No hat, no picture

The phrase "hat trick" to denote a sporting achievement occurring three times comes from cricket. When one H.H. Stevenson took three wickets in consecutive balls in 1858, his team mates bought him a hat. This seems more practical than the traditional match ball in football: the principle of "bring your own ball" does not apply much above the public park, and you cannot have too many hats, especially if you leave them on public transport at the rate I do.

For the weekend after Christmas, Prescot Cables were entertaining Padiham, whose original incarnation was one of the most successful clubs in Lancashire before they were overshadowed by the teams from the larger towns of Burnley, Blackburn and Preston. They, like us, were members of the Lancashire Combination and founder members of the North West Counties League, but had to drop out of the latter in 1990. Over the last few years have successfully rebuilt, and are playing their first season in the EvoStik League.

The weather was much more pleasant than on Boxing Day, and although the stand blocks out quite a lot of sun by 3pm, some still gets through on to the pitch.

Lewis Coyle goes for a header

The primary purpose of these pictures is to highlight our players at their best. Conceding a free kick does not fit in with that objective, so you do not see many of those minor offences everyone gets up to from time to time. However, when the light is just right and the referee is not looking...

Sean Breen gets to grips with his opponent

The justified man of the match for Prescot was Phil Bannister, with all three goals.

Phil Bannister

The first was announced as an own goal, but the attribution was corrected after Dave Powell gave his opinion that, whilst the defender changed the direction of the ball, it was from heading to the bottom corner of the net to going in to the top. The other two came in the second half, the first when I was not quite in position, and the second I when thought I had time to change a battery. The scorer of a hat trick is a natural subject for a picture for the Merseymart, preferably when scoring one of the goals, but I had to make do with the picture above. So, not only no hat, but not the best of pictures either.

With the sun, there was plenty of natural light well in to the second half, and I delayed my move to the gasworks side. I was rewarded with probably one of the best resolution shots of our own goalkeeper I will probably get all season.

Nick Culkin

I was speaking to Dave Powell after the game - he mentioned that there is a flurry of activity on Twitter when I publish the link to my pictures. That is the idea - if players are tweeting pictures of themselves playing for the club, it builds team spirit, and helps to promote the club amongst their families and friends.

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

Final score: Prescot Cables 3 (Bannister 3) Padiham 0

Christmas jumpers

There was once a football club (now defunct) with a name that was almost made for Boxing Day, although I never watched them on the day, or any other day for that matter. Leftovers SC was the second team in East Grinstead when I started watching football, playing in the Sussex County League Division 3.

I have never been a great fan of the Boxing Day fixture - it often seems like an excuse to get out of the house after the enforced jollity of Christmas Day. This year, Prescot Cables were entertaining Warrington Town, which made sense, as they are among our nearest opponents. That assumes people can get there - there were fewer visiting supporters than I was expecting, the missing ones I suspect being those without their own transport. Many of our own supporters had a fairly frequent service on the main 10A Liverpool to St Helens bus route, but for those from further afield there was no public transport at all.

Both teams looked like they were preparing for serious business.

Although we escaped the worst of the storms that affected other parts of England, the weather was still not pleasant - a gloomy day, and one to wrap up warm.

Dave Powell

Warrington manager Shaun Reid seemed to have found a warmer jumper than usual, but sticking with trusty 100% Wool.

Shaun Reid and Lee Smith

There were first starts for two players who impressed in substitute appearances at Salford before Christmas, Robert Gilroy ...

... and Pavel Pinto-Vieira, who has most recently been playing in Portugal.

I have commented when playing Warrington on the section from the Laws of the Game that used to say "the goalkeeper's clothing shall be distinguished from that of the other players and the referee", and for which I cannot remember the current wording. As an aside, I know the Laws do not necessarily need to flow, but given that match officials do not have time to leaf through them in the middle of a game, they should at least be memorable. On that occasion, their goalkeeper was dressed from head to toe in black, with the only distinction I could see from the referee and assistants being a number on the back.

This time, the possible clash was with our kit. Here is Dave Dempsey taking a free kick.

In this picture, the goalkeeper's kit looks very similar to ours, just a different shade of yellow. There is a bit more contrast close up, it looked better to the naked eye than it does to the camera, and the match officials accepted it as enough of a contrast. Here is Isaac Kusoloka finding the net, but unfortunately being denied for offside.

That was in many ways the story of the game, our players put in a good performance, but the result went very much according to form and current league position.

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

Final score: Prescot Cables 0 Warrington Town 2.

