Scrappy But Very Happy: Dover 1-0 Weston-Super-Mare

You can't beat a good old last minute winner, can you? A 93rd minute strike from a rejuvanated Barry Cogan ensured the Whites picked up all 3 points in a dour game at Crabble, against a cynical Weston side intent on time-wasting and hoofing their way to a 0-0 draw. Fortunately they eventually came unstuck, but it was not a very impressive Dover performance in the piss-poor weather conditions.

With this being our fourth Saturday home game on the bounce it means that yet again there is nothing particularly interesting that I can report. These blogs are indeed fastly becoming predictable and dull. "Went to the Old Endeavour early with Champ and Fish, drunk a lot of pints of stella, got fairly pissed which means that I am unable to recall chunks of the game, drunk a few more beers after the game then managed to stumble my way back to Herne Bay for work in the morning". And that is pretty much entirely what happened again.

Well me and Champ decided for the second week running to get to the Old E for an early start. Then we picked up our dear friend Fish and got to the Endeavour at the ridiculously early time of 10:24AM. But with all 3 of us having not drunk anything the night before it enabled the beer to flow down well even at that time. I've gained a reputation from fellow Dover fans for being a piss-head/alcoholic but I very rarely drink that much outside of Saturdays/Match-Days so its a bit unjust sometimes. Binge-drinker is the correct term to be applied with me! In fact I'd say I drink less than quite a lot of other people my age, it's just that most of my drinking gets consumed on match-days.

The pre-match shenanaghans at the pub were as subdued as I had predicted. It seemed to take forever for the next Dover fan to arrive which would eventually be good old Paul Eades, still going strong in his late eighties. Fair play to him.
Other than him though there were very few others that joined us, other than the pleasant company of Andy Lucey, Jared, Mark Winter and a few others. A combination of piss-poor weather and the lack of excitement at playing yet another home game, this one against a small club that would only bring 3 fans to Crabble, were probably the main contributers to the lack of numbers
So by the time we departed in our taxi to Crabble around half 2 (Yes we're lazy buggers!), my mood and excitement for the impending game wasn't particularly bouyant.

My first Crabble Burger in about 4 or 5 years slightly lifted the spirits. At £4.20 it was slightly expensive but being as succulent, tasty and greasy as it was, it was worth every penny of my random decision.

I made my way onto the River End just prior to kick-off where a minute silence was observed for the recently departed Barry Fletcher, who sadly lost his life on Friday afternoon. Barry was an absolutely lovely bloke, a real character and one who will be sorely missed on Crabble matchdays. This has been a terrible year for us with us losing so many of our loved supporters and Barry unfortunately joins a list of people that you couldn't say a bad word against that we have now lost. R.I.P Barry, its always the best ones that get taken away from us prematurely.

The Weston players nobbishly decided that they would switch ends before kicking-off after winning the toss, which meant that we had to move around to the Town End. And after that nuisance hinderance we would have to witness a very dull half of football. Donovan Simmonds made his much-needed return to the side after injury which meant George Purcell went out to the left-wing, where he struggled to make an impact in the entire game. Phil Starkey slotted in for Shane Huke at right-back who began his 3 match suspension.

Did anything noteworthy happen in the entire first half? I can remember a couple of glancing headers which didn't trouble their time-wasting goalkeeper, then I can remember an audacious bicycle kick from James Walker which flew over the bar. Other than that though, I need to see the impending match highlights to see if I have forgotten anything of interest. Some bloke from the forum filmed the game and should make them available online soon, which is positive stuff. Hopefully he can do it on a more regular basis.
But we barely got a grip on the game and struggled in the wet and windy conditions, with Redwood and Purcell being particularly ineffective on the wings.

The second half continued in the same vein as the first - chances were very few and far between. Purcell saw an early effort fizz past the post but it would be a while until we saw meaningful shot on target, when Tom Wynter, deputizing as captain, saw his long range effort well saved by their keeper, so the search for his first goal in DAFC colours continues.

