Havant & Waterlooville 5 Chelmsford City 2

24apr10
Conference South
West Leigh Park, Havant
att. 1,333

...and so the scoring began in the 20th minute courtesy of a woefully underhit backpass that trickled to a halt like a train faced with a forthcoming six foot snow-drift. Warren McBean ran off with this gift of a free ball, like a kid whose just found a Tesco bag full of well thumbed copies of Razzle in the woods behind their house, and rounded Nathan Ashmore to score.

Then, on 35 minutes, our young centre-half Sam Pearce met a cross with a solid instep to fire a quality shot firmly into the top corner. Sadly, it was a Chelmsford cross. So, there we were barely half an hour into a literally must-win game against a team already assured of a play-off place and, therefore, probably quite good, down to the tune of two goals, both of which we had, essentially, scored for them.

It was at this point that I and some of my terrace chums turned to each other and began discussing all the reasons being in the Conference National would have been dreadful and why the Conference South is great. The kind of thing you don’t do when you feel the day is going to go your way. One resigned retort to a little bit of ‘you never know’-style geeing up was “yeah, but we needed a miracle in the other games and now we need one in this game.” Within a minute of all this, one of those wished for miracles began.



And it began with a pretty phenomenal kinda goal. Wes Fogden, who has made our Player of the Month award so empathically his territory in the past few months that one imagines he must have repeatedly urinated on it, lobbed Chelmsford keeper Ashley Harrison from a fair old distance. Beautifully pitched, it was as easy on the eye as a view across a lush green valley.

At this point the belief started to surge but so did the knowledge that the way of the scores elsewhere meant that even if we were to win that we couldn’t afford to win by just one goal, and thus went in at half time with still three to score. Impossible against a side such as Chelmsford, surely?

Thankfully the kind of turbo charge that has rocketed our vaguely implausible run to play-off contention from the drab environs of Nowhereville was still in our boots as we came out for the second half. Only seven minutes had elapsed before we were awarded a penalty. Needless to say it was Wes Fogden who was tripped to win it; this passage of events is as much tradition for us as a Turkey dinner at Christmas.

As I’ve said before, Wes is a kind of penalty-award soothsayer, putting himself about in bad tackle country and drawing out the nasties like a tighly bound wound dressing. It probably helps that when defenders legs come near, Wes’ evasive gait is much like that of those thin wooden puppets that don’t really have knee and elbow joints. As such, when he is felled, he goes down as though his strings have been cut, ending up on the floor looking like a pile of sticks blown over by a stiff breeze.

Manny Williams stepped up to take the kick and not being in great form, one no longer feels that confident when he does so. Yet the trick for me was just to stand at ground level behind the goal and just stare at the ball. After that, I just knew it was going in and Manny pushed it beautifully into the bottom corner.

Level pegging then but not enough for us. As such, you can imagine the celebrations were much louder when, just three minutes later, an Ian Simpemba header from a corner bounced slowly inside of the far post. An astonishing turnaround.

Yet still, not necessarily enough. So another penalty helped with that. This time Mustafa Tiryaki was brought down as he attempted to round the keeper. Again Manny went to the keeper’s left but further up this time, curled beautifully inside the post which would have left the keeper with no chance even if he’d somehow manage to replace his gloves with a set of Kenny-Everett-Let’s-Bomb-Russia oversize hands.

However, even this wasn’t the end of it with young Wesley scoring another goal, tucking in a cross at the back post to make it five. Yet try as we might we couldn’t score the main goal we needed i.e. the one for St Albans City at Bath. We knew Woking would win, given they were home to stricken Weymouth, and assumed correctly that Braintree would lose to champions Newport County so Bath’s was our pivotal result. 0-0 was all they needed, was what they got, and our magnificent final few weeks was all, in the being-in-the-play-offs respect, in vain.

We finish sixth, one place and one single point outside the need for further football this season.

Disappointed though? Not a bit of it. There has been time enough for that this season, I fully intend to bask in the glow of a garish, outlandish run of winning form, in the anarchy of 21 goals in six April games and in the eccentricity of a season that refused to fizzle out.

Further words on the season as a whole will follow next week.

Final league table

Meanwhile...

As a result of signing up to attend a conference for NHS librarians in Manchester, I took the opportunity to pop up the night before and make the most of my return to the fabulous North. Part of that included a Caribou show at the delightful Deaf Institute venue. A review and a piccy can be seen at Vanity Project.

