was about 30MB larger than that from Saturday. It is one reason why the pictures from a Tuesday evening game usually only appear on Friday.

James Edgar

For about the first 15 minutes of the game, the team still looked shocked from Saturday, but after that started to put in a much better performance. Unfortunately it was in that 15 minutes that we conceded the only goal of the game, against opponents who were difficult to break down, and a few of whom sounded as though may not have had as far to come as you might expect.

Rob Doran

The rest of the pictures from the game can be seen on the club website here, and on Google Photos here.

Final score: Prescot Cables 0 Colwyn Bay 1.