A trip across the city...

Bradford Park Avenue 1 Hereford 0 (Northern Premier League, Saturday 22nd October)

When you decide to start up a football blog about Yorkshire non-league football, you have to accept that for every time you see Thackley hitting six against someone or a storming match between Guiseley and FC United, there will be some not-so-stellar games in there as well.

Although this game could technically be described as a battle of former league clubs, it was never actually a league fixture at any point in the past as Hereford weren't actually admitted to the football league until 1972 when they replaced Barrow and Park Avenue had lost their league status two yearss before, making way for Cambridge United. It's probably a moot point anyway as both clubs are actually phoenix ones, the original versions that played in the league having folded due to financial irregularities. But sod it, let's do a bit of background here anyway.

It seems weird to think some fifty years later given City's struggles since the halcyon days of their brief Premiership run around the turn of the millennium that there actually used to be two league clubs in Bradford but for over 60 years, that was indeed the case with City, based on the north side of the city centre in Manningham joining the League in 1903 and Avenue, based just south of it in Great Horton, following them five years later in 1908. Both teams were in the top flight in the 1910's but after World War I, both would find themselves dropping down to Division 2 and then Division 3 (North) as it was then. Ironically, it would be Avenue who would be the more successful of the two Bradford clubs in the inter-war years as they would return to Division 2 in 1928 and remain there right up until 1950 while City would also get promoted the same year but were back in the bottom flight by the time the Second World War broke out.

Following Avenue's relegation to the third tier, both Bradford clubs would spend the decade struggling although an upturn in City's form towards the end of the decade would see them placed in the new Division 3 when the League was reorganised in 1958 with Avenue dropping into Division 4. However, the 1961 season would see the clubs swap places with Avenue getting promoted and City relegated although Avenue's spell in Division 3 would be brief and two years later they would return to Division 4. Thereafter, they never really looked like getting out of the division again and their fourth re-election campaign in a row in 1970 turned out to be one too many with the club voted out of the League.

Avenue would struggle on for a few seasons in the Northern Premier League before financial problems caused the club to fold in the mid-'70s. A phoenix club would form at the end of the 1980's, starting off in the North West Counties League and slowly climbing the ladder to the Conference North where they currently reside. Ironically, within fifteen years of their demise, City had been promoted all the way back to Division 2 for the first time in half a century and would then go on to the Premiership fifteen years later. And of course it's been downhill ever since for them. But I'll come to that when I deal with Pools' away game at Valley Parade next March.

Hereford's demise is altogether more recent and I can certainly remember Pools playing them a few times in the '90s and '00s. Indeed, they had a reputation of being one of our eternal bogey teams along with Southend and Wycombe. Pools used to get the odd win over the Bulls at the Vic but Edgar Street was never a happy hunting ground for us and I think it might be the only ground where I've seen Pools bow out of the FA Cup twice. The second time was especially galling as I remember watching the second round draw on the Monday night after we'd hammered non-league Gainsborough 6-0 in the first round and seeing our number come out to face either Hereford or Leeds away. The teams had drawn at Edgar Street the previous evening and I think most people thought Leeds would finish them off at Elland Road. At the time, the Whites were having a dreadful season in League One, hopelessly adrift in mid-table (this would've been the dying days of Gary McAllister's reign as manager) and the fans were quickly becoming restless and turning on the team (so what’s new I hear you say). A couple of months before we'd played them at their place in the league and they'd been lucky to scrape a 2-2 draw against us - all we had to do it seemed was to get an early goal to set the discontent off and the atmosphere would work against the home team and bosh, Round 3 and hopefully an away trip to Newcastle, Sunderland or Middlesbrough would be ours.

What we didn't count on of course was Hereford having exactly the same idea - they won the replay at Elland Road 1-0 and people as far away as Barrow could probably hear the groans emanating from Pools fans as we realised we had to go to Edgar Street instead. Sure enough, despite being a division below us, the Bulls saw us off depressingly easily 2-0 and that was the Cup run over for another year.

