“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you Ted.”
MAIDSTONE UNITED 0 DARTFORD 1
MATCH REPORT BY CHRISTIAN GROSS-MISCONDUCT
Paul Merson once asked George Graham why he was also so lenient with him. Graham’s reply was simple: “If you have a Rolls Royce and it breaks down you fix it. If you have a Morris Minor and it breaks down, you fuck it off.”
Late last night our management, perhaps anticipating the online shitstorm a Kent Senior Cup defeat would generate, decided to “out” three players for Mersonesque punctuality, throwing Ibrahim Olutade, Iffy Allen and Justin Amaluzor under a mode of transport that they’re allegedly perpetually late for.
We can surmise this was an act of last resort. Managers usually like to keep disciplinary issues in house and Hak had avoided the subject during the post match interview, but at some point later that evening, JS2 decided to get the story out there. They’d been seen getting into a car 10 minutes before kick off and one rumour was that they’d been told to go home, although it seems they stayed to watch and spoke to a few curious fans.
No one understood why Olutade in particular hadn’t made the squad, but they’d failed to make the 6:15 arrival time. They live 90 minutes away but as JS2 pointed out, as they don’t work there’s no reason why they shouldn’t leave early to safeguard against delays. It’s less than two years since the Macclesfield fiasco when we were lucky to escape a points deduction, but the difference seems to be that while anyone can get stuck on a motorway once, it can’t keep happening.
This wasn’t a first offence: Big George reportedly stuck his neck out for them to stop them getting fined and he’d obviously been let down. They car share (which is at least environmentally sound), but this means that if one of them’s late they’re all late. The upshot is they may never play for the club again, which, we can further surmise, is a final threat designed to coax a career-turning transformation out of all three of them, rather than a promise.
It doesn’t take a lot for the fan base to lose its shit and its shit was duly lost. It is totally unprofessional unbehaviour and the club is well within its rights to bin them BUT …
Before everyone scrambles for the moral highground and chucks the words “shame” and “disgrace” around like a News Corp subeditor, being late does not make you a bad human being. I mean, it’s not as if they’d done something like this for example. It takes some Arshloch to get yourself in the Mail, the Sun and Kent Online (the holy Trinity of IMNARB journalism) for that and still manage to surface on a forum to deliver a lecture about “common sense” to non-league footballers with punctuality issues the following day. Fair play to Maidstone’s answer to Laurence Fox for managing it.
Some of the more sensible fans who’d made the trip to St Albans said it was genuinely wretched and this probably contributed to the post-match misery, but (sticks tin hat on) this wasn’t actually that bad a performance and there’s no evidence Dartford “wanted it more, Clive,” other than the final scoreline. There was plenty of effort, but the difference was one decent finish, two pivotal refereeing decisions and some admittedly risk-averse play in the final third, all played out in eerily quiet conditions that recalled midweek Kent League games.*
The temperature was zero and the crowd was 337, with maybe 30 from Dartford. It’s amazing how a single individual can completely alter the mood around a club, but the Alex Brooker lookalike was a gobshite at Whitehawk and he’s a gobshite now. Half a dozen of their fans were equally as obnoxious and with no segregation in force they quickly found our own mouth-breathers, with whom they made their own entertainment.
You couldn’t argue with the goal, a curler from the edge of the area that found Lewington’s top corner, just after the half hour mark. You could, however, argue with the incessant shitgibbonry. The players repeatedly tried to Dominic Cummings the referee and King’s mouth flowed like a sewage outflow pipe after a period of heavy rain.
“That’s unacceptable!” he yelled, whenever a decision went against him. “He’s trying to even it up!” he squealed, after a cardworthy tackle. How’s a ref supposed to deal with this? Maybe check to see if there’s an assessor present and if it’s all clear let rip with: “Sit down and shut up you dismal, whingeing CUNT.” Hey, it’s worth a go.
At some point Knight picked up an innocuous yellow card and moments before half-time this came back to haunt him. Akka was wiped out in the area and it looked an absolute Peter Tatchell, but the ref waved play-on and Big George clattered Sheringham as they tried to clear it. All fucking hell broke loose, George was shown a yellow and the atmosphere of outrage may well have been weighing on the ref’s mind moments later, when Knight committed another innocuous foul and was shown a second yellow.
Early in the second half Dartford missed an absolute Rick Witter but from then on I thought the ten men actually edged it, everywhere other than in the Dartford box.
This, admittedly, was something of a problem. Zihni cannot be faulted for effort, he gets absolutely everywhere, tackles like a bastard and runs for the full 96 minutes, but five minutes from time he was clean through after a fuck up at the back. Instead of backing himself to score he tried a pass, which might have worked had he not completely Prince Andrewed it.
At which point someone beneath the Main Stand posed the question: has their keeeepaaaaah actually made a save? And as far as we could remember he hadn’t, a state of affairs that persisted until the final seconds, when Boucaud let rip from 25 yards and he tipped the ball onto the post. If that had gone in and we’d won on penalties we’d have been spared the usual post-defeat bollocks from people who want the manager sacked every time we concede a goal.
But it didn’t and people who weren’t there were queuing up to tell us how shit we were. Did the trio it cost us the tie? Impossible to say, but it doesn’t have to be the end. Alan Walker once dropped Nathan Paul for arriving late at Sporting Bengal but he turned out to be a Rolls Royce. These boys are running out of chances to show they aren’t Morris Minors.
*One of our old Kent League rivals Greenwich Borough announced yesterday they were withdrawing from The Whatever The Fuck They Call It Now League yesterday. They aren’t folding, they just aren’t playing, according to this story on their website. Games against them almost always involved at least one fight, usually on the field, but sometimes off it and occasionally both. This is the same Greenwich Borough to whom we allegedly lost a member of our backroom team a couple of years ago because they offered more money and the same Greenwich Borough that were planning a tilt at the National Leagues in a 6,000 capacity stadium. That would have worked out at approximately 1000 spaces per fan.
