Take the late train to Clarksville

I am on to about my fifth sporting trip to Lancaster, and I have failed to reach the town at the time I intended on any of them. Although there are two trains an hour between Wigan and Lancaster, they are 10 minutes apart, and seem to accumulate the same delays. I therefore allowed extra time on this occasion to get some pictures of the town in the evening light and a meal at the excellent White Cross.

Lancaster City give potential punters the opportunity to get in from whatever direction they come, with turnstiles in three corners of the ground. This allows for segregation, although I was surprised to find all three open for our visit.

At this time of year, we still have natural light at the beginning of the game, with the Met Office app telling us sunset was four minutes before kick off, although the referee started a couple of minutes early. He was clearly not expecting a shot along the ground: when I took up position behind the goal, with the game in progress, a home official was walking round with a couple of extra spikes to fix down the goal net. One would have thought that either the net was satisfactorily fixed, or it needed to be rectified before we started. The floodlights went on a couple of minutes before the start, but the natural light with a clear sky was more than sufficient whilst they warmed up.

Weekday evening games, especially away, are often a chance for new players, as some regular players will have work commitments.

Jonathan Lynch

The floodlights proved to be amongst the best in the Division. There are four pylons on each side, with three heads each of the end pylons, and two on the middle, which does not quite fit my little diagrams. Half an hour in, I was still getting good results from the end of the pitch with the shutter speed at 1/250s.

Sean Myler

I then moved round to the side, where it seemed gloomy on the terrace. This may be an indication that the lights work as they should, casting light on the pitch with minimal spillage to surrounding areas: efficient, and good for neighbourly relations in a residential area.

In the second half, I stood by the tea bar and toilet block, towards the end of one side of the ground. Results were surprisingly clear in the middle of the pitch ...

Phil Bannister and an unnamed Lancaster player. Numbers on the front of shirts need to catch on!

... and around the goal.

Antony Shinks takes a goal kick for Nick Culkin

On my side of the pitch, some results were almost good enough to use straight off the camera.

John Beattie - picture cropped, but with no lighting adjustment

The finished result, with shadows ligthened

I spent most of the rest of the game between the two dugouts, a vantage point I almost never take in daylight, as there are coaching staff, substitutes and an assistant referee legitimately getting in the way, but in the evening, the available light can make up for it.

Mike Smith takes a free kick

As for the result, the report in the Lancaster Guardian referred to our side being difficult to break down, and having dangerous attacking players, which I think is a fair assessment, but Lancaster were the better team on the night and their 2-0 win was probably a fair result.

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

Not going to the game

When I picked up my Merseymart, and read that one of our players, Joe Fielding, had walked 3 miles from his home in Standish (which my former manager, who lives there, assured me is the posh part of Wigan) to access transport to Prescot Cables' game at Lancaster City, I felt a bit sheepish not having attended myself. Lancaster is a pleasant town, and I would have had chance to send some photos to my friend Philip from church, who watched Lancaster City when he was at University, and is now spending a year staying with his uncle in New Zealand.

Joe Fielding, on a warmer day

During a cold spell in 2009, I was talking to a Manchester City supporter, who was complaining that one of his side's fixtures, at Portsmouth, had been postponed due to a frozen pitch. The temperature had dropped to at least -5ºC, so it was within the Premier League rules, which state that grounds should be playable in temperatures down to -3ºC. However, it was a surprise that games could be postponed due to the weather, especially as he was not planning to go out in the cold, but to watch the game in a nice warm pub.

For those watching football at our level, the weather is of almost as much interest as to the farming community. When I started watching in 1991, attending winter away games was a lottery. We relied on the weather forecast on the television, or in the morning's paper, which was vague at best, and the best part of a day old. Specific information depended on a call to the club, which relied on an official being able to answer the telephone, rather than being out clearing snow or inspecing the pitch.

