PROGRAMMES FROM THE PAST

We’re coming to the end of March and I’m going to talk about a couple of games we played in the past on more or less the same date as today’s 2023 game. The programme that we issued for those games in the past will be helping me.

We start with East Grinstead v Sidley on Saturday 25 March 2005 in division one of the Sussex County League. Rather oddly the game kicked off at mid-day – because England were playing Northern Ireland in a World Cup qualifying match at 3pm. We thought that all those coming to watch us playing would like to stay behind and watch the England match in the comfort of our clubhouse – and maybe buy a drink or two as well!

We were having a bad season – more detail later – and needed every point we could get to improve our position. So, a 0-0 draw on the previous Tuesday evening at home to Ringmer from the top half of the league was sort of OK, though a couple of other teams at the wrong end of the league had won on that evening.

We had already played Sidley twice with a 2-2 drawn league match down in Sidley in October (goals from Chris Arrow and Ben Brockbank) and a league cup 2-1 defeat after extra time here at East Court in January (Kris Trevor scoring).

Here’s more detail of that bad season we were having. The league table shows us in 19th place (out of 20 teams) with Sidley only a couple of places (and four points) above us. But we did ourselves a lot of good with a 2-0 win with goals from Aaron Zimmatore and from our 2023 manager Drew Cooney.

And England won that World Cup match 4-0 with all the goals – Joe Cole, Michael Owen, Frank Lampard and an Irish own goal – coming in the second half.

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Moving on now to East Grinstead v Hassocks on Saturday 24 March 2012 in division one of the County League. Richard Tramontin’s notes tell us that that our season is coming to an end rather earlier than normal – after the Hassocks match we had just one home game and 2 away games left.

Manager Simon Funnell talks warmly about the team’s two most recent games – a 3-2 win at home to Ringmer (goals from Ben Chick, Tony Reid and Ben Chick again) followed by a 1-1 draw down in Pagham against one of the better teams in the league (Aaron Watson scoring). Both of these games also get full match reports.

We also get a page looking at past games against Hassocks under the heading “Wasps have never beaten Hassocks at home in a division one match.” The matches recalled are those from February 2010 and September 2004 – both of which ended 0-0. In the 2010 game the last kick of the game saw a Hassocks shot hit the underside of the bar and, according to the ref and the linesman, it bounced down on the line. Or was it really over the line?

Let’s look at the league table. We were in 10th place with Hassocks having a good season in fifth place. We had however won the away league match way back in early September 2-1 (Tom Lyons and John Paul Collier scoring) though they had beaten us 2-0 in the RUR Charity Cup in November. And here at East Court we made it a second league success with a 3-0 win – Dave Gellatly, Tony Reid and Ben Chick scoring the goals.

If you’ve had your memories jogged by this piece then I’d be happy to hear from you at lestermedcalf@btinternet.com