Of course, fans of lower league clubs of a certain age will always associate Hereford with being the club that lost out to Brighton in the infamous battle to avoid relegation to the Conference on the last day of the season in 1997 where both the bottom two teams played each other and Brighton took the point they needed at Edgar Street to survive by the skin of their teeth. I have to be honest, as a fan of one of the teams who were in the group of strugglers at the sharp end of the table that season (again, the more things change…) and who only secured their safety a week or so beforehand, I felt desperately sorry for the Bulls that day. I'm sure no-one would deny how atrociously Brighton were being run at that time with a chairman who'd ruthlessly asset-stripped the club including selling the team's ground from under them to property developers and leaving the Seagulls homeless and having to play their away games 70 miles away in Gillingham and their rise from the ashes as a fan-owned club afterwards which eventually took them all the way to the Premiership is something you can't help but admire but the continual presence of people in the press that season droning on about "poor old Brighton" and how it would be such a shame if the club that gave the world Steve Foster and the Tesco carrier bag kit went out of the league at the expense of a bunch of nobodies like Hereford or Pools or Torquay or Darlington definitely stuck in a few of us' craws a bit. I remember reports from Pools' away game at the Goldstone Ground that season where the travelling fans decided to goad the home support with a chant (to the tune of "the *insert team name here* are going up") of "Thirty pounds a week, thirty pounds a week, GM Conference calling, GM Conference calling, GM Conference calling, thirty pounds a week!" We went on to lose 5-0 and gave Brighton their first win in about two months. Proof that sometimes it's best to wait until your team's actually ahead before getting cocky...

Hereford would return to the league eight years later and would even manage to scrape a season in League One but their fall afterwards would be rapid with the club only managing one season in the third tier before bombing back out of the League altogether a couple of years later and going bust shortly afterwards. A phoenix club, now dropping the United and simply called Hereford, has slowly worked its way back up the League to Conference North level (exactly how in any way you could describe Hereford as being in the north is a mystery to me but that's a whole other rant for another time).

Avenue now play their home games at Horsfall Stadium in Odsal right out on the south side of the city although the bus ride there took me past their original home on Horton Park Avenue which has now reverted to its original use as a cricket ground (Yorkshire used to play the occasional home game there back in the '90s but it's been years since I followed cricket so I dunno if they still do). At one point there was even talk of them moving up the road to Odsal Stadium to groundshare with the similarly fallen Bradford Bulls rugby league team who at the time had been turfed out of their ground due to not getting sufficiently high attendances to make staying there cost-effective and had been reduced to groundsharing with Dewsbury Rams but that never came to fruition. Given that Avenue's average attendance these days is somewhere around the 500 mark and Odsal has a capacity of over 10,000 you can kind of see why it neve got off the ground although these days the Bulls struggle to attract more than 3,000 to their home games - a sad state of affairs for a team that was one of the dominant forces in the Super League in its early years.

Horsfall Stadium reminds me a bit of a smaller version of Gateshead's ground in that it's primarily an athletics stadium with one big stand at the side and the rest being people standing around next to the barriers. There were a fair few Hereford fans who'd made the long journey north and were sampling the beers in Avenue's clubhouse before the game while I was catching up with an old school friend who I hadn't seen in twenty odd years and is now a regular at Avenue - it was good to see him again.

I wish I could tell you that this was a great end-to-end game with plenty of action but I would be lying. Going into the game, Avenue were stuck at the bottom of the table after a terrible start to the season (my friend had commented that there'd been a LOT of 1-0 home defeats for them) with Hereford firmly ensconced in the bottom half of the division as well. It showed. Both sides looked incredibly hesitant on the ball and the result was 45 minutes of long balls to no-one in particular. In fact the only thing of note was that I decided to head over to the snack bar for a burger midway through the half and the service was so slow that I ended up gone for about 15 minutes while the staff were...well, I'm not sure what they were doing to be honest. Upon finally returning to my seat, I asked my friend if I'd missed anything. His reply was that I very much hadn't.

Avenue did at least start to pick themselves up a bit in the second half and Hereford made a couple of substitutions to inject some pace into their decidedly lethargic midfield. There were even a couple of attempts on goal at this point but I mentioned with about 15 minutes to go that this one seemed to have nil-nil written on it from a mile off. In the end though, Avenue sneaked it via a penalty with about five minutes to go. An attack broke down in the box but the Hereford defence made an absolute hash of their clearance and sent it straight to Bradford's giant number nine Jacob Blyth. He ran into the box, a Hereford defender panicked and flailed out and brought him down and he promptly got up and scored.

To be fair, it was deserved - Avenue hadn't been great on the day but they'd looked marginally more threatening than Hereford for the previous twenty minutes. They would hold on and take a crucial three points to move them off the bottom of the division with the defeat dropping Hereford two places to 17th.