One of the more entertaining moments of the first half was a mass brawl that occured near the Centre Spot. Well I use the term 'brawl' but it was more like handbags as you see at most football games. Lots of flapping arms in the air and lots of shoving but unfortunately no proper punches connecting. The only end result was a couple of yellow cards that were dished out. Shame.

We spent most of the second half huffing and puffing for a winner but a lack of end product in the final third combined with their shameless time-wasting antics made it seem like we would all be going home dissapointed.

Then came the 93rd minute. Harry Baker passed the ball down the right flank which found Southam in space. He cut the ball back into the ball into the path of an on-rushing Barry Cogan who duel fired the ball into the bottom. Bang! Cue pandemonium in the sparsely populated River End for the wildest celebrations of the season. You cannot beat moments like those. Everybody just loses their inabitions and just frantically jump, run, cuddle, kiss and push one another in that single moment. I think my Dad took the brunt of most of my excitement! Theres not a sweeter moment than those 30 seconds following those important goals - those are the moments that make all that time, effort and money religiously following a football team worthwhile.

The next few minutes saw Weston's goalkeeper comically rushing all over the place, having spent the previous 93 minutes taking the piss over how long he would take on a goal-kick. Then the final whistle went. Cue joy, relief and a feeling of justice finally breaking down a Weston side totally devoid of any ambition to win the game. It wasn't particularly a good performance but we did obtain the all-important 3 points and I went into the centre-spot happier than I have been after any game this season. Woohoo!

The crowd, as I had expected, was very dissapointing at 725. We have a new manager, new hopes and renewed prospects for the season yet we're still struggling to get people through the turnstiles. Why? Obviously playing our fourth consecutive home game on the trot didn't help, neither did the horrible winter conditions. But their can't be too many excuses - this would be considered a poor crowd for us during our ryman south years. When we spoke to Jim after the game he understandably wasn't impressed either. He deserves better for all he has put financially and with the effort he puts in running the club on a daily basis. WE deserve better. Everyone is quick to pat ourselves on the back when we get a big attendance and create a superb atmosphere but we need to be getting more for our bread and butter league games. It can't always just be take, take, take from fans like some people expect.
This isn't a dig at regular supporters as I do understand that not everybody can make every game but overall there isn't enough people from the town getting behind the club.
Poor attendances wind me up and concern me more than it should but that is just my PASHUN filtering through, I want this club to grow and progress instead of settling for mediocrity and i'm sure many of you feel the same.

So with that bared in mind, it was understandable that the atmosphere was shit yet again. It's like fighting a lost cause when its the same 10 or so people singing. Obviously its a personal choice whether people choose to sing or not but that doesn't mean we can't recognize that it has been crap.
While complaints on the forum (which I regret drunkenly replying too) about Champ and others calling people 'wankers' for not joining in our justified, it really isn't as bad as it is being made out. As I said again, the context gets mistaken for being and aggressive one whereas the reality of it is that it is just a rallying cry to just drum up more response. I use equally as bad language to try and get more people to join. Whether or not this is the right way to go about approaching it, its very frustrating for some of us nonetheless.

Right anyway, enough whinging about crowds and atmospheres, they don't win prizes (although they can help). I had a rather enjoyable couple of post-match jars of fosters in the centre spot. One of them came courtesy via Reginald, who has been an absolute star this season. He handed over me £50 (and trusted me not to spend it on beer!) to contribute towards the costs of the two flags I am purchasing, as seen on the Dover forum. If anyone else would like to help burden the costs then that would be much appreciated and you know where to find me (well you can hardly miss me, fat cunt etc).

Inside me and Champ had quite a long conversation with Olly Schulz and his father, who both agreed what a shit, inept manager Martin Hayes is/was. His devoid of passion and communication was the key theme. Champ also vigorously made him promise that they would get revenge on Dartford for us with us still reeling from that awful result. Olly already seemed fired up for the task so hopefully we'll return back from Princess Park with nothing less than 3 points in our back pockets. NO PRESSURE THEN LADS

We eventually tumbled our way down the hill in the pissing rain to meet the others in the Old Endeavour, who had all SHAMELESSLY avoided putting money into the club bar for a few post match beers. Come on guys, I know that the centre spot is a shit venue at the best of times but having one or two in there won't hurt if you're drinking anyway.

