It's Saturday, it must be Yorkshire

Prescot Cables' game at Farsley Celtic was our third visit of the month to Yorkshire, and another experiment in seeing how late I could leave home and get to the game. I arrived in plenty of time with the assistance of some nifty footwork to catch an unadvertised connection at Manchester Victoria. My footwork may one day not need to be so nifty if they fix the 10mph "temporary" speed restriction on the approach to the station from Liverpool, which has been there since two departments of British Rail could not agree who was responsible for paying to rectify it in 1987.

Walking down a side street on the way to the ground, I passed houses with the northern feature of the front looking exactly like the back, some having front doors opening to one street, and the back to another (a proper street, not an alley*). I would have said I was walking past fronts, were it not for the washing lines across the street just above head height. It was as well it was not a drying day, or I would have been navigating past the residents' thermals. On arrival, I fortified myself with a hot pork pie with peas and gravy, which, given the wind, I had to eat quickly to stop it becoming a cold pork pie (pleasant enough) with cold peas and gravy (not pleasant at all).

When we kicked off, I was alongside our own half, so I moved at a leisurely pace behind our goal and down the open side. We continued the experiment of having Chris Almond and James Edgar at full back. There was also a start for Josef Faux.

Josef Faux

The hosts had the wind behind them for the first half, and they looked intent on making the most of it, so we did well to only be a goal behind at half time.

We thought we might not make the most of the wind in the second half when Farsley scored a few minutes in. However, a couple of minutes later, Dominic Marie beat the keeper with a shot from the corner of the penalty area. At this point it had started to rain, so I had moved to the side of the pitch to keep it behind me, so I was in just the wrong place for a decent picture. I recommend, however, watching the video here, it is well worth it!

Dominic Marie

You can see at the end of the clip that we were keen to retrieve the ball for a quick restart, knowing our best hope for a result was to keep up the tempo, use the wind, and allow the hosts as little time on the ball as they allowed us. The wind was the one constant part of the weather, the rest was changeable, never raining heavily, but enough to blow drizzle on the front of the lens, interspersed with the sun breaking through the clouds.

Lloyd Dean

I read a film review once which described the lighting, "as if the only time the director had to speak to the lighting engineer was to utter three words, 'smoky blue grey'". The hosts' colour dominates the visual environment, and their chairman's cigar provides the smoke.

Harry Cain

The second half saw a decent performance against a team nine points behind Lancaster City at the top of the table with three games in hand, but it was not enough for more than one goal, despite hitting the post two or three times in the last five minutes.

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

Final score: Farsley Celtic 2 Prescot Cables 1 (Marie)

* or an entry, ginnel, twitten, back passage etc.