P&P Go Groundhopping

Cheadle have no game this weekend so, seeing as how the pair of us have nothing else better to do, Polardin and I trawled the fixture lists to see if there was any decent 90 minutes on offer within a reasonable driving distance.

After much deliberation and research, we've opted for Harrogate Town v Hucknall Town in the Conference North. Harrogate are handily - if not entirely comfortably - poised for the play-off places whilst Hucknall stand teetering over the relegation trap door; a defeat will mean they fall through it, thus joining Leigh RMI and Vauxhall Motors for a life in the Unibond Premier next season.

On a completely different but-still-football-related tack, Cheadle's pathway to the end of the 2007-2008 season has finally been sorted out. Our last four matches are as follows: our last home match of the season against Bootle next Monday (21st April), away to Castleton Gabriels on Tuesday 29th April, a trip to Ashton Athletic two days later (Thursday 1st May) with the season being wound up at a hopefully drier Bootle on Tuesday 6th May.

Speaking of Bootle, they moved into 6th last night with a 3-2 win at Daisy Hill whilst Kirkham and Wesham solidified their 2nd place with a 3-1 away win at Darwen.

File Under "Pending": New Teams for 2008-2009

With the end of the 2007-2008 season only six weeks away it's not too early to approach the topic of the new faces on Cheadle's fixture list for next season.

To recap/educate, new teams will come from two sources: relegation from Div 1 and successful applicants from our feeder leagues. Here's the lowdown on the current state-of-play....

Relegation from Division One
Definitely one, possibly two teams will be relegated from Division One this season. Candidates for the drop - in order of descending likelihood - are Nelson, Bacup Borough, Abbey Hey and Atherton Laburnum Rovers.

Applicants from Feeder Leagues
Not quite sure how many teams we'll get from this but it could be about four or five if the NWCFL want to swell the current number of teams from 18 to 22. Anyhow, the current situation is as thus:

Teams Who Have Definitely Applied
Middlewich Town (from the Cheshire League, were in NWCFL Div 2 in the mid-90s as Middlewich Athletic), Runcorn Town (from the West Cheshire League) and Wigan Robin Park (from the Manchester League and only three years old!).

Teams Who Are Expected To Apply
Irlam (another Manchester League side - used to be known as Mitchell Shackleton) and, more intriguingly, a team that doesn't strictly exist as yet...a certain AFC Liverpool....

There is a whole host of teams - too numerous to mention here - who have asked about joining but haven't put in their application, but if all of the above are successful then we should have enough to be getting on with anyway. Watch this space for any further news.

(Don't) Blame It On The Weatherman

No weekend round-up this week - no point. The result at Park Road - the only game to be played in Div 2 - meant that Ashton Athletic went up to third and Cheadle Town are still 13th. So there, round-up over and done.

In its place is an assessment of Cheadle's current situation regarding fixtures. With six league matches still outstanding (five of them away from home) and the continuing rain hanging like the Sword Of Damacles over this Saturday's League Cup fixture against Runcorn Linnets, I thought it was time to have a look at the calendar and see if there was any danger of a fixture traffic-jam.

As it turns out, things aren't as bad as I first thought. There are four "blank Saturdays" from now until the end of the season; with the six outstanding matches mentioned before, that means Polardin and I will be attending at least two midweek fixtures. We love the midweek fixtures (particularly away from home) but we've got the squad to think about - those kind of games are more difficult for them to attend. It could be worse - we could be Norton United who have still only played 15 matches (compared to Cheadle's 19).

Of course, this "cosy" situation could be thrown out of the window if this miserable weather continues unabated. A postponement this Saturday and - heaven forbid - on February 9th which could force a midweek trip to Holker (!!) would have me re-thinking the situation all over again.

All of a sudden I'm taking an interest in the weather forecasts....

If any of our readers have stories relating to fixture pile-ups and tales about playing a ridiculous number of matches in one week, then we'd like to hear from you.
E-mail: ctfcblog@btinternet.com

With more aliases than Klaus Barbie...

...blowing hot and cold, that's CTFC.

Apologies to any fans of Carter: The Unstoppable Sex Machine for the slight alteration to the words for 'Sheriff Fatman', but it's the lyric that jumped into my head (for reasons best known to my own state of mind) as I trudged away from Park Road last Saturday after witnessing Cheadle Town FC at their very best: so bloody wonderfully unpredictable.