An apple, a tangerine and a bag of nuts

I do not have children of my own, but if I did, I suspect they may not like my ideas about a traditional Christmas present. Not for me the delights of Xboxes and Play Stations, whatever they are, I would be dispensing the fruit and healthy comestibles of the title. Tangerine is also probably the most popular description of the colour orange when applied to a football kit.

Prescot Cables' visit to Salford City was our last pre Christmas trip of the year. I was expecting the trains to be packed with shoppers, there were warnings two weeks previously of queues to get in to the station, but there were fewer people around, and therefore a more pleasant journey, than I anticipated. There are no decent pubs (or, as far as we can tell, any pubs) near the ground, so Richie, our leader in beer and pub choices, guided us to the New Oxford in central Salford, which has an excellent range of real ales and Belgian beers. Sometimes I think it might be fun to order one of the latter with the correct pronunciation, complete with short wave radio effects on the gs, but the landlady seemed so knowledgeable I think she would have been correcting me.

We were in our red away kit, and Salford were in their usual tangerine.

Connor McCarthy

On first sight, we were a bit concerned that the colours were a bit close together. On the whole, I think they were sufficiently distinguished, although there might have been a problem if there had been thick cloud - in which case they would probably have been a bit close if we had been wearing amber too.

Being a week after our earliest sunset, it was two minutes later this week, with the difference in longitude between Prescot and Salford taking a minute off. That minute made all the difference - well, not quite all, the absence of thick cloud may have more to do with it. The ground is in a natural dip, but there there was still some sunlight for the start of the game.

Paul Cliff makes his first start

The sun soon dropped below the surrounding houses, leaving an even light, supplemented by the floodlights.

Dave Dempsey explains how to get happier and healthier. A goal usually does the trick for me.

Salford have a larger than usual gap between the pitch perimeter fence and the touchline. A few years ago, some clubs with this arrangement would change the width of the marked out pitch from game to game to play to the weaknesses of the opposition, cramping a team with good wide players, or giving a team with fitness issues more ground to cover. Such shenanigans are not allowed these days at our level, with leagues imposing tighter restrictions on the permitted size of the pitch, and requiring clubs to stick to the dimensions they have registered.

It was nearly two years since I was last at Salford, with last season's fixture having been in midweek and inconvenient for travel due to engineering works. Looking back, I made the observation on that occasion that the pitch was in one corner of the available surface, but it seemed more centrally placed this season. One effect of this is that the dark patch that usually occurs at the base of the floodlight pylons in the side arrangement is not on the touchline.

Robert Gilroy progresses near the touchline

The gap also avoids one of the pitfalls of taking pictures from the side with a 70-300mm lens, namely that a player running along the touchline can come too close to be able to capture from head to toe in a landscape frame. I have not developed the manual dexterity to flip the camera to get the frame in portrait orientation with sufficient speed to continue to capture the action.

The best illuminated spots remained on the edge of the penalty area.

We can get an idea of the illumination at the touchline from the player taking the throw in - usually in this sort of situation, he would be shrouded in gloom.

Despite the good photographic opportunities, the game was not one of our best performances - the rest of the pictures from the afternoon can be seen here.

Final score: Salford City 2 Prescot Cables 0.

The shortest daylight

Prescot Cables' game at home to Curzon Ashton the weekend before last was the one for which we have the shortest amount of natural daylight. I am not sure why, but although the day with the shortest time between sunrise and sunset is 21st December, the sunset starts to get later from about the 14th, and the sunrise does not start to get earlier until the beginning of January. I thought it might be something to do with longitude, but it happens on the Greenwich Meridian too.

At this time of year, the cloud makes as much difference to the lighting as the sunset, a bright day can probably be worth about half an hour's extra natural light, and this was anything but a bright day.

Isaac Kusoloka

We cannot see very well from the pictures, but Curzon Ashton's kit was a particularly unreflective shade of blue - it looks a lot brighter with lighting enhanced in the final images, but I suspect it had some effect on the exposures. The floodlights were turned on about 20 minutes into the game.

The game saw a return to action for Dave Dempsey.

Dave Dempsey

Dave was participating in Movember, and unlike many participants looks like he has decided to retain a hirsute appearance: I am surprised more people do not, it has after all the advantage of keeping your face warm. Not that the weather has been particularly cold so far this season, I would have expected to have had at least a couple of matches postponed due to frozen pitches by this stage. The rain also seems to have fallen in manageable quantities, we have only had one game postponed, and that was an unexpected pre match downpour at Ramsbottom.

The first half ended with Curzon Ashton 2-1 ahead with our goal having come from Isaac Kusoloka. With the lighting indistinguishable from an evening game for the second half, we drew level again with a goal from Phil Bannister.