I'm sure I'll be back at Avenue again later in the season - hopefully their form will have picked up a bit by then and the game'll be a bit better than this one was!

Pennine derby in miniature!

Guiseley 2 FC United of Manchester 1 (Northern Premier League, Tuesday 18th October 2022)

To be honest, I was in two minds about whether to go to this one - the match at the weekend had left me a bit down to put it mildly. But sod it, sometimes you pick yourself up the floor and try and restore your faith in football. Which, happily, tonight's match very much did.

As I mentioned earlier in the season, the original plan was to go and see Guiseley play Marine for their first home game of the season before a heatwave (and, if I'm honest, a reluctance to leave the nice air-conditioned pub we were having a pre-game pint in!) intervened. However, the visit of FC United of Manchester intrigued me sufficiently that I decided to forego watching this week's Bake-Off to head to the game.

FC United are a bit of a funny one - they were formed as a breakaway club from Man United about twenty years ago following the Glazers' takeover at Old Trafford. So in a way the blueprint was for them to be kind of a northern version of AFC Wimbledon but they never quite reached the same heights. The team started out in the North West Counties League and after a few rapid promotions ended up reaching the Conference North (two divisions below the league) but then kind of ran out of steam and found themselves relegated back to the Northern Premier League a couple of years ago.

I kind of feel a bit sorry for FC United really as the emergence of Salford City in the last few years has kind of overshadowed them a bit - while there's plenty of goodwill and an impressive support behind FC (they must have brought a good 200-300 fans with them this evening swelling the attendance at Nethermoor to over 1000, almost double what Guiseley normally get), they don't have the likes of Scholes, Giggs, Beckham, Neville et al putting money into the club hence why they hit the glass ceiling while Salford have gone on to get promoted all the way up to League Two. I'll be honest, as a Pools fan I've always had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about clubs coming into the league in the last 10-15 years who would be several divisions down the pyramid if it wasn't for some sugar daddy investing in them as a plaything to swiftly be discarded when the novelty wears off. Ah sod it, let's name names - Crawley, Forest Green, Harrogate, Salford...sure they might have the money but when you've got a club who've only come good in the last couple of decades and are still struggling to attract 1500 most weeks despite their lofty league position taking the place of the established likes of Chesterfield, Notts County, Oldham et al in the league...well maybe it's just me but it doesn't feel right somehow.

Of course, this whole thing is nothing new - arguably the first club to fit this description to break into the league were Rushden and Diamonds back in the early noughties, formed when Dr Martens took over two local Southern League clubs, merged them and invested frankly stupid amounts of money to get them into the league. Rushden were promoted with Hartlepool in 2002 but while Pools would consolidate, the Diamonds were rapidly found out as the money dried up when the boot company ran into financial difficulties and were relegated straight back down to the fourth tier before bombing out of the league altogether two years later and into oblivion soon afterwards. You'd think it would be a lesson from history but I guess as long as there are people like Ryan Reynolds et al willing to plough stupid money and push clubs beyond their means only to abandon them as soon as they want to go and find a new toy to play with, the cycle is doomed to repeat eternally.

Anyway, rant over. The first thing we noticed upon getting to Nethermoor was a police presence, almost unheard of at Guiseley. I s'pose when you've got Man United fans travelling to a suburb of Leeds, you can't help but be careful. To be fair, both sets of fans were in good voice for the game and it made for a cracking atmosphere (although the holding up of play due to one of the players having racist abuse shouted at them was a disappointment - no need for that sort of thing in the game nowadays) and it made for a cracking game.

Guiseley seemed to have put their disappointment against Marine behind them, going into this game unbeaten in six, and although FC United were clearly no slouches as their position at the top of the league testified, apart from a few dangerous red attacks in the opening minutes, Guiseley pretty much grabbed this one by the scruff of the neck right from the word go, using their pace to torture the United defence. They took the lead on 25 minutes from a well worked goal which saw centre half Ellis lash a loose ball into the net. They held on to the advantage for the rest of the half and were good value for their lead at the break.

I think some words must have been had in the United dressing room as they came out for the second half with an added urgency to them, taking on the demeanour of an Alsatian that's just had its bone nicked.  The attacks started getting more and more dangerous and it wasn't a surprise when their substitute Rodwell-Grant, a youngster on loan from Wigan, equalised midway through the second half.

