Colemen Cut The Mustard

Hopperational details
Date & Venue	Saturday 11 November 2017 at Pack Meadow
Result	Coleshill Town 8 (Eight) Blaby & Whetstone Athletic 1
Competition	FA Vase R2
Hopstats	Ground 625 on the lifetime list and I am here randomishly because @TheVan played along on Twitter and imagined pulling the Six of Hearts from an imaginary deck of cards.  See the previous post for the proof.  It’s random, or at least random-ish. Only he and/or his psychiatrist (if any) knows whether there is any deep significance to his choice, and we will never know.  All this happened because I had exactly 52 games on my list of unvisited grounds for today.  Thanks to @matthewcr too who followed with a reserve choice a few seconds later.
Context
Although Step 5 vs Step 6, both teams are going table-toppingly well in the Midland Football League Premier and the Eastern Counties Premier respectively.  B&W will need to catch up on games in hand because they’ve already played three times in this competition.  They’ve had home wins against Blidworth Welfare, Bottesford Town and Northampton ON Chenecks with a 13-1 aggregate.  Coleshill Town lost out in the Vase semi-finals over two legs to South Shields last season.  Should be a good contest.  (Postscript: what do I know?)
In one sentence
An astonishingly one-sided game featuring a double hat-trick after Coleshill had seen a first-half straight red card given to a defender with the scores still level.
So what?
As is the case with knockout competition, Coleshill now go into an imaginary hat and Blaby & Whetstone concentrate on the league.
Match Report
After an impeccable Armistice Day silence, Coleshill had the majority of possession in the first twenty minutes or so but there was no clue about what was to come later.  Their keeper Paul Hathaway needed to be alert in a sweeper role with a couple of headed clearances, and his opposite number Thomas Holyoak took a while to get accustomed to the bounce of the ball on the artificial surface.  The home side did in the end take the lead with a disputed direct free kick after 25 minutes.  Jordan Nadat was the scorer. 1-0 Blaby & Whetstone were level within a minute as they went straight up the middle from the restart and Rikki Bates smashed in an unstoppable shot.  As the craziness continued, a B&W defender almost headed an own goal but Holyoak backpedalled and just caught the ball in time, and with the very next attack Nadat played in Reece Leek who hit the post from close range.  Thus ended one of the maddest two minutes of football I’ve seen for a very long time. After 31 minutes Nadat just failed to convert a cross and then the game changed bizarrely with the sending off of Coleshill defender Luke Edwards.  The incident was up the other end from me, but it seemed to be a straight red.  Within a minute, Nadat and Leek had linked neatly again to split the away defence. Nadat’s first shot was blocked but from an almost prone position he found the net to round off another mad two minutes. When The Ten Men of Coleshill extended their lead soon after the break, it was clear that normal protocol had gone out of the window.  Nadat controlled the ball well before losing a defender and shooting for a hat-trick.  I wrote down “too easy” when it became 4-1 through Leek.  B&W had expected the game to be stopped for an assistant’s offside flag but I guess the referee deemed that a new phase of play had started.  Once a Joe Halsall header had gone in to make it 5-1 it looked like the visitors had crossed a motivational line in the wrong direction and we could be about to see an embarrassment.  Another hat-trick from Nadat completed the scoring (and to be fair Hathaway stopped another goal with a full-length save) as Coleshill went on the rampage.  It’s the first time I have witnessed a double hat-trick, and by now this was a real drubbing, all the more impressive for the execution with one man down.
Ground Pix
Match Pix
Coleshill in the white-and-blue.
Pre-Match Entertainment
I’ve been picking up the threads of my family tree again recently and Coleshill is the home town (or maybe village back then) of the ancestors I’ve tracked the furthest back in time.  My great-great-great-great grandmother Letitia Barnes, who was baptised here in 1785 and (honestly) was recorded in some Victorian censuses as Lettuce, left when she married one of the Brinklow Greens.  Green, Lettuce.  It’s just too good.  There were plenty of Greens in the area from a number of large families.  The next generation moved to work in the textiles factories of Coventry, and two generations later my great-grandmother Selina Green married a Coventry cycle enameller by the name of Allen Bolton.  Their daughter Lily married my grandad James Yapp from West Bromwich and no-one is really sure how they met.  Lily was a domestic servant in one of the big houses in Leamington and her brothers and sisters scattered across England and Wales.  The other Coleshill family featuring heavily on my tree in the 17th Century are the Bartons.  Hello to any distant Coleshill cousins reading this. Before kickoff I popped up to see the church where Leticia was baptised and several Bartons were baptised, married and buried.  Unfortunately an M6 delay meant that it was a very brief visit.
Goalkeeper Top Colour Stats
No clean sheets today, but a win for green over yellow.  No change in the placings. Results so far after 124 games: Based on conventional 3pts for a win, 1pt for a draw, but also -1pt for a goal conceded (GC) and +5pts for a clean sheet (CS).  Colours ranked on a points per game (PPG) basis. For new readers the odd .5 was caused by a shocking half-and-half shirt and the .1 was due to a substitute goalkeeper in a different colour.  The Fire Cracker colour was confirmed with the help of the social media team at Dulux UK, and it deserves to be last, trust me.  All of this arises from a comment attributed to Petr Cech that orange is the best colour for a goalkeeper because it changes the behaviour of other players around the box. P W D L GC CS Pts PPG Red 9.0 4.0 1.0 4.0 9.0 3.0 19.0 2.111 Maroon 4.0 2.0 1.0 1.0 6.0 1.0 6.0 1.500 Blue 30.1 12.0 6.0 12.1 47.0 10.0 45.0 1.495 Grey 41.5 20.0 9.0 12.5 68.5 11.0 55.5 1.337 Green 66.0 33.0 8.0 25.0 112.0 17.0 80.0 1.212 Orange 25.5 9.0 4.0 12.5 40.5 5.0 15.5 0.608 Purple 11.0 5.0 2.0 4.0 25.0 2.0 2.0 0.182 Yellow 27.0 7.0 6.0 14.0 57.0 5.0 -5.0 -0.185 Pink 14.0 4.0 4.0 6.0 29.0 1.0 -8.0 -0.571 Radioactive Bile 12.0 5.0 0.0 7.0 26.0 1.0 -6.0 -0.500 Black 5.0 1.0 3.0 1.0 14.0 0.0 -8.0 -1.600 White 1.9 0.0 0.0 1.9 4.0 0.0 -4.0 -2.105 Fire Cracker 1.0 0.0 0.0 1.0 4.0 0.0 -4.0 -4.000
What Next?
Follow @GrahamYapp on Twitter for details! No definite plans as yet but probably one of my step 3 priority grounds next weekend as I close in on “The 232”.

