A traditional damp evening

"CTC members a bit thin on the ground", mused Paul of our Train Crew, posting from the Hop Vine in Burscough. Dr James and I arrived from Burscough Junction shortly afterwards to find three present: Paul, his uncle, and Frank, who came from Huyton via Wigan.

We have not had many evening games this season, but there are plenty to come, with 18 League games in ten weeks, plus at least one in the Liverpool Senior Cup. It was my first night game in earnest since I replaced my camera body, apart from one at Marine I attended more for a technical test. I was at Burscough a couple weeks ago, and knew we would be in for a tough game. I would have been satisfied with a good performance whatever the result.

James nearly caused a multiple pile up at the unfeasibly narrow turnstiles, as he tried to go through forwards wearing a rucksack. Once inside, I took a position by the covered standing along the side. It was showery, so it was handy to to be able to dart for cover without the need to wrap the camera. The floodlights are good, so I was happy with my exposures, particularly when play came close to me, even if I am still working out how the camera handles the relationship between aperture and sensitivity in shutter priority mode.

Joe Evans

Bram Johnstone had rejoined us, having made a few appearances in pre season.

Bram Johnstone

At half time I walked around the ground, past the substitutes warming up, checking the light at various points. As I did so, Connor Grainger sent a ball over the wall into the adjacent field, and briefly tried to climb over to retrieve it. Abandoning the attempt, he told me he was not built for climbing, which was just as well, as the notice on the wall warned of anti climb paint, so he avoided coming on later covered in the stuff.

During the second half I tried a few pictures from behind the goal, which I do not normally do in a ground with floodlights arranged on the sides. I was able to get some reasonable exposures, although when play was towards the touchline, players were in shadow with the rest of their surroundings not, and exposure correction on the raw file was only partially successful addressing this.

Lloyd Dean

I became more confident we would get at least a draw as the second half went on, and things got even better with a goal from Joe Nicholson. The Train Crew may have been a bit thin on the ground, but the cheer that went up showed quite a few people had made the short trip by other means.

Joe Nicholson

After the game the Train Crew divided in the traditional railway manner, with the front portion (Paul, his uncle and Frank) heading for the Bridge, adjacent to the eponymous station, and the rear portion, (James and me) returning to the Hop Vine, a minute or so closer to Burscough Junction, and, more importantly, a known quantity for working heating and decent beer. The former was essential after a traditional damp-getting-into-your-bones evening game.

For the second set in a row, there was a change to how I upload pictures. Google are retiring the Picasa application, so I need to migrate to Google Photos. The advantage is that pictures are uploaded at a higher resolution (some significantly so), the disadvantage is the "public on the web" sharing option has gone, so I cannot enable a viewer to follow a link to one collection and then browse the others.

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

Final score: Burscough 0 Prescot Cables 1 (Joe Nicholson).