"Bugger," said my mate, "they're gonna lose this, aren't they?" As it turned out, quite the opposite happened - United's parity only lasted seven minutes before Guiseley got what turned out to be the winner as a quick break upfield saw their giant number nine and captain Jake Cassidy slot home.

I remembered Cassidy from his days at Hartlepool a few years earlier - it's safe to say he wasn't exactly a success there. One of a number of "guaranteed twenty goal a season strikers" signed by the various managers we had in charge during our National League years (Craig Harrison, Richard Money, Matt Bates etc), he never looked like getting anywhere near that during his sole season at the Vic, mostly just coming across as big and slow. Here though, he looked genuinely dangerous, using his size well to dominate the United defence and proving a thorn in their side all game.

The final whistle was greeted with a huge ovation from the home support. United remain top of the table but with just six points separating the top fifteen sides in the division (!), it really does look like this could be anybody's season at this point. Hopefully it'll be Guiseley's but we'll wait and see. Either way though, after the disappointment of the weekend, this was a good reminder of just how much fun a night out at the football can be sometimes. Much needed.

Things go a bit mad at Thackley…

Thackley 6 Maltby Main 2 (North Counties East League, Saturday 3rd September 2022)

"I've got to be honest," my mate says as we drink our first pint of the day, "I'm already leaning towards staying in the pub."

We've just got our first pints of the afternoon in at the Great Northern pub in Thackley and are watching the second half of a Merseyside derby that's not so much about as dull as watching paint dry as sitting around waiting for it to peel.

"Nope," I say, "We're going. It's become a running joke this and I'm determined that we can make it to a Thackley match."

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in the “report” of the Guiseley game that wasn't that we don't have a great track record when it comes to getting out of the pub and going to games. Even when I mentioned to my wife this morning what the plan was, she burst out laughing and said "I don't believe you, send me a photo as proof or I'm just gonna assume you've just stayed in the pub again!"

But we manage it. I dunno if it was the fact that the weather today's actually pretty much just right for watching football (no rain but not too hot either) or the fact that after the snorefest that was the Everton vs Liverpool match that whatever Thackley served up HAD to be more entertaining than that. Interestingly I did send my missus a photo. No response. One nil to me I think.

Thackley are based up in the leafy northern suburbs of Bradford, just a mile or so up the road from where I live in Shipley making it my local club by default (well, there's another one which is probably about equal distance and we'll deal with them next week). The club were founding members of the North Counties Eastern League in 1983 and have remained there ever since. I think it's safe to say that there'll be quite a few NCEL match reports in this blog as the Bradford area has a LOT of clubs at this level. It's a bit odd really - obviously you've got City in the football league then Park Avenue in the Conference North but then there's a huge gap of three divisions* down to the NCEL where suddenly you get Thackley, Eccleshill, Silsden, Campion and Albion Sports (not to mention Steeton and Ilkley Town who play in the North West Counties League which is at the same feeder level...but that's a whole other complicated kettle of fish for another time).

(* - if you really want to stretch things, Farsley Celtic in the Conference North and Guiseley and Brighouse Town in the Northern Premier League are all one postal district outside the city boundaries but we haven't got all day here...)

Thackley play their home games at Dennyfield just on the edge of the green belt with Buck Wood which runs from the edge of Thackley village down to the Leeds-Liverpool canal just opposite. Similar to Guiseley's Nethermoor ground (albeit a smaller version), it's a nice picturesque ground in a rural setting and sitting in the gentle early autumn sunshine with a pint from the clubhouse (the clubhouse is actually outside the ground but the guy on the turnstile was happy to let us nip out to grab beers from there - "It's alright lads, I'll remember you both"), it makes you realise that sometimes the best football experiences come from being away from the big crowds further up the league (sorry, non-league football cliche number 728 there I know)

Neither Thackley nor their opponents Maltby Main (Maltby is between Doncaster and Sheffield just off the A1) had got off to a great start to the season with the Dennyboys starting the day in 18th place, two below their visitors. It didn't exactly promise to be a classic but you never know. The first thing we noticed as the players ran out was that Maltby were a proper Land of the Giants team - I'm not sure they had a single player who was under six foot tall. Their number 15, playing at centre-half, in particular looked as if he'd been lying on a table in a scientist's lab until five minutes ago when someone had stuck a couple of electrodes on to the bolts on his neck to kickstart his pre-match warm-up.