Phil Bannister shoots for goal

When you are busily engaged in looking at details, you can easily lose sight of the bigger picture, and with a strong wind making the running and passing that make for good pictures difficult, the goal somehow did not fully register, and I was thinking we were still a goal behind, and when Curzon Ashton went a goal ahead I thought they had put the game out of reach, whereas our team were putting in a superb effort to try and gain another goal.

The game also saw a welcome return from injury by Connor McCarthy, who came on as a second half substitute.

Curzon Ashton goalkeeper David Carnell gathers from Connor McCarthy

After the game, it was off to drop my kit off at home and then in to town for the Cables Train Crew Christmas Dinner. Naturally there was only one way to get there ... er ... by bus.

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

Final score: Prescot Cables 2 (Kusoloka, Bannister) Curzon Ashton 3

Watch the water roll down the drain

Features of life in a northern town, particularly in the West Riding, include hills and somewhat inclement weather. The Met Office app had been predicting dry weather, with the possibility of a little sun, for Prescot Cables' visit to Ossett Town. I was less convinced when I got to Huddersfield to change trains in heavy rain, but the hills can often trap weather, with something completely different on the other side. This seemed borne out on arrival in Dewsbury, with the sky looking considerably lighter and drier above the hills between there and Ossett.

Rob Doran, scorer of Prescot's goal

Our train crew was depleted by staff shortages, with only me making the journey by rail. Fortunately, Richie, our leader in beer and pub choices, still led in this aspect, as he had posted what was to be our planned pub online, the Leggers Inn. It seemed a shame to waste the recommendation, so I took some refreshment before catching the bus to Ossett.

At the ground the promise of dry weather had not been entirely fulfilled, as there was a downpour shortly before I arrived, which caused concern for a couple of areas of the pitch. Fortunately, most of the water indeed rolled down the drain (with assistance from some of the club officials), allowing the referee to pass it as fit, even without a trip to the B&Q opposite for a bag of sand.

The cheerful young gentlemen running the tea bar seemed aware of the hazard that not many people will purchase, wiping out any profits with wasted stock. Orders for a burger resulted in one being taken out of the freezer, and therefore a wait for the finished product. However, they had some chips on the go, so I ordered a portion, with some pleasantly fruity curry sauce.

Fortunately we were attacking the bus station end in the first half, so I could take advantage of the seats whilst the light was good enough for pictures from behind the goal. This provides a good low camera position, and the chance to eat my chips between attacks (remember - food before photos).

Jordan Shirley

The low angle works well for close up shots too, providing I avoid getting the perimeter fence in view.

Isaac Kusoloka

Despite being in position for some good pictures, Mr Google thought one could do with improvement. Here is James McCulloch going for a header.

An automated process called Google Awesome thought it might be better with some snow.

"Awesome" was probably not the word I would have chosen. Besides, if I want pictures of our players performing in precipitation, I have chances to get them myself.

The floodlights augmented the natural light for most of the first half, and, as usual, for the second it was a case of finding the location with the best light, which seemed to be the side. Ossett have a pylon on each corner and one on each end of the half way line, with 5 heads on each, although the situation was complicated by some bulbs being out: I suspect it is quite difficult to change them, as the pylons do not fold down, and four of them are mobile phone masts (as this is Yorkshire, I hope one is from EE).

Given the good location in the first half and the complexities of lighting in the second, the final collection was more weighted towards the first than usual, with only 11 frames (of 60, if you do not count the snow scene) making it in from the second.

Sean Breen

When in Ossett, it is rude not to visit the Brewery Tap, so I adjourned there after the match to warm up in front of their wood fire, and for a pint of Ossett Brewery's Nervous Turkey. Most seasonal beers for December are dark winter warmers, but this is a light beer, just right to go with the industrial quantities of white meat one usually finds oneself eating at this time of year.

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

Final score: Ossett Town 2 Prescot Cables 1 (Doran)

Not an entirely happy return

Players moving clubs is common at all levels of the game, probably more so at our level than amongst full time professionals with their contracts, transfer fees and transfer windows. So, former players often return to play for the opposition. Some go into management at other clubs, such as Simon Garner, recently appointed manager of Prescot Cables' visitors, Clitheroe.

I was away for the game earlier in the month at Clitheroe, where we lost 3-1. The scorer of our goal on that occasion, Connor McCarthy was injured for this match, as were James McCulloch and Dave Dempsey, with Antony Shinks also absent through illness. So, prospects were not good on paper, but our home form has been considerably better than our away form this season.

At least, I thought, as I caught the bus, the sun will make for good exposures in the first half. This was not to be, as a lot of high cloud had appeared by the time I got to the ground. I arrived a couple of minutes late to find us also a goal down. With those who would normally take the captain's duties unavailable, the task fell to Enzo Benn.