Technology has made things easier: club websites and social networks keep us informed of early postponements, and the Met Office website and smartphone app give local forecasts that break the day down into 3 hour segments, so you can get a reasonable idea whether your journey is likely to be fruitless. In this case, light snow had been forecast for Friday evening, turning to rain later. In the event, the forecast rain fell as snow, leaving 3 or 4 inches across the county, and bringing down power lines on the railway line between Wigan and Preston.

The things that make a place attractive to visit often disappear in the winter: the steep streets slippery with slush, the views obscured by fog, which leaves the pubs, which are all very well, but they do have them nearer home.

Lancaster - lots of fires but few televisions

Having spent some time working out alternative routes, including using the club coach, it was announced there would be a pitch inspection at 11.45, with the coach departing as soon as the result was known. With the quick route unavailable, I would need to leave home well before the inspection whatever way I chose to travel, so I tried to second guess the outcome.

When the pitch is inspected early by a local referee, he can call the game off (if he decides there is no reasonable prospect of the pitch being playable), but cannot say it will go ahead, that decision is for the match referee. As the amount of snow we had would melt to form large pools of standing water (Waterloo called off their rugby fixture for that reason), I thought a game was highly unlikely, and decided to stay put.

I was a bit surprised to find, in pictures from those who went to the game, Lancaster had received hardly any snow, in contrast with everywhere in a 50 mile radius. It might have been handy if the person on their Twitter feed who was confident about the game going ahead on Friday had shared that observation on Saturday. NASA published a photo from the morning - if you zoom in, Lancaster is in the small green bit.

I had also thought of going to London for the weekend, where I would have been able to see Dulwich Hamlet play away to Leatherhead, but decided against due to the weather between here and London. The game was abandoned after 78 minutes when about 20 people, mostly teenagers (wearing onesies for some reason I have not been able to fathom) were celebrating Dulwich's second goal, a few of them leaned on the pitch perimeter wall and found themselves flat on the ground when it collapsed. Fortunately no-one was near the wall on the pitch side. It even made The Guardian.

Although we can see all the large debris being removed, the referee considered there may be nails and broken plastic from an advertising hoarding presenting a danger to the players - not having been there, I cannot comment. Looking at people's photos, I think Leatherhead may find themselves replacing more than the collapsed section, as a couple of other bits looked less than straight, or had mortar that looked as though it may have suffered from the weather over the years.

Old fashioned newspaper-style photographs

Remember when the newspaper had photos in black and white, the ink came off on your hands, and, on the sports pages at least, it always seemed to be raining?

A few months ago, I saw an exhibition of London Street Photography at the Museum of London. The exhibition has recently finished, but the book is available from the museum shop. As I was looking at some of the pictures, from the 1890s onwards, I wondered about creating some of the effects of these photographs today. Our friend Photoshop can do much, but some of the effect must depend on the actual equipment on the ground, with digital sensors capturing a level of detail, and sometimes clutter (of which I suspect there is more today too), not possible on film.

Whatever else may have changed, the essence of most sports has remained the same: the ball may be synthetic materials instead of leather, but there are only so many ways to kick it. The rain too continues to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. So I thought I would have fun with some of the pictures from Prescot Cables' trip to Lancaster City, and try to create the atmosphere of the papers of days gone by.

I adjusted the lighting on some of the colour pictures for the slide show, using the levels, as discussed in the last post, to get rid of the mist, then lightening the shadows to emphasise how hard it was raining in the second half.

Then, I went a step further, using the "Convert to black and white" menu in Photoshop Elements, starting with the "Newspaper" option, tweaking the colour intensity and lighting shadows to give that old fashioned press look.

If it was not for the advertising and the white ball, you could probably be anywhere between 1930 and 1980.

There is one aspect of the golden age of the newspaper photograph I cannot recapture - the mud. Lancaster's pitch looked to be in excellent condition, and it is only September, but even the heaviest pitches at our level are positively verdant compared to even First Division pitches in the seventies and before.

The rest of the photos from the game, including more pleasant weather in the first half, can be seen here.