Maidenhead United 0 Havant & Waterlooville 2

17apr10
Conference South
York Road, Maidenhead
att. 336

After the flash-bang-wallop-what-a-picture nature of our previous two fixtures, this game was much more attritional; like trench warfare, only without much in the way of the warfare. Personally, despite Maidenhead having a couple of good chances in the first half, one saved magnificently by our reserve keeper Nathan Ashmore, I was never particularly worried that we’d falter.

However it took until the second half to settle ourselves properly with a goal. Merely two minutes into the second half, Manny Williams, despite being clearly unfit, got himself to the by-line and sand-wedged a sublime cross across the box where Stevie Walker met it with a header that looped slowly into the top corner like a balloon in a balmy breeze.



It wasn’t until injury time that we made absolutely certain of the points, Mustafa Tiryaki getting his foot over the ball beautifully to hammer home a shot that could just have easily ended up miles out of the ground. Muz proceeded to bury himself within the bosom of our fans which was probably not the best move given that he was already on a booking. Thankfully the referee was not in killjoy letter-of-the-law form.

Four wins on the bounce then with fifteen goals scored and only one conceded. We are holding up our side of the bargain in terms of an improbable late dash to the play-offs, certainly. Our players could have only done more to advance the possibility in the last fortnight had they treated the squads of Woking, Staines Town, Braintree Town and Bath City to two seriously large Friday nights of expert drinking while sticking to the R Whites themselves.

Unfortunately though, similar can be said for nearly all of our rivals. Four team names (in addition to our greedy two) highlight the fact that there are a hundred million variables involved in the race for the final two unconfirmed berths in the end of season extras. Indeed, this piece is likely to use the word ‘if’ so much I’ll be forced to give a partial writing credit to Rudyard Kipling.

So, here goes. If Bath City and Staines win their games in hand on Tuesday evening, we would need Bath and Braintree to lose next weekend, and hope that Staines and Woking draw their games or worse.

If Bath and Staines lose in midweek, and Braintree lose next Saturday, we would need one of Bath or Woking to not win next weekend and then we would join the one which did.

There are goal difference issues, but I won’t bore you with them. Our +14 in the last four games has to a large extent neutralised what was a substantial deficit anyhow.

Yet, the only factor I’ve not mentioned thus far is that we need to do our bit too. In these scenarios above we, of course, need to win. No cakewalk either. We would need to beat Chelmsford (in 2nd) who are assured of a play-off spot. However if they lose to us and Dover (in 3rd) win, they would forfeit home advantage in the play-off final if both they and Dover were to qualify for it from their respective semi’s. As such, we cannot rely on them resting the first team and fielding their under-12’s.

In theory we could end up in the play-offs with only a draw if, and this is beyond credulity of course, Woking lose their final game, if Bath lose both their final games and if Staines do not win either of their final two games.

Still to be in a position to talk this way with just one game to play is something we would not have even thought credible at Christmas. So I am grateful for the little bit of excitement it has brought to our lives, a little tension that was not the type we had expected in the deep midwinter when the relegation zone was sniffing at our ankles like a dog desperately running out of latrine options.

Whatever happens it should make for a great atmosphere at West Leigh Park next Saturday and our players are clearly up for doing their bit. Hopefully there are four teams out there in the Conference South who can make like an amnesia-afflicted milkman, when it comes to locating their bottle.

Current league table

Previously, from York Road
11feb06: Maidenhead United 3 Havant & Waterlooville 1

Havant & Waterlooville 6 Weston-super-Mare 0

13apr10
Conference South
Westleigh Park, Havant
att. 796

“and you may find yourself in another part of the world”
- Talking Heads, Once In A Lifetime

You may ask yourself, how did we get here? Right amongst an exciting end-of-season play-off-chasing run-in, despite the fact we managed only one league win in the four month period between mid-September and mid-January. We’re taking the New Labour route to vanquishing murky memories of discontented winters, clearly.

You may ask yourself, how did we work this? A team that spent six months after Manny Williams initial net-thwack fury looking more than a little gun shy, now with 13 goals in three games. Given that goal difference may well be a factor come the end of the campaign next week, we’re certainly doing our level best to catch up the pace.

And you may ask yourself, was this our beautiful ground, playing witness to the long since crowned runaway champions Newport County being torn violently asunder this past Saturday? Well, you won’t be able to ask me about it as, sadly, I wasn’t feeling up to the journey home, so missed the whole thing. Needless to say the knowledge that I’d missed an emphatic 4-0 win against the best team in our league did little to bring me out from under the weather on Saturday evening. I could have delighted in the result in the context of the season of course, but I can be a curmudgeonly and self-pitying swine when not in the rudest of health.



