Sunday Nov 15, 2009
For several years in the late-1990s and early-2000s (why does that still sound odd when the decade is about to end?), I worked with a Chester City supporter...
An otherwise thoroughly pleasant person, he had undergone a sense-of-humour bypass operation at birth and thought irony was something you did to shirts and trousers.
Every Sunday afternoon, it was his job to compile a round-up of the highlights of that weekend's lower-division football (League One and Two, as it now is). Somehow, Chester City always managed to get a mention and if they lost, as they invariably did, his intro would be "Unlucky Chester lost to a last-minute penalty"; or "Unlucky ten-man Chester battled bravely but were denied"; or "Unlucky Chester lost to a controversial decision"...you get the idea.
It's been a few years since he and I parted company from the sports desk but such was his influence that I still cannot think of this afternoon's visitors as anything other than "Unlucky Chester".
That, of course, is deeply unfair on them and their fans and it's perfectly true to say that they haven't enjoyed the best of good fortune over the years. All that exposure to Chester City has left me with a bit of a soft spot for them and I hope, for their fans' sake that things turn round, but not this afternoon please.
It says much for our recent run that one of the BTAD crowd decided his wife's birthday was a more pressing engagement than the Hayes & Yeading game two weeks ago. Another of us brought his two young sons to enjoy the family fun day and in deference to their delicate young ears, we decided to stand not in the shed (just give it a few more years and they'll be in there...) but at the top end of the ground. Which was probably just as well because I can remember a time when their dad would have been leaning over the fence and in the middle of the spectacular on-pitch brawl which broke out halfway through the second half and which got GM sent from the dugout.
Although that incident did much to get the crowd fired up, something which hasn't happened too often recently, I think it actually scuppered our chances of getting something from the game. Having been dismal for the first 45 minutes, we had looked far better after the break and with a bit more luck - and a striker - might easily have scored three goals in the first 20 minutes.
But as the crowd spent the next 15 minutes abusing the match officials, attention was drawn completely away from the game and our chance was lost.
So we come into this afternoon's game on the back of nine games without a win but hopefully rested, hopefully fitter and hopefully with a stronger squad.
There's been much doom and gloom expressed in recent weeks about the team's recent sorry run of results and some comments about the club's future which seem to me, from my viewpoint BTAD, to be wildly over-dramatic.
I have said it before, probably more than once, but I'll say it again because it needs emphasising; we knew when we got into this league that finishing one place above relegation would do nicely. We knew money would be tight, we knew we had a small squad, we knew injuries would scupper us - and they have.
Some people think to point that out smacks of a lack of ambition and perhaps it does. Plenty of people on the terraces and on the forums wonder why the club can't generate more money off the field to help out when the club needs some spending to be done on the field.
Of course, they're entitled to ask that question and it was interesting to hear that the VIP Club proposes to get involved in more fundraising.
In the meantime, after a fortnight of speculation and somewhat over-excited moaning, it's going to be nice to get back to football this afternoon. Let's hope the lads make it worthwhile.