What alias are we? The footballing visionaries that can beat anybody on their day and roast a NWCFL Div 1 side by five goals to two away from home? A team that has found its four-leafed clover, plays absolute gash and yet still nicks a 2-1 away win at places like Daisy Hill? Or a team that is always capable of losing a match that it dominates for large periods?

For this very reason I refuse to make any sort of scoreline prediction in my match previews as I'd be simply wasting my time, yet there are two people much closer to the squad who always stick their necks out.

And so it is to Trevor Howard and Steve Brokenbrow - team managers and eternal optimists - that this blog tips its online hat. Despite the erratic nature of the squad that borders on the wildly eccentric, Trevor and Steve's pre-match faith never wanes.

If Trevor's prediction of a 5-1 home win this Saturday comes true, you'll hear it here first....

"Mary Bradley waits at home, in the nuclear fallout zone..."

As I blew the dust from my 'Now That's What I Call Christmas' CD the other night, a question occurred to me...one that perhaps our faithful blog readers may be able to answer.

On the track listing of this CD - and indeed on the track listing of every Christmas compilation out there - is Jona Lewie's 'Stop The Cavalry'. Apart from some jaunty, slightly festive-sounding brass, could somebody please tell me the link between this song and Christmas? Good luck....

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

Something tells me that Christmas is just around the corner.

Cardboard reindeer have started to crop up in my local ASDA, television adverts are starting to feature people wearing woolly clothing and sleigh bell-y music, Polardin has reminded me that the German Market is on its way to Albert Square, which is also being visited by a local cabaret singer turning on some coloured lights this week.

Ah, good. I love Christmas, or should I say, the run-up to Christmas. Depending on what kind of gifts you get, the day itself can be a bit of an anti-climax, so I tend to spend all of my juvenile excitement on the weeks leading up to it all, with matters reaching a feverish peak when the double edition of the Radio Times comes out.

Masters of the pre-Christmas fever were Woolworths. The well-known "we don't know what our target market is so f*ck it, we'll sell everything" high street shop never appeared on television for 11 months a year but then used to go the whole, extravagant hog once the festive season approached.

An example of which can be seen in the video below. Hosted by Joe Brown, here's 90 seconds of festive pomp from the early 1980s...and some gift ideas to boot. Enjoy.

Wood You Believe It?

From time to time, the custodians of this blog like to side-step away from the footballing matters that give us mild cardiac trouble and nail our colours to the mast.

Everybody has their favourite Beatle; where Polardin and I are concerned, it's Paul McCartney. The yin of worshipping Liverpool's favourite wobbly-head comes with the yang of despising everybody's least-favourite gold-digging, publicity-hungry cretin: Heather Mills.

Not happy with holding out for as much as Sir Paul's money as she can, her inability to just f*ck off and leave us all alone has become evident once more this week. She has flown to Hollywood to plan a film about her life...and somebody had better warn Reece Witherspoon as it is believed that she is Mills' preferred choice to play the part of her.

Let's just say that Polardin and I won't be bothering buying that on DVD, which is the format that the film will be heading straight for as a grossly disinterested human race renders the cinema seats well-and-truly empty.

Heather Mills, just piss off. Thank you.

If You Know Your History

Before the Kirkham and Wesham home match Polardin and I were handed a little booklet detailing some of the history of Cheadle Town FC entitled Memories of a Local Football Team, or something like that.

I'll be revisiting the contents of that booklet at a later date but for the time being you can satisfy yourself - if your love of non-league football club history is your bag - with the updated Cheadle Town page on Wikipedia, which now includes a beefed up 'History' section and includes the honours that the club earned pre-1983 when they were known as Grasmere Rovers.

Enjoy. And learn.

Don't Take My YouTube Away....

Did you watch Panorama on BBC1 the other night? It was about videos of kids leathering other kids being posted onto internet video websites and henceforth being made available for worldwide viewing.

Caught squarely in the middle of this new debate is YouTube. Teachers and anti-bullying organisations - both of which I back to the hilt - are calling for the shutdown of video websites like YouTube so that the artery of extra-curricular bullying and humiliation is cut.

Unlikely as it is to happen, it'd be a shame if the online community were to lose such a useful vehicle as YouTube as it has a vast majority of responsible users - this blog included - who post sensible stuff. Without YouTube you wouldn't have half, if any of the video content you get on here, I wouldn't be able to hunt down classic snippets from television of old...and Polardin would be knackered for something to do whilst sat at his computer.