I was still going strong in there with the beer flowing down beautifully before the realisation that I had to make my way home soon dawned on me. So I decided to fit in one more drink on the way back in the Admiral Harvey; officially the most grim and dhingy pub in Britain. I beat Jared in the most sloppy, mistake-ridden game of pool in history in a match where neither of us deserved to win.
Then we both bought a whole hot chicken each in Morrisons that was reduced to 99p, where I would devour most of it in Dad's kitchen before abruptly making my way to the station and leaving a lot of mess behind so I would like to spend this sentance to apologise to my father for being a messy son. Sorry pops.

And that concluded another bog standard home game which was made much more enjoyable by the dramatic 3 points.
Fortunately the next few blogs will be slightly more varied with us playing  Maidenhead away tomorrow night, which I am very much looking to, along with Boring Wood away on Saturday via St Albans and hopefully Nottingham after the game (book your fucking tickets Fish).
A bit of research indicates that Maidenhead have not won in the league since early September, which has made me feel dangerously confident ahead of tomorrow evening. Its true that they have played well in the FA Cup including a dicking of Woking a few weeks back, but the FA Cup is a totally different kettle of fish and hopefully they'll be too busy concentrating on their 1st round tie with Aldershot on Saturday.
We will have to improve on Saturday's performance mind you if we want to continue our current decent league form. Fingers crossed my write-up later this week will be full of happy tones.

Saturday 05 Nov 2011
Boreham Wood	2	-	1	Bromley
Bryant (31) Wilkinson (46)			Waldren (76)		231
Dorchester	2	-	1	Basingstoke
Dickenson (15) Martin (52)			Sills (64)		491
Dover	1	-	0	Weston-S-Mare
Cogan (91)					725
Eastleigh	4	-	1	Maidenhead Utd
Slabber (11) Montgomery (23) Slabber (37) Flood (91)			Brown (54)		503
Farnborough	1	-	3	Chelmsford
Connolly (31)			Akurang (02) Ibe (53) Bakare (61)		505
Hampton & Richmond	3	-	1	Eastbourne Borough
Ledgister (48) Tarpey (58) Ledgister (90)			Watson (32)		441
Salisbury	1	-	2	Dartford
Anderson (02)			Wallis (26) Erskine (63)		769
Staines Town	1	-	4	Sutton Utd
Dunne (64)			Griffiths (36) Orilonishe (67) Griffiths (69) Orilonishe (78)		378
Tonbridge Angels	3	-	2	Thurrock
Walder (21) Kinch (86) Boateng (90)			Poole (56) Bowditch (06)		478
Truro City	2	-	3	Welling
Pugh (05 og ) McConnell (90) Hayles (09)			Pires (66) Day (72)		542
Woking	3	-	0	Havant and W
Gray (47) Gray (53) Cowan-Hall (74)					1,655

Pos		Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
1		Woking	16	12	3	1	39	13	26	39
2		Sutton United	15	10	3	2	33	15	18	33
3		Welling United	16	10	3	3	36	22	14	33
4		Dartford	15	10	2	3	32	17	15	32
5		Chelmsford	16	7	7	2	27	15	12	28
6		Basingstoke Town	15	7	5	3	29	20	9	26
7		Dover	15	6	7	2	20	10	10	25
8		Boreham Wood	16	7	3	6	18	21	-3	24
9		Truro City	16	7	1	8	28	31	-3	22
10		Dorchester	18	7	1	10	24	30	-6	22
11		Tonbridge Angels	16	6	3	7	30	33	-3	21
12		Eastbourne Borough	15	6	2	7	29	27	2	20
13		Weston-S-Mare	15	6	2	7	26	27	-1	20
14		Eastleigh	16	6	2	8	19	27	-8	20
15		Salisbury City	15	5	4	6	20	22	-2	19
16		Havant and Waterlooville	16	5	3	8	30	30	0	18
17		Bromley	15	5	3	7	24	28	-4	18
18		Maidenhead United	16	5	3	8	21	33	-12	18
19		Farnborough	16	3	4	9	19	39	-20	13
20		Staines Town	15	2	4	9	15	23	-8	10
21		Hampton & Richmond	15	2	4	9	19	29	-10	10
22		Thurrock	16	2	3	11	14	40	-26	9