Still, if anything is going to make you feel better about missing a 4-0 home win, it’s turning out at a 6-0 home win but three days later. While Weston-super-Mare may be dreadful and already relegated (barring their usual end-of-season saviour that has been clubs failing their ground grading or merely retreating and regrouping to the lower ranks), they showed us at their place only three weekends ago that they can be rather awkward even if they aren't very good. Indeed, their recent form, whilst short on points, has also been light on thrashings. A team not to be taken lightly then and cautionary notices were posted on our forum prior to the game. Rightly so, now is not the time to strut around with honking hubris, there’s still plenty of work to do.

As such, a third minute opener was in ideal settler. Mustafa Tiryaki’s recent form has been astonishing to the point of being a kind of matching book-end to Super Manny’s opening month. After his hat-trick against Weymouth, and two red hot strikes against the marauding Welsh, it was our Turkish terrorizer who kicked over the first domino by powering through the Weston’s defence and firing under Kevin Sawyer’s hefty trunk (and comparatively titchy head) as the keeper thundered to the turf with an already exhausted air of lumbering futility.

Twelve minutes later, centre half Ian Simpemba fancied himself as a bit of a Paulo Di Canio figure (minus the fascism, of course) with an immaculate striker’s finish, crashing home from close range with a scissor volley.

Just after the half hour, Wes Fogden was felled in the penalty area. It’s always Wes, isn’t it? He goes down in the box so often, I am constantly fighting the urge for a filthy simile. This is not to call Wes a cheat or owt; it just appears that clumsy tackling appears drawn to him like calves to the udder. Despite the fact that he appears to have been carrying an injury for some time and his form has suffered as a result, Manny took on the responsibility, and sent Sawyer the wrong way.

Wes, as you might expect from someone who had been presented with his third player of the month award in a row prior to kick-off, was playing exceptionally well and fortune favours the err.. good. His goal just prior to half-time would probably be chalked up as an own goal if televised as the deflection off a defender’s leg was so wicked it came with its own pointy hat and broomstick.

His second, and our fifth, after 54 minutes was much more the product of good work than good luck though. Having drawn Sawyer towards him, the sack-a-potatoes custodian was stranded as the ball bobbled loose. Muzzy Tiryaki threaded the ball back to Wes, who was able to relatively calmly walk the ball in.

In all honesty we could have had loads more goals, with Manny Williams and Stevie Walker squandering great chances. Both can be let off though, what with Manny’s penalty and the fact it was Stevie who scored our sixth and final, neatly tucking in a rebound to depress Sawyer even further.

So, there we have it, a six goal haul for the Hawks and we’ve not had hundreds of them in the league. In our twelve seasons, there have been only five. A 6-4 away win at Fleet in our first merged and promotion winning season; a 6-0 thumping of Burton Albion in 1999; 6-2 against Folkestone Invicta in 2003; the same result away at, titter, Eastleigh in 2006 and finally another 6-0 against Hayes in 2007. Of course, there was absolutely no real point to me listing all of those, but it was too good an excuse to remind the world of the times we put 6 past our rancid local rivals and also against a club now plying their trade in the Football League, who were managed by current Championship gaffer Nigel Clough at the time.

Those were some good times, and so is the right here and now. All of a sudden it does NOT feel the same as it ever was, or at least as it’s been for the last two campaigns. This is a thrilling ride, and even if it ends being an ultimately fruitless effort (those snookers still being required in addition, probably, to the full remaining six points), this genuinely does feel, although I am now conditioned to say this with hesitation, that this has been a proper corner turned by this football club.

Current league table

More therapeutics

Flagged up the new Therapy? live review last week of course but rummaging around some old gear at my parents gaff at the weekend, I found the article I had written about them for the Portsmouth Uni SU mag where I was once music editor. The piece was in the March 1998 edition.

As such, I've re-published it as a companion piece. It can be found in full-text and PDF format at the Vanity Project site.

Havant & Waterlooville 3 Weymouth 1

05apr10
Conference South
West Leigh Park, Havant
att. 820

If you were asked to name the vital ingredients for success in a team making up for lost time in a late dash for the play-offs, you might throw in phrases like ‘unity’, ‘team-spirit’ and ‘collective will’. All good, chest-out, ‘there’ll-always-be-an-England’ kinda stuff.

A concept you might leave aside is one involving yer goalkeeper sticking his fist within a five inch radius of a team-mate’s schnoz. You would be even more likely to leave it aside if this fantastical scenario were to theoretically occur actually on the pitch actually during the course of a game. The training ground you can let slide, to a certain extent; out of sight of the fans, out of the mind of the fans; boys-will-be-boys, and so on. Yet, despite John Hartson trying to teach us, a few years ago, that nothing breaks up interpersonal tension like a heavy toe-end upside the chin, it is not exactly what supporters want to see from their team.

