And he gathered a mighty strong host

I once worked in the European Customer Service Centre for a major multinational company. We even had names appropriate for the countries with which people were dealing. There was a Mr Ireland on the Irish team, and a Ms Brittain on the UK team, but the office never reached its full potential when Fred Former-Yugoslav-Republic-Of-Macedonia decided not to join us.

Only part of that is true, but our mythical Fred would find himself at home with Prescot Cables' visitors in midweek, Bamber Bridge. James the Pharmacologist, who has an eye for the unusual in the non League game, explained that Bamber Bridge have a group of online supporters from Macedonia, who found the club online and liked the name. In consequence, someone takes a flag to games.

Franny Foy plays in front of the Macedonian flag

When you have had a heavy defeat away to the league leaders, a visit from a team making a late challenge for the playoffs is not what the doctor ordered, but the fixture list delivers what it will.

With sunset at about 8pm, the first few minutes of the game were in daylight, so I spent  few minutes behind the goal.

Lloyd Dean

With the light falling, I retreated to my usual position by one of the floodlight pylons on the gasworks side. Once the sun had gone down, the lighting conditions were challenging - a clear sky, so no nice fluffy white clouds to reflect the light from the floodlights, and the opposition in a dark red kit.

Rob Doran

Richie Mottram

I am familiar with these conditions, and have built up a range of tricks and tactics to get the best from them. However, one needs to keep practising, and I realised how little I have had with evening games this season. Usually, postponements from earlier in the season mean that there are evening games most weeks at this time of year, but the weather has been particularly kind this season, with the main loss of fixtures being throughout January, when we usually only have games on Saturdays, so we only missed out four games. As a result, we have had only two evening games at home since the beginning of the year, so I have been getting a bit rusty.

Our visitors showed their quality with four goals in the first half. We feared more of the same in the second, although we played somewhat better, and kept them to just the one further goal, Nathan Parish having probably our best chance of a goal.

Nathan Parish

After two games where the result was not unexpected, but the score was heavier than we might have wished, we are now off to Wakefield, already relegated due to ground issues. We have not translated good performances into results playing away this season, but Wakefield's home form almost matches our away form.

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

Final score: Prescot Cables 0 Bamber Bridge 5.