Bumper crowd of 761 for Guisborough Town’s Juniors’ Day Teesside derby

By Bill Perfitt

Guisborough Town attracted a bumper KGV Stadium crowd of 761 on 25 March who witnessed a hugely competitive and very hard-fought Teesside derby between Guisborough Town and Redcar Athletic.

What a wonderful advert this memorable day was for the keenly community-orientated Guisborough Town as the club put on a superb Juniors’ Day spectacle to thrill the Northern League’s second biggest crowd of the day. It was absolutely brilliant to see the KGV terraces and stands thronging with young kids as young as four and five with their proud parents looking on with almost as much excitement as their children!

The fact that Redcar Athletic emerged narrow 1-0 winners to complete a ‘double’ over the Priorymen seemed almost secondary to the superb sight of the KGV Terraces packed five and six deep in places.

However, the final result of a narrow only-goal victory to the aptly-named Steelmen of Redcar was a huge disappointment to Guisborough’s players, management, officials and supporters alike.

A disappointed Guisborough Manager Steve Bell said after the game that he thought his side lacked the superior physicality of their opponents, which he said ultimately swung the game in Redcar’s favour.

“It was a typical end-of-season type of game,” said Steve. “At the end of the match there wasn’t a lot I could have said to my players in terms of what they could and should have done betterapart from the fact that we just weren’t physical enough over the whole 90 minutes.”

The Guisborough boss continued: “There are six or seven games to go to the end of the season and I know there are three or four positions in the team that we need to improve on for next season and I know what we need.

“I’m not making excuses but today we sorely missed the guile, speed and penetration of Jack Blackford and also the all-round energy and aggression that our captain Joey Bartliff brings to the side,” added Steve.

The pre-match build-up to this eagerlyanticipated game held a vast amount of intrigue, not least the fact that Redcar’s four-man coaching team of Gary Forster, Davey Onions, Mark Robinson and Greg Booth were all former Priorymen.

Add to that the fact that Redcar’s starting 11 included no fewer than four ex-Guisborough players in Mason McNeill, Nathan Guru, Brandon ‘Donny’ Holdsworth and Sonni Coleman.

The first half was a rather scrappy affair overall with neither side seriously challenging either of the opposing goalkeepers - and it finished a dour stalemate as the whistle sounded for the interval.

Play continued in a similar vein in the second half with neither side really threatening in their opponents’ penalty areas but in the 62nd minute Redcar finally broke the deadlock.

Winger Anthony Bell whipped over a dangerous-looking clash from the right and the ex-Guisborough striker Sonni Coleman cleverly flicked a header which looped over Guisborough keeper Will Cowey and into the far corner of the net for 1-0 to the Steelmen and that’s the way it stayed to the final whistle.

The Priorymen have had a very mixed bag of results since their superb 3-1 away victory at high-flying Whitley Bay in mid-February.

LATE EQUALISER

They were held to a 3-3 draw at the KGV by Carlisle City who staged an extraordinary comeback from 3-0 down in the second half to grab an unlikely point with a late equaliser.

Following that game came probably what was Guisborough’s most disappointing result of the season when they suffered a shock 2-1 home defeat to local Teesside team South Park Rangers in the North Riding Senior Cup Semifinal. Rangers scored two goals in the last three minutes of normal time to shatter the Priorymen’s hopes of reaching a second successive Senior Cup Final.

Still reeling from that shock KO, Guisborough picked themselves up off the floor and in their next game – the toughest of away trips to titlechasing Ashington – they almost caused an upset until a hotly disputed penalty, which although saved brilliantly by Guisborough ‘keeper Will Cowey, was followed up with a cross which was headed home by Ben Harmison, brother of former England cricketer Steve Harmison.

A video of the ‘penalty’ incident clearly showed that an Ashington player went down in the penalty area without a Guisborough player touching him! Such are the cruel ups and downs of football! You can watch the incident in a clip on Guisborough’s Twitter feed to decide for yourself.

That game was followed by a hard-fought 0-0 draw at home to Whitley Bay but the Priorymen got back to winning ways in their next encounter with Pickering Town at the KGV with impressive recent signing from Wolviston Mikey McGee scoring a fantastic hat-trick inside a devastating eight minute spell in the second half.

That game was followed by the home defeat by Redcar, leaving Guisborough sitting sixth in the table. But for a run of bad long-term injuries to key players like skipper JJ Bartliff and big striker Jason Blackburn, the Priorymen would surely have been mounting a realistic challenge for the title.