All a bit quiet

At Prescot Cables' game against Ossett Town, Rod, our drummer, was unusually quiet. His Vicar was on holiday, so Rod was looking after his dog, and left his instruments at home. This can be an occupational hazard of going to church, although it is unlikely to fall to me. Our Vicar has a cat, who does not accompany anyone to football, and who looks at me with the disdain that can only be mustered by a cat determined to remember my accidentally treading on his tail 18 months ago.

Rod's Vicar's dog - I'm sure his collar should be white

We were joined at the game by friends and family of Dermot Allister, a long standing club volunteer who died recently. Dermot will be remembered at the club for many years to come for the murals he organised, the tiger visible from the top of Hope Street, and the 1884 mural unveiled last month.

Whilst we have been sure of league safety for a few weeks, we have for some time met teams who have a greater need for points, and coming off second best from the encounter. The visitors were no exception, in a struggle with Harrogate Railway Athletic, against whom we suffered a defeat earlier in the week, to avoid the remaining relegation place.

I started the game in front of the tea bar,

Charlie Duke

and then worked my way round behind our own goal and along the Gasworks Side,

Shane Glean

to behind the goal we were attacking.

Phil Bannister

The visitors had the balance of play, so I made my way back to the side, where I stayed for most of the game. One goal in the first half, and two in the second, secured the result for Ossett, the last being from David Brown who has featured in these pages on many of our encounters with Yorkshire.

David Brown

A positive aspect of our season is that we do not stop looking for goals, and we secured a late consolation from Oliver Grundy, his first for the club since joining us the transfer deadline day last month.

Oliver Grundy

After the game, I had another duty, photographing the presentation for the Player of the Month for March, won by Lloyd Dean.

We did not quite get the presentation in before the Grand National, so I found myself watching it, which I never make a conscious effort to do. Despite growing up near a racecourse (or perhaps because of it, having the village person's natural suspicion of all things connected with the village next door), I have never followed horse racing. Steve Garnett, our Commercial Manager, likes to get a picture of the presentation on the website as soon as he can, so I tried using the camera's WiFi and the Nikon Wireless Mobile Utility to process the picture whilst still out supporting a pitchside advertiser.

Bram Johnstone playing against Burscough

Steve was happy with the result, but I found that, having loaded it from the camera as a jpeg, then cropped it on the phone's photo editor, the quality was borderline acceptable for the size at which it displays on the website. However, every time you save a jpeg file, including uploading to many websites, it loses more information, so it was looking decidedly pixellated when it made it to Twitter.

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

Final score: Ossett Town 3 Prescot Cables 1 (Grundy)