In reserve

With Prescot Cables having no first team game at the weekend, and with no rugby union fixtures (they sensibly leave a couple of weekends free at this time of year to play any weather affected fixtures from earlier in the season), I was looking for a game to watch.

Lee Owens, who does an excellent job publicising Prescot Cables Reserves games, posted on the forum that the Reserves were playing at Ashville, in Wallasey. Reserve team matches are often at the same time as First Team games, and the ground at which they play their home games is not convenient for me, so this was a good opportunity to take some pictures of the hard work the Reserves put in.

Lee Owens

The function of a reserve team at our level of football can sometimes appear somewhat nebulous. Some clubs use them to provide a stock of players in the event of a replacement being needed in the first team, or allow first team players to regain match fitness after an injury. That is probably the case at a minority of clubs: whilst players can and do progress from the reserves to the first team, in many cases the first team and the reserves can seem to operate as completely separate entities, and some clubs have dispensed with a reserve team altogether.

Shaun Reid seems to be making more use of the Reserves than his predecessor - he attended the match, and has called up a couple of players for a chance to prove themselves in the First Team. Liam Hollett was playing, to regain match fitness after a month's suspension. Not that he did anything heinous, it was the usual "suspended from all football until Prescot Cables have completed three First Team matches" for a red card at the beginning of January: unfortunately two of the three matches were four weeks apart.

Liam Hollett holds off the opposition

The Reserves are self financing, so the players pay to cover the costs of playing, so to keep costs down, only a referee is supplied by the league, with the two managers acting as assistants. Non neutral assistants only adjudicate on throw ins, leaving them free to manage.

Prescot Cables Reserve Team Manager, Joe Gibiliru

As this was a one off occasion for me, I tried to get a picture of all the players. I took a position at the side of the pitch, firstly because my usual position at the end can mean I miss our defenders, and there was a lot of space for the ball to go at the M53 end, so I thought I might find myself spending a lot of time retrieving it with 4lb of camera kit flapping in the breeze.

The players seemed to be happy with the results, I had a couple of appreciative comments when I posted the pictures on the web forum. You can see the results for yourself here.

After the game, it was off to the Cheshire Cheese, where they had Higsons Best, revived to the original recipe by the Liverpool Organic Brewery, and the second half of England v Wales rugby union on the television. Wallasey has one of the curses of being at the bottom of a hill, every chimney bristling with television aerials pointing in multiple directions, most to the North West transmissions from Winter Hill or Storeton, but a few deciding the best signal was the Welsh transmission from Moel-y-Parc, a proportion that seemed to be reflected in the respective support for England and Wales in the pub.