Hopperational details
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Date &
Venue
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Saturday 12
May 2012 at Englefield Road, Theale.
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Result
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Theale 2 South Reading 5
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Competition
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Reading
Senior League (Step 7).
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Hopping
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I am here,
at lifetime venue #465, because I am on the way to a social event in the
Midlands and the divisional title is South Reading’s to lose.
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This match in one sentence
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A
comfortable championship-clinching win for the visitors in the final game of
the season, so they did enough to render another result elsewhere
meaningless.
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So what?
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South
Reading win the division by one point.
Theale finish 10th.
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The drama unfolds
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At the
start of the day, Westwood United were leading the division by two points
from South Reading but with no more games, and Woodcote SR follow in third,
three points behind Westwood and guaranteed to have a better GD if they won
their last match today at Highmoor Ibis Reserves.
So we have
two games, three outcomes for each, leading to nine possibilities:
South
Reading have to win, and any win gives them the title irrespective of the
other result. Woodcote SR have to win,
and hope that South Reading don’t win.
Westwood have to watch and hope that neither South Reading nor Woodcote
SR win.
Firstly,
time for some village cricket on the adjacent pitch …
 
They are
probably still playing. South Reading,
meanwhile were warming up very professionally and had all their balls in a
proper storage bag. They completed the
process and went inside just as Theale’s players were stamping out a
cigarette or two in the car park. As I
walked round the pitch, eight of them wandered out aimlessly, and some
semblance of a warm-up began with ten players five minutes before the
kickoff. The last Theale player was
closely followed by the officials and the South Reading team. Taken all together, the players, officials,
fans and fans’ dogs of Westwood United and Woodcote SR should probably have
abandoned all thoughts of the title there and then. It really did not look promising.
South Reading,
in orange-and-black, kicked with the wind in the first half. The last-minute Theale instructions had
been to “sit tight for twenty minutes”.
Here’s a scene setter clip of them ignoring this and trying to score.
The swirly
wind was a factor in South Reading’s opening goal after 8 minutes. A bouncy ball was misjudged, letting in
number 7 Raymond Spence for an easy but well-taken goal. 0-1
Theale hit
back immediately and forced a sharp save from the South Reading
goalkeeper. As the ball bounced
around, it was flicked in from near the touchline. The lino’s flag, however, protected the
lead.
Much of the
rest of the first half had Theale on the back foot, being pressed high up the
pitch, but South Reading lacked the final quality ball. Their number 9 missed a half-chance and
they were not at all fluent. Theale
would fancy their second half chances with the wind, I thought.
However,
some of the aforementioned wind was removed from Theale sails ten minutes
before the break. South Reading’s
number 3 made another attacking run down the left. His effort was blocked but he retrieved the
ball at the touchline and played it back.
His teammate’s hanging cross fell nicely for number 10 to glide a
header in to the corner. 0-2 at half-time
Number 10
grabbed a half-time cigarette before joining the team talk out on the
pitch. If anything dramatic was going
to happen, Theale needed to score early in the second half, and I wandered in
the direction of the goal they were attacking. My second clip is therefore as far as it is
possible to be from South Reading’s third goal, scored after 50 mins and
again by Spence, after a disallowed goal and five minutes of optimistic Theale pressure. 0-3
The fourth
came after 62 mins, a mazy dribble and well-placed shot from number 11 so I
now started to look for the helicopter.
I won’t tell you what the Theale goalkeeper said when he found out
there were still over 20 minutes to play.
0-4
We then had
a few moments of comedy. A defensive
mix-up handed Theale’s Ibrahim Koroma a goal on a plate. 1-4
South
Reading’s two-goal hero Spence was subbed for a hug shortly after complaining
to a colleague that he had been running certain appendages off, and then
suddenly the margin was down to two with 10 minutes to go as Chris Bark
scored for Theale. 2-4
Fortunately
for South Reading, they quickly extinguished any Phoenix-type aspirations with a well
taken goal by number 6 from the left corner of the box and the visitors closed out the game with no other scares. Final score 2-5
For the
record, scorers 10, 11 and 6 are Ben Lyden, Kyle Roberts and James Weston,
but I could not say in which order.
Therefore, South Reading duly won their title, the trophy appeared
from a cardboard box, the ref helped to photograph the presentation (and
hopefully I am in the background), Mrs Dow (clearly a very important person
in Reading football) joined the team photo, and then the team waited
respectfully while she retired to a safe distance before the obligatory
bubbly shot. A future in the Hellenic
Division One East or the Combined Counties Division One may await. I have no idea what happened in the
cricket.
Acknowledgement to the league
website for helping with partial identification of the scorers, which also
told me that the Highmoor/Woodcote game was postponed anyway. Woodcote can finish second if they win it.
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What Next?
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I will try
to find something meaningful to watch next Saturday.
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