Let's face it, the majority (not all....I'm prepared to give them some grace!) of today's youth - particularly males - are twa....sorry, untrustworthy. They'd soon find another way of getting their videos online, so shutting down YouTube would not solve the overall problem in the long term.

Is this an example of technology development being a double-edged sword?

Alan Johnston

If you've scrolled down the screen far enough over the past couple of months or so you'll have noticed this little button featuring BBC reporter Alan Johnston.

Anybody with their own website or blog was encouraged to put this button on their front page so that they could do their little bit to keep Mr Johnston in people's minds. He's probably never heard of Cheadle Town FC, nor is he ever likely to, nor is he ever going to be interested in the comedy quartet that is Howard, Hills, Brokenbrow & Howse, but I felt obliged anyhow to play my part.

I'm glad to say that after 114 days I'm in a position to delete it as the BBC have their reporter back.

Somebody who has such a difficult and risky journalism job as Alan Johnston (anybody who'd want to be a Middle East reporter deserves a medal) must despair at the crass approach that is sometimes displayed by their peers. Take, for example, the journalists that were gathered outside the home of Alan Johnston's parents this morning, two of whom asked questions ranging from the bleedin' obvious ("how do you feel now that Alan has been released?") and the slightly befuddling ("can you describe the 114 days of Alan's capture?").

And these blokes get paid. I'm in the wrong job.

Things That Football Players Shouldn't Be Doing

Appearing in television adverts. For anything.

I'm using this as a lame excuse to test-drive Blogger's new video uploading thing but I hope I make my point. Mr Keegan ought to be ashamed of himself.

Somehow I can't see Cheadle's very own Johnny Hussain appearing in something as darkly homoerotic as this.....

RIP Scarborough FC

I know I said I wouldn't be back until this Saturday but I've been forced into action by the sad news that Scarborough FC are no more, after being wound up at Leeds High Court yesterday morning with debts of £2.5m.

In their 128 year history, The Seadogs had their fair share of glorious moments: they won the FA Trophy three times in the 1970s, reached the FA Cup Third Round twice in that same decade with perhaps their finest moment as a non-league club coming in 1987 when Neil Warnock guided them to promotion to the football league.

Scarborough were literally seconds from football league safety at the end of the 1998-99 season but when Jimmy Glass performed that now well-documented injury-time miracle for Carlisle United, it brought about Scarborough's first ever relegation in their footballing history. Things haven't gone right for them ever since.

At the end of the 2005-2006 season Scarborough were bottom of the Conference and, after much to-ing and fro-ing over Altrincham's 18-point deduction and Scarborough's financial stability, were relegated to the Conference North. They then started the following season with a 10-point deduction and struggled. Another relegation took them down to the Unibond Premier, which is now a team short for the start of the 2007-2008 season.

As seems to be the present-day way of things, don't be too surprised if you see them re-appear in the near future with a new name a la Runcorn and Telford. There's already talk of a "Scarborough Athletic" being put together to play in the Northern Counties East League Division One.

This blog sends its sympathies to the fans of Scarborough FC.

Summer Break

Just to let you know that this blog will be taking its short summer break from tomorrow and will return again in two weeks' time on Saturday 23rd June.

On its return the footballing world will hopefully start to slowly wake up from its summer stupor and things may start happening; hey, there might even be news of some CTFC pre-season friendlies to tell you about.

Until then you're just going to make do without my irreverent rambles. If you get bored you can always take another look at last season's photos or wander over to the blog's video channel on YouTube.....or you could even see what Polardin has got to say for himself over at his blog.

See you in two weeks.

Logo a No-Go

If you haven't seen it or heard about it yet, what you see on the left is the official logo for the 2012 Olympic Games in London. You've probably read all of the comments and all; well here's my two penn'orth:

Crap, isn't it?

Apart from the actual word "London" that's on there, it says absolutely nothing about the city or country that is hosting the games. Olympic logos in the past have tended to have some link, however tentative, to the culture and/or history of the games' host.

An opportunity to come up with something meaningful has been surrendered to the words "contemporary", "bold", "dynamic" and, dare I say it, "politically correct" as the logo smacks of a country that is too sh*t-scared to offend anybody, hence the lack of Union Jack or similar British reference.

