Another visit to the Street

With no game for the Baggies yesterday, Glynis Wright braved the elements and paid another visit to Hereford.

No real surprise to where we went, I'm afraid - once more, my other
half heard loud and clear the clarion call of the Bulls persuasion,
so Edgar Street was where we shifted to around lunchtime. By the
way, for the first time in yonks, their accounts have shown a
profit, which is a complete turnaround from the near-disastrous
one-million-quid deficit they had five or six years ago, and nearly
ended up dragging them under. We had planned to include a pre-match
visit to a Levi jeans shop in the town centre, but getting stuck
behind a bloody tractor (speeds 'dead-slow' and 'stop' only)
en-route, and encountering a combination of a speed camera and a
thirty mph limit in one of the villages along the way, it wasn't
until after two we finally pulled up on their enormously-capacious
car park. Which wouldn't have mattered a jot, as the shops were only
about five minutes walk away anyway, but when strolling past the
ground, we just happened to bump into Roy Hayden, of Kiddy Branch
fame, who was also spending his Saturday seeing rather more of the
Bulls than he normally would most days. That's what happens when you
support a club that seems to have developed something of an aversion
to playing at the 'proper' time God ordained, of late!

By the time we'd finished batting the breeze, it was too late to go
in search of new strides, so we opted for a quick tool into a
Cornish pasty shop nearby instead. All hand-made and locally baked,
and a variety of ingredients within that in some instances paid but
little homage to the original Cornish tin-miners' delicacy, but
highly scrumptious all the same, which is why we brought a couple of
the pastry-covered blighters home with us for tea.

Our 'eats' finally sorted, we returned to the ground once more, and
as there was around 15 minutes to go by then, we shifted ourselves
inside without further ado. All the usual crowd in the part of the
stand we frequent on these occasions, including the posse of old
ladies I've mentioned before, plus Nick Brade, quiz compiler
extraordinaire - more of him later. Eighty-odd year-old May not
coming, then? No, sadly - until she rolled up anyway just before the
start, much to our astonishment. And that of our chums - May had
told all and sundry beforehand she wouldn't be coming because of the
awful weather!

Today's opponents were Morecambe, who were around mid-table, but
because of the dog-eat-dog nature of the Conference this season, they too had a legitimate claim to an end-of-season play-off spot in
progress. (Go on - have a look at the table, and you'll see
precisely what I'm banging on about.) They'd brought about a hundred
hardy souls (soles?) from the fastness of their seaside town, now
infamous because of the disaster that occurred to those Chinese
cockle-pickers about a year ago. And, quelle horreur - they'd
brought a bloody percussion band with 'em. One helluva noisy drum -
blimey, I was really glad I wasn't sitting next to the bloke
wielding it - also a tinny sort of noise I couldn't place at first.
And then it suddenly occurred to me, in a flash, as these things
generally do; someone (or several 'someones'?) back home would be
missing not a few familiar items of kitchen-ware before the day was
through.

I can just hear the conversations: Wifey: "Eeeh, Our Joe, I've
looked for me saucepans all over t'kitchen ter do me hotpot in this
teatime, 'an I can't find t'big 'uns any where. Eh, chuck, do yer
know where they've gone?"

Hubbie: "Ah canna be sure, like, but Ah thought Ah saw Our Albert
wi' 'em just afore he went to t'football. Playing down some pansy
southern place somewhere, where they make t'cider, or summat.."

Wifey: "Our Albert? At a bluddy football match? Wi' me bluddy
saucepans? Wait till 'ee gets home - I'll kill the little £$%&@!! So
Ah will!"

The 'musical accompaniment' apart, a listen to the Morecambe side
via the PA proved somewhat instructive. Playing at number four was
Michael Howard! For a moment, visions crossed my mind of the Tory
leader deciding to take time out from biting great lumps out of the
NHS, and turning to 'dirty tricks' on the football field, as opposed
to The House Of Commons, instead - but, alas, the chap who emerged
from the players tunnel was about forty years younger - but hang on
a minute! Wasn't eternal youth the 'prize' for selling your soul to
Old Nick? Well, that's what Faust reckoned; as far as the Tory
leader was concerned, he'd already exceeded the job specifications
required thanks to that lengthy Parliamentary career of his.

The game? Well, Morecambe came primarily to play the defensive game,
but they also got lucky. With two minutes only on the clock, after
attacking right from the start, they earned themselves a corner.
Chuck in a huge wodge of awful marking from the home side, and a
far-post header, unmarked, from about four or five yards, and The
Bulls suddenly found themselves chasing the game. As far as the
visitors were concerned, that was it; they'd shoved their noses in
front, and no bugger was going to shift them. No surprise to learn,
then, that the next forty minutes were to prove an
exceedingly-frustrating time for them. Mind you, I suspected a lot
of their seeming lethargy out there was due to the fact they'd
played more games than any side had a right to over the last few
weeks. There's only so much of that sort of 'two-games-a-week' grind
players can cope with, after all.

But fair play to The Bulls, they did manage to get an equaliser with
about a couple of minutes to the break, from a corner again, and had
they pushed Morecambe even more before half-time, they might well
have taken the lead. The second half? Well, both factions fought
mightily, but neither would yield sufficiently to irrevocably breach
defences. That, plus the fact the Morecambe keeper played right out
of his skin that second-half, so a one-one it was, and, in its
latter stages, a game played to the incessant backdrop of driving
sleet.

Mind you, the interval did prove interesting on the food front. What
normally happens is the aforementioned ladies bring with them enough
sweets to drive any self-respecting dentist crazy, and those in
close proximity - even the Bluenose couple sitting but a few rows
further forward, may I say - benefit mightily from this half-time
equivalent of the 'midnight feast'. But our elderly friends truly
excelled themselves today; first of all, a large box of Terry's
All-Gold was produced with a flourish from a bag that seemed to
possess even more interior capacity than that of The Fart, and once
they'd all gone down the hatch, out came yet another box of sweets -
this lot from Portugal, and very creamy toffees they were, too. Huh.
We don't get spoiled like that at The Hawthorns - but we are open to
bribery, of course!

But back to Nick Brade. As part of the fundraising stuff he does for
the club, he recently set supporters a bit of a quiz, the prize
being a signed home shirt, or a club shop voucher to the value of 20
quid. It might look a simple sort of thing to complete at first
glance, but once you inspect the thing more closely, you suddenly
find there lurks within an absolute stinker. All you have to do is
decide whether a statement is true or false - but there are no less
than 45 of the blighters to sort out! Examples? "Tigers have striped
skin as well as striped fur," or what about "Northwich Victoria were
founder members of Football League Division Two"? Anyone out there
study Jane Austen for A Level English? If so, did she really only
have one book published in her lifetime? The daft thing is, I did an
Austen book when I was studying English Lit about thirty-odd years
ago, but I'm completely banjaxed by that one. I'd honestly thought I
was good at that sort of thing, but it only took a couple of minutes
of close study to make my brain really hurt. But I'm not going to
let the sodding thing defeat me - I'll get the answers if I have to
turn cyberspace upside-down to do it.>

---