Colour us fourteen shades of dismayed then that it turns out our goalkeeper Aaron Howe’s guidebook to team morale apparently includes a step-by-step set of photographs detailing how to cram your knuckles into the confines of your centre-half’s startled mush.

So, anyway, that was our 1-1 draw away at Basingstoke on Easter Saturday. It was as though one of our supporters had offered up a prayer to their deity, asking “if we’re not going to make the play-offs Lord, I beg of you, show us a sign.” Assuming this was God’s response, you have to admire His creativity, and not just for the Universe and that.

Flippant as I might be about it, it is embarrassing and, needless to say, it was Nathan Ashmore who found himself between our sticks for this game against Weymouth. Aaron will apparently face the shadowy cabal that is the H&W disciplinary committee later this week with early conjecture suggesting that a single black ball in the hat will mean he has to paint the stand in the close-season, whilst two would see him tarred, feathered and displayed in our car park as a warning to others.



Anyway, this forehead-slapping sideshow aside, we had a game against some old rivals to look forward to. Mind you, games against Weymouth aren’t quite the turbulent epics they once were (see my reportage for our away fixture at the Wessex Stadium for further details of those), not now they are plummeting through the divisions like a cannonball down a laundry chute. So rapid is their descent one wonders if they are now dispensing with the pretence of being a football club and concentrating on skeleton bob and luge. As a result where once they brought at least a hundred fans with them today their showing barely reached double figures.

You can hardly blame them though as they came to West Leigh Park an already relegated side, and an exceedingly young side at that. The keeper Michael Neish appeared to be so pre-pubescent that he may well have arrived at the ground on a BMX having come straight from a local heath where he’d spent most of the morning poking the carcass of a dead rat with a stick. Perhaps it was the trauma of this that caused his severe problems with kicking and collecting crosses.

To be fair to him though, he did make several at-feet and at-stretch interventions as, like at Weston-super-Mare, we treated the stricken and demotion-haunted with kid gloves whilst they were ripe for a mullering; particularly as Weymouth largely shot themselves in the foot for both of our first half goals.

In the sixth minute, panic in the Weymouth defence caused Cameron Mawer to attempt an impossible back-pass that Neish didn’t have time to do anything else but collect with his hands. As such we were awarded an indirect free-kick inside the box at about a 40° angle. Given the charge down from what was less than 10 yards, it was very much to Mustafa Tiryaki’s credit that he launched a shot from Ian Selley’s soft tap that zipped past the outside of the wall and yet still remained on target, bruising the far top corner of the net.

After that we dominated possession and territory, yet squandered all of our good work, until a minute prior to the interval. Breaking free, Wes Fogden caused the keeper to commit early and as they tangled up in each other like the shoelaces of the bullied, the ball bobbled to Muzzy who was faced with a gaping goal and no defensive pressure. Thankfully rather than an attempt a grandstanding drop-goal type thwack, he pushed the ball firmly in as though sinking a long putt from the edge of the green.

Weymouth headed in their goal a minute after the re-start causing the sunlit calm of the hitherto Easter Monday stroll-in-the-park to be suddenly sucked in by 800 swiftly inhaling bum-holes. The small collective of Muff mentalists got all excited but it never really felt like they had a second goal in them. That said, we always know that we have a potential howler in us.

As such, it was a great relief when Muzzy Tiryaki completed both the win and his hat-trick with another scorching shot, this time from just to the side of the ‘D’. Muz has put in several good shifts lately and it was great that his hard work was rewarded here with goals and lots of ‘em as he probably hasn’t scored as many as we would have liked, at least in the league. That said, it was his second hat-trick of the season, although his first came in a Hampshire Senior Cup gimmee at Hythe and Dibden.

So, as such, how it stands is this. It’s all the fours. Four games to go. Four points from the play-offs, and four teams between us and Staines in that final berth. To my mind, there are too many variables in there to contend with, but you never know. The late charge continues this Saturday when we go from the ridiculous to the sublime, as long-crowned champions Newport County visit.

They have lost two games in thirty eight. If we can make that three in thirty nine then, well, the adrenaline really will be pumping and we’ll have given ourselves one hell of a chance.

Previously, on dubSteps:
31aug09: Weymouth 0 Havant & Waterlooville 1

Ba-da-bada-da, Ba-da-bada-da...

A new review of an old favourite. The second of three intimate nights for Northern Ireland's finest alt.rock veterans Therapy? at the King's Cross Water Rats Theatre is discussed over at the Vanity Project site.