Cradley Rocked by Optimal Sub

One of the best Step 6 programmes you will find anywhere

Hopperational details
Date & Venue	Tuesday 9 August 2016 at Beeches View Avenue
Result	Cradley Town 1 Coleshill Town 4
Competition	FA Cup Extra Preliminary Round Replay
Hopping	Ground 587 on the lifetime list.  I am here because I happen to be in the Midlands and I have never been to this ground before.  These teams play in the West Midlands Regional and the Midland Football Leagues at Step 6 and 5 respectively.
The Club Emblem
The club nickname is The Hammers, and the associated chains and anvil also refer to the great industrial metalworking traditions of the Black Country.
Pre-match preparation
The teams drew 2-2 last Saturday.  Coleshill went two up in the first half before Cradley got one back before the interval and then a second-half equaliser.
This match in one sentence
The scoreline is harsh on Cradley Town who competed well for most of the game but were beaten in the end by Coleshill's more clinical finishing.
So what?
Coleshill Town will play either Dudley Sports or Nuneaton Griff in the next round.  Maybe I should go and check them out.
The drama unfolds
I watched the match in the company of my brother Martyn and we reflected on the fact that our respective hobbies (Birdwatching: Twitch Level in his case) leave us vulnerable to obsessive elements.  He just missed something important after a long drive to East Anglia last weekend, a bit like my arrival at a just-postponed game in Sussex at the end of last season.  Meanwhile, the two teams squared up to each other with a decent tempo and the occasional hint of feistiness.  Later on I would express surprise that there were still 22 players on the field.  Cradley weathered the early Coleshill storm and their striker Liam Hickman gave me my first Step 6 stepover of the season before failing to find his strike partner.  Much like Raheem Sterling but without the insane remuneration.  It was all pretty even. The deadlock was broken by Simeon Colbourne (thanks to the club Twitter feed for the ID).  A scuffed Cradley clearance led to a one-on-one that was initially defended well but at the expense of a corner.  Coleshill had always looked to have the edge at set-pieces and the corner led to some pinging around in the six-yard box before the ball ended up in the net.  0-1 after 38 mins and at HT Cradley started the second half well and Paul Hathaway made a flying save to keep his side in front.  However, a deserved equaliser followed just aftrer the hour.  Sorry, the scorer remains unidentified at the time of writing.  1-1 after 62 mins Coleshill took the lead again following another set piece.  A towering header (note: headers that hit the bar must be described as towering, one of the new rules I think) hit the bar and came down on but not over the line.  Any need for controversy was removed as the initial clearance fell to sub number 17, on the teamsheet as Aaron O'Neil but on Coleshill tweets as "Pellet", and the defence could not keep the shot out.  1-2 after 72 mins The remaining two goals added an unfair bias to the final score as Cradley were forced to commit to attack, but they were both well-taken by the aforementioned multiple-monikered Number 17 for a hat-trick from the subs bench.  Harsh but effective.  1-3 after 83 mins, 1-4 after 90 mins and at FT
Ground Pix
Plenty for groundhoppers to enthuse about here.  A ground with some character - a bit of ramshackle building, a fence made from pallets, and a great view of the Clent Hills thrown in.  A well-stocked club shop, an excellent tea bar and one of the best Step 6 programmes you will find anywhere.
Match Pix
Cradley Town are in the red and black.
Celebration Time
Goalkeeper Top Colour Stats
Coleshill Town's keeper turned up in something allowable as "Green", but the Cradley Town keeper is neither yellow nor green so he has to go down as an unfortunate night for "Radioactive Bile".  Green continues to do well, second only to the much rarer Red.  The full table will appear in the blog from time to time.
What Next?
Watch @GrahamYapp on Twitter for details!  Nuneaton Griff v Dudley Sports looks tempting.