Thackley actually looked half decent at the outset with the strikers firing in a couple of shots at Maltby's Kasper Schmeichel lookalike keeper but it was the away side who took the lead with about 5 minutes gone. Maltby's winger fired in a cross which wrong-footed everyone including the Thackley keeper to creep over the line. Thackley's response was to pile upfield for an equaliser but unfortunately in doing so they left themselves open at the back and Maltby promptly doubled their advantage from a quick counter which their striker clinically headed home.

I was fearing the worst at this point - I'd visited Thackley once before in the middle of January last season to see them play Penistone Church. In that match, Thackley had played well until a collision midway through the first half had seen their keeper stretchered off injured (he subsequently spent the night in hospital). Unsurprisingly, they were a bit shellshocked by that and crumbled to a 3-1 defeat.

Which made what came next against Maltby all the more remarkable. Clearly stung, Thackley quickly subbed off their number 2 (who I actually thought had been one of their better players at that point) and I'm not sure what instructions the sub came on the pitch with but there's no way you could have predicted how the rest of the game would turn out at that point.

The comeback started a few minutes after the second goal when the Dennyboys won a free kick 35 yards out and their number 11 Aiden Chippendale promptly stepped up to smash an absolute rocket of a shot into the Maltby net. I thought I recognised Chippendale’s name and it turns out he’s had more northern clubs than Lee Westwood, having started his career at Huddersfield in the late noughties then moving on to spells at Bradford (both City and Avenue), York, Accrington, Chester, Stalybridge and Bury (both the original club and the phoenix one) among several others. By halftime, the score was level as Thackley were awarded a penalty after Maltby's keeper collided with Chippendale which Thackley's number 9 Greaves dispatched. 2-2 at half time and a pretty good match but I don't think anyone could have foreseen what was coming next.

The second half started with Thackley dominating after an early spell of Maltby pressure and on the hour they went in front as Chippendale lashed a ferocious shot into the net from the edge of the area. Chippendale then got his hat-trick and Thackley's fourth with almost an exact replay of Maltby's first goal as a cross into the area deceived everyone and ended up the back of the net.

By now, Maltby were pretty much falling apart and Chippendale added his fourth and Thackley's fifth just before being subbed off with an absolute rocket of a shot from outside the area which the keeper couldn't do a thing about. Definitely the goal of the game but Thackley weren't finished yet as some keystone cops defending from Maltby in injury time allowed sub Murphy to tap in at the far post to make it 6-2.

"Tell you what," says my mate as we wander back into Thackley and towards the Great Northern for a quick pint before heading off our separate ways, "We should definitely do this again". I suspect this won't be the last match report from Dennyfield this season.

A trip to Guiseley goes astray…

Guiseley 0 Marine 3 (Northern Premier League, Saturday 13th August 2022)

It's a bit of a running joke with me and my mate that on the occasions we attempt to go to a non league game, there is a good chance we won't actually make it if there's a decent pub nearby. I s'pose it doesn't help that non-league football and pubs pretty much go hand in hand - our local, the Great Northern, is about five minutes' walk from Thackley's ground and more than once last season we ended up meeting there for a pre-match pint before going on to watching the Dennyboys play only for us to end up staying in the pub because it was tanking it down outside or someone we hadn't seen for ages turned up or...well, you kind of get the picture.

I thought that by changing our destination to Guiseley that I'd manage to avert this. I was wrong. We somehow picked an absolutely scorching hot day to go to Nethermoor and after a pre-match pint at the Potting Shed pub nearby, set off for the ground. We got about halfway across the car park of the Station pub over the road, realised that there was no way we were standing in the open air in these conditions for two hours especially as both of us tend to burn to a crisp after five minutes of midsummer sun (my mate’s a redhead and I’m a middle aged goth, go figure) so we decided to call this one off and headed for the coolness of the pub.

It's a shame and I fully intend to make a proper trip back to Guiseley some time later in the autumn. Not least because in my teenage years, it was the nearest ground to where I grew up in Otley and on the occasions when Pools were playing at the other end of the country and a trip to Bramall Lane wasn't on the cards, I frequently ended up there. At the time, Guiseley were having one of their intermittent successful spells and were challenging for promotion from the Northern Premier League to the Conference (this was in the days before the Conference North).