Enzo Benn

The visitors had the most of the play in the first half.

That's my Lottery numbers chosen - numbers on the front of shirts make sense in so many ways

Clitheroe went in two ahead at half time, after which the sides came out to the high cloud producing a fine sunset, much reproduced on Prescot Online and other local websites during the evening.

A half time substitution, bringing on Isaac Kusoloka for Sean Breen seemed to improve matters, as he was able to disturb the Clitheroe defence, which we had not really been able to do in the first half.

Isaac Kusoloka (no 16)

Isaac posted this picture on his Facebook page: a comment from one of his friends indicated I was not the only one who thought his gloves (so far there has not been anything in the Laws of the Game relating to what part of the kit their colour must match, but it can only be a matter of time) made it look as though he was jumping with his hands in his shorts.

This effort was saved, but Ged Murphy opened the scoring shortly afterwards.

Ged Murphy (no 4) scores our first goal

Isaac added the  equaliser a couple of minutes later, sealing a performance that earned him the Man of the Match award, and ensuring Clitheroe's returning manager took a point from his visit. The only snag for me was that I did not have a print quality picture of Isaac from the game to send to the Merseymart - there is a certain amount of pot luck involved in what you get from the second half at this time of year.

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

Final score: Prescot Cables 2 (Murphy, Kusoloka) Clitheroe 2

Mr John's shilling

The Augustus John (known to all as the AJ), a Good Beer Guide establishment on the University of Liverpool Precinct (sorry, Campus, people can no longer cope with local variation in these matters), has at times been a fertile recruiting ground for Prescot Cables supporters. Unsuspecting students and graduates have been for a quiet drink on Friday evening, and found themselves on the terraces at Hope Street on Saturday afternoon with only a vague recollection of how they got there. When I first attended in such circumstances, we had to get to Prescot for 1pm, for a kick off that I think turned out to be 2pm, as this was before floodlights were installed at the end of the 1990-91 season, and there were no mobile phones and internet to confirm the time. At least Prescot still had a museum then.

With this in mind, it was appropriate that our group of pharmacologists, photographer and phork lift truck driver travelling to our Liverpool Senior Cup tie at Burscough was joined by Tony, one of the bar staff from the AJ, who had been to a number of home games, and was dipping his toe in the waters of away travel. The Liverpool Senior Cup is probably the one piece of silverware we have a chance of winning: last year's Final was contested between Bootle and AFC Liverpool, both of the North West Counties League.

Having squeezed through the turnstiles, I found a traditional floodlight arrangement with four pylons along each side. In addition to two heads at the top of each pylon, there was a third head, two thirds of the way up, pointing directly down to illuminate the touchline. This made for an even light, which took some time to get used to, as it did not have the pools of light of which I usually make use.

Once I got to grips with the light, the results were quite acceptable.

Ryan Dunn

Results were good and clear near the touchline, where there is often the lowest levels of light.

Jonathon Lynch

Prescot were down to 10 men after about 25 minutes, when Jonathon Lynch was dismissed for a handball in front of our goal. He was probably unfortunate: the ball immediately fell to an attacking player, who put it across the line. By this time the referee had blown the whistle, so a penalty had to be awarded. I only heard the whistle after the ball had crossed the line, but I was more than half the length of the pitch away. Had the referee been half a second slower, the goal would have stood, and, although reaction time is not exactly the same as playing an advantage, the principle from the Guidance for Referees about not dismissing a player for denying a goalscoring opportunity where a goal is scored directly from the advantage would presumably apply.

The game also saw a return for Jamie Menagh, back on loan after signing for Chester a couple of weeks ago.

Jamie Menagh

Note the "I have just committed a minor foul and hope no-one notices, so I shall put my arms in the air to draw attention to it" posture from Jamie's opponent.

In the second half, the Burscough goalkeeper was keen to engage in dialogue with the assistant referee with a stream of complaints about offside and queries about how much time was left. A complaining player is often best dealt with by humour, and the fourth enquiry as to time in as many minutes, with 20 minutes still to go, drew the retort, "If you stop moaning to yourself, you will find the time goes faster".

A Rob Doran goal brought the scores level, with neither side able to secure further advantage in normal play. In common with a number of other cup competitions, the Liverpool Senior Cup no longer has extra time, and goes straight to penalties if scores are level at full time.

There are many advantages to an enthusiastic young team, and their energy and will to win has gained us points in the League, but I believe experience counts in a penalty shoot out, with Tim Horn saving three of our penalties to put the home team through.

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

Final score: Burscough 1 Prescot Cables 1 (Doran), Burscough win 3-1 on penalties