The FA Cup Hoodoo Returns: Dover 0-1 Bath

Urgh, three days have passed since we got dumped out of the FA Cup by some lacklustre west country bumpkins and I'm still as fucked off as I was at 4:50PM on Saturday. A very below par Dover performance resulted in our first home defeat of the season and in typical fashion it had to come in the FA Cup, in the final qualifiying round before the chance of meeting some of the big boys.

Seeing as my enthusiasm to write this blog this morning is very dry I'll get any football-related shit out of the way now. And luckily, due to a combination of being pretty pissed  and having been able to erase most of the dour game from my mind, there isn't much I have to reiterate here.

Overall it was just a piss-poor game between a poor Bath side and an under-performing whites side that desperately missed the creative talents of the injured Donovan Simmonds.
We weren't particularly bad in the first half, we enjoyed the majority of the possession but the only real goal threat I remember us producing was a George Purcell cheeky aerial backheel that had to be tipped around the post. Adding to that, we maintained a superb first-half atmosphere in the River End as we looked forward to pushing forwards in the second half.

Unfortunately that FA Cup dream died just a minute within the re-start. I don't remember the build up to the goal, just them hitting the crossbar and then being confused as they stroked in the rebound. The ball looked like it had gone out of play initially.
And that my friends was the end of the game. From then onwards we reverted to shit, long hoofball and struggled to carve out any real chances against a side that were just content to hold on for their first away win on the season. And in the end we could have no real complaints over the scoreline as we went out of the cup without a whimper. Our second half subsitutes that were Baker, Vassell and Ashton failed to make any impact, although in fairness they were not even given much of the ball.

The next stage of this dissapointing defeat was having my fingers crossed that Bath would pull out a shit tie in the draw the following day. I know that is a little bit spiteful and petty but it would have absolutely destroyed me had we missed out on one of the Sheffield clubs or any of the other big football league clubs in the draw.
So I was not devastated when I discovered they had drawn Dagenham & Redbridge away although had we gone through I would have enjoyed that draw. It would have provided a good chance to knock out a league team with them struggling at the foot of League 2 whilst providing a localish ground to get to and to sample their brand new away stand, which is the most impressive part of their ground.
Unfortunately though that will not be the case as we have continued out miserable record of not being able to qualifiying for the first round two years in a row in our history.

One other major concern for me to come out of this game is how we would cope if we got promoted to the Blue Square Premier. With us struggling to get going against the worst that division has to offer, it has made me wonder whether we are ready to re-join the non-league elite. And on that evidence it would be a no. Don't get me wrong I would never turn down the opportunity to get promoted, theres no point supporting a team if you don't want to compete as high as you can. But there should be no desperate rush to get promoted if we're not fully prepared yet.
Of course, the defeat could have just been down to our continous FA Cup hoodoo along with us being jaded after a sterling effort during the week against Bromley. But it does make ya wonder.

Theres not too much to write home about on the social side of things either. We pretty much operated under the same tedious routine that we usually do before home games, although this time we made our way down to the Old Endeavour at 10:30AM instead of the usual Midday. HARDCORE.
Having barely drunken anything on the Friday evening this was fine by me. We spent the first 90 minutes in there sitting outside the back, drinking out drinks very slowly as we patiently waited for happy hour to begin, being the tight bastards that we are. Scotty's young son Dylan provided some entertaining outbursts as most young children do,  although the novelty effect soon wore off and I was pretty relieved when he took him home. I'm not going to make a very good father should the opportunity ever arise. (YEAH RIGHT LIKE I'M EVER GOING TO GET LAID AGAIN HAHA)

Then I became the source of entertainment when it became public knowledge that I had sat down in one of the chairs covered in bird shit. Cue me having to dash off to the toilet to clean my jacket . A bit of deja vu from a few weeks back when one shat on me in mid-air, in the same pub. WHY ALWAYS ME?