Nethermoor’s a tidy compact little ground under the shadow of the nearby Chevin hill and me and my dad spent many an afternoon there in the mid-'90s. That Guiseley team was an enjoyable one to watch playing fast-paced attacking football. Indeed, two of them would go on to play in the football league - Lutel James, a tricky winger who would frequently leave opposition fullbacks floundering in his wake with his runs downfield would go on to play for Bury under Neil Warnock in the late '90s and was subsequently a part of the Accrington Stanley side that enjoyed that meteoric rise up to the league in the early noughties. He even represented St Kitts and Nevis at international level.

However, it's the other player that you might have heard of - Geoff Horsfield. A proper old school English centre forward, Horsfield was a big burly striker who was also deceptively skillful for his size. Picked up by the Lions after failing to make the grade at Scarborough, he and his strike partner Bob Colville, a thirtysomething Yorkshire non-league veteran, were borderline unplayable that season with the strike partnership yielding close to forty goals, twenty plus of which came from Horsfield. Soon afterwards, Horsfield would be snapped up by local Conference neighbours Halifax and bang in 30 goals as the Shaymen romped home with the Conference title. He would continue his goalscoring exploits in League Two and after netting seven in his first ten games, newly minted Fulham would spend £350,000 on his services. Horsfield would be a key part of the Cottagers' rise up to the Championship under Kevin Keegan before going on to taste Premiership football with Birmingham and West Brom.

Guiseley would end up finishing the first season I saw them in 3rd place in the NPL, even surviving the loss of manager Ray McHale to Scarborough (then still a league side) with hulking centre half and captain Steve Richards taking over as player-manager after his departure. The season saw a three way battle for the title between the Lions, Leek Town and Marine, the latter of whom just happened to be the Lions' opponents today hence my interest in attending the game. Ironically, the whole thing turned out to be a moot point as both Guiseley and Marine's grounds failed to meet the Conference standards hence Leek, who finished 2nd, were promoted by default.

It's safe to say that Guiseley and Marine's relevant paths have diverged a bit since those days - that season was pretty much as good as it got for Marine who missed the boat when it came to joining the Conference North a decade or so later and would spend most of the next two decades floundering around the Northern Premier League. However, a good Cup run in the Covid season a couple of years ago saw the group reach Round 3 and get the plum tie of Spurs at home. It's the sort of tie that in the old days would have seen the club play the fixture at a local lower league ground (probably Tranmere in Marine's case) and draw in the extra supporters for the big day. However, with supporters not allowed in the ground, BBC viewers were treated to the somewhat surreal sight of Kane, Son et al plying their trade on Marine's tiny astroturf pitch. Spurs would win the tie comfortably in the end but the television money had helped Marine return to the NPL Premier after being stuck in Division 1 West for the previous few years.

Guiseley, on the other hand, had achieved the near unthinkable and, after relegation in the early noughties, had bounced back impressively culminating in the club reaching the National League for the first time in its history in 2015. They would then go on to confound everybody by staying there for three years, avoiding relegation on the last day in 2016 and 2017 (with larger neighbours Halifax and York being the respective fall guys for the Lions' great escapes) before finally succumbing to the drop in 2018 (though the buggers would still beat Pools at Nethermoor that season).

Unfortunately since then, the club had been on a downward spiral culminating in another relegation in the season just gone. The Lions had been hovering around the drop zone all season but a terrible run-in saw Telford and Farsley Celtic overhaul them in the last few games to send them back down to the NPL with even the return of Steve Kittrick, the manager who'd got them promoted a few years before, failing to fire the team to safety. I remember checking the results on the last day of the campaign - with ten minutes to go, Guiseley were 1-0 up against Alfreton and looked to be heading for safety at Farsley's expense only for two injury time goals to sink them and send them down.

As it turned out, we didn't miss much by staying in the pub - Guiseley's hopes of a flying start to the season were comprehensively derailed as Marine won 3-0. By all accounts it was a much closer game than the scoreline suggests - Marine took the lead in the first 20 minutes, Guiseley spent much of the next hour or so pressing hard for an equaliser only to be hit with two late suckerpunches. Sitting in the Hawkhill Tavern, at least we were gifted some light relief by watching Brentford dismantle Man Utd 4-0. There's always someone worse off than yourself etc. Hopefully when I make it back to Nethermoor in the coming weeks, the performance'll be a bit better.

I'm away in Norfolk for the next couple of weeks but should hopefully be back in business with a trip to Thackley at the start of September...if we ever make it out of the Northern that is...