It annoys me just to look at it. Rant over.

Counting on the Pollen Count

Every June - and only in June - I become a miserable, stuffed-up, itchy-eyeballed, sneezing wreck as hayfever claims another victim, cast aside on the pavement on life, high as a kite on anti-histamine.

Therefore it is with mild humour, a wry smile and no expectation of sympathy that I share this video with you. It's a Public Information Film taken from the 1950s starring Richard Massingham who was a regular in these films at the time and was one of a set accompanying the "Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases" campaign. I can only assume that people really didn't know what to do with a hankerchief back then....

Enjoy.

Meat Loaf; Wrong

Two out of three is bad, pal.

Every year I have a "treble", if that's what they call it in betting circles, on the outcomes of the three play-off finals and every year, one team always lets me down.

My combination of Bristol Rovers, Blackpool and West Bromwich Albion was looking good until the 60th minute of yesterday's final when Pearson slid home the winning goal for Derby County and kept up my 100% record of "two out of three" where this particular wager is concerned.

Who said that gambling was a mug's game?

Head In The Cloud (23)

This blog is 7,000 hits and counting.....!
Alright, it's not the best picture in the world as
i) It was taken with a mobile phone camera and, despite the advances of technology, they've a long way to go before they start knocking on the doors of Nikon, Canon et al
ii) It was taken through a window, and it was raining...

...but I hope you get some sort of an idea of the view you get from Cloud 23, the cocktail bar that is set 23 floors up of the new Beetham Tower in Manchester City Centre.

It's definitely worth a visit if you're celebrating a birthday, anniversary or any other special occasion with your beloved, or with your friends, and you're also guaranteed a great view of Manchester on the move. Just a few tips:

1. Be prepared to queue up to get in.
2. Take plenty of money (cocktails average about £8 a go)
3. Dress smart - no trainers or even "smart casual" shoes. Come booted and suited, or else you won't get in.
4. Enjoy the view - it's quite strange realising how the city you've lived in all your life looks so different from 23 floors up

Main Stand Nostagia

For those of you who have been to Park Road and have sampled the delights of our Main Stand, take a look at this photo taken at the stadium (around the mid-90s, I think)....

Do you notice anything peculiar about it?



Take another look....


Seats! Proper tip-up seats! Look at 'em! Aren't they wonderful! For those of you who haven't been to Park Road before, it's safe to say that those seats are sadly a thing of the past!!

If anybody from the club knows why the seats were taken out or wants to give us a bit of history about the Main Stand, then feel free to post a comment.....

Sky Plusses, Sky Minuses

I'm partly ashamed to say that last week I joined the masses that are partly responsible for drowning football with money: I signed up for Sky.

In my defence, I have no choice. The increased interference of television in football and not having a season ticket at Man City FC next season means that my only chance - outside of the CTFC matches and handful of Man City FC matches I do choose to attend - of watching live football is going to be courtesy of the Astra satellite circling the earth, the communal dish on top my block of flats, a Sky+ box and £36 a month.

However, as I have discovered over the past week or so, having Sky is not all about the Premiership.

The play-off semi-final matches were all screened last week and if, like me, you were a neutral, you were treated to some absolutely barnstorming, drama-laden matches; I can't wait for the finals over the bank holiday weekend! However, I still feel that Sky dropped a massive clanger by not covering the FA Vase Final in favour of the Premiership relegation battle; seeing as how it covered the FA Trophy, it could have walked that extra yard and made an effort to cover the remaining corner of non-league football.

Admittedly there's also a lot of stuff you'd never watch in your life. About ten shopping channels serving as launching pads for the next generation of TV presenter and taking fifteen minutes to describe a kettle; around ten gambling channels; around fifteen channels full of Bollywood films and music; Al-Jazeera UK...and just don't start me on those religious channels - they're just plain scary....and that's a blog post in its own right.

So, I've "sold out" to the baddies. I've seen a bloke on The GOD Channel can heal me and cleanse me of my sins....

Hairdryer

When I first saw this on YouTube the first thing that came into my head was "I wonder if Trevor is like this during a half-time team-talk when Cheadle are two-nil down?"

The footage is of a BBC journalist - forget his name now - who was doing a documentary on Scientology and who, let us say, "lost it a bit" with semi-hilarious results. Watch for the way he suddenly cools down...before flying off the handle again!