Once midday had passed and happy hour had begun the Stella's began to flow down quicker than Michael Barrymore's tears when he realised that he was responsible for Stuart Lubbock's death. There was a lot of quiz-machining going on too, which in my opinion are one of the best pub things to be invented. After a few jars of lager everybody thinks they are Chris off of Eggheads. Not me though.I am very useful when it comes to Match Of The Day football questions (in fact so useful that nobody can touch me, FACT), but other than that the only time I come in handy is on modern history questions. Still, being the annoying, stella-hyped-up twat that I am I kept on interfering on peoples games in the hope that I would randomly get the questions right.

At one point in the afternoon the Old E got overtaken by a coach load of Bath City fans that had stopped off here on the recccomendation of Phil following some advice on the forum. Whilst it was initially humiliating being over-run by carrot crunchers in our own boozer, I did not mind this because it brought in lots of trade for the pub which will enable them to keep down the low prices for us. As well as this, Bath fans are a harmless bunch, a seemingly simple group who certainly live up to the West-Country stereotypes, particularly with their accents. On an aside note, they must have one of the oldest average age supports out there. I think they only had 1 lad who looked under the age of 45, and he was carrying a kit bag!

The next nice suprise to come up was the appearence of RUSSSSSSSSSALLLLLLLL and his annoying lovely girlfriend Bethany. I had suspected that he would want to come back down for this game and thankfully he did make a last minute decision on the Friday to. One only positive to come out of losing this game means that I can now go ahead with plans to stay up in Nottingham with him after the Boreham Wood game in a few weeks which should be a lot of fun, even though I absolutely despise student vermin.

Overall it was a pretty lively and enjoyable pre-match piss-up and I certainly felt the effects of 6 pints of stella more than I did the 10 pints on Tuesday at Bromley. Quite comically and lazily we got a 15 man mini-bus up to the ground at half 2 which enabled us to get a drink in before the game, and for once it was half-busy in there.

Post match things were very rubbish. I was miserable and deflated, which was a mood reflected by most of the Dover fans. Me and Russell slugged out a very slow pint in the centre spot after the game, where he would greet every Dover player as if they were his best mate. He loves sucking up to the players. Then we eventually joined Phil and Co back in the OE where we managed another miserable pint before deciding to piss off home early, mainly due to the encouragement of Bethany who was obviously worn out of being surrounded by these boring non-league football fan types.But I didn't complain - I was severely pissed off still and just wanted to go to bed. So much so that I fell asleep on the train and ended up waking up at Sittingbourne, a stop further than I had intended too, which meant I got home to Herne Bay half an hour later than I should have done. Annoying, yes, but luckily not as far as Bromley South which is where I ended up after a game last season.

So next up for Dover is Weston-Super-Mare on Saturday for yet ANOTHER game at Crabble. Not particularly looking forward to this one, mainly because Weston are a much improved side this season and will provide a stern test for us, but also because we are missing many regulars so I am expecting yet another small crowd. (We got an 'FA Cup crowd' of 922 on Saturday, which looked more over the 1k barrier to me but we're still struggling to get decent league crowds). I know that Phil Smith has fucked off to Tenerife or somewhere on holiday, Alex and Camilla said on twitter that they're not going while Martyn McGarrigle is off to Coventry to see his best mate Jared's ex-girlfriend Sascha, who is now his girlfriend. Add to the that I can't see many of the floating fans who turned up on Saturday being eager to return after such a dismal game.
But the important thing is that we bounce back after a lacklustre display. Now we're out of the cup they're no excuses for poor league form unlike last season, so lets rise back into the play-off places where we belong. COME ON YOU WHITES.