Tonight, at PPL Park in Chester, PA at 6 P.M., the Philadelphia Union's staff will host a
'visiting' squad made up of members of the Sons of Ben, the team's supporters group.
Last year the Sons of Ben fell 2-1 to the Union staff team after current interim head coach John
Hackworth, who was the assistant coach under Peter Nowak in 2011.
The River Cup will take place tonight at 6:30 pm at PPL Park. Tickets are being sold at the
stadium for $10, all of which goes towards Chester City United. Parking in Lot B is free and there
will be no shuttles from the train stations, so driving is the best option.
Here's our list of predictions for the first annual River Cup between the Sons of Ben and
Philadelphia Union staff (feel free to create odds on these if you'd like):
Piotr Nowak will welcome Sons of Ben goalkeeper Dave Flagler to PPL Park by curling a ball
upper-90 on a freekick.
As Friday beckons, the Philadelphia Union and the Sons of Ben continue to promote their charity
match at PPL Park. The two sides held a press conference to bring more attention to the first
annual River Cup, which will help provide funding for local youth club Chester City United.
Union CEO Nick Sakiewicz and Sons of Ben President Matt Ansbro sat at a table and went over the
details of the game, before delving into some light hearted back-and-forth smack talk.
The trash talking Sons of Ben team learned on Thursday who they will face on the pitch when they
meet the Union's front office squad in the inaugural River Cup charity game at PPL Park on July
15.
Among those appearing for the front office will be, from the coaching staff, Peter Nowak, John
Hackworth, Rob Vartughian and Brendan Burke.
As the July 15th River Cup gets closer, the Sons of Ben team is gaining confidence. A match
versus the Philadelphia Union front office will be the first time the two sides face on another on
the pitch.
The idea was innocuous enough; the Union front office team playing a friendly match versus the
official supporters group team to raise money for the local youth soccer club, Chester City United
Soccer Club.
The Sons of Ben and Philadelphia Union jointly announced today that the Union's staff and
members of the Sons of Ben will play against one another in the inaugural 'River Cup,' on July 15
at 6:30 pm.
Tickets will sell for $10, with all of the proceeds from the ticket sales going to benefit
Chester City United.
Having been elected into the Football League in 1978 and spending the next quarter of a century
in the bottom two divisions, finding inclusions for Wigan Athletics turn on our Match Of The Past
series hasn't necessarily been easy. However, we have managed to find six matches from the years
between 1982 and 1997 for you this evening, starting off with their last home match from the
1981/82 promotion season, when the cameras of Granada Television (and a young Martin Tyler) were
persuaded to Springfield Park for a match against Mansfield Town, and next up is a trip to Wembley
from 1985, as Wigan take on Brentford in front of a crowd of almost 40,000 people in the final of
the Football League Trophy.
With the club season completed with Swansea City's victory in the Championship Play-Off final,
and only a handful of European Championship qualifiers to go on the continent this evening, the
focus for football over the next few weeks will be off the pitch. And, while the majority of news
may come from the fallout of the FA v FIFA crisis, as well as the comings and goings of the
transfer market, the most important fixtures of the next month will not be anything to do with Sepp
Blatter, nor will they be the European Under 21 Championships or any of the opening games in the
Women's World Cup – in fact, these fixtures may not get any sort of coverage whatsoever, and
certainly will not be televised.
End of season title deciders in non-league football have a tendency to bring out vastly inflated
crowds which hint at the potential of a club were it to be playing at a higher level, and this
weekend was no exception with a crowd of 5,009 people turning out at The Exacta Stadium in
Chester to see Chester FC draw 1-1 with Northwich Victoria to lift the Premier Division title in
the Northern Premier League.
It's a familiar enough scene to anybody that has ever been to the movies. The bad guy gets shot,
and some soothing music is played but, just as the audience settles down after the previous few
minutes of tension, the music cranks up a notch and what we thought was his lifeless hand grips the
handle of his gun again.
This week's non-league videos of the week features four matches from the Second Round of the FA
Trophy. With only thirty-two teams left in the competition at this stage, the scent of a Wembley
final is starting to drift into the air, and our four matches tonight feature twenty-five goals.
First up is a match between two clubs that are owned by their supporters, as Ebbsfleet United of
the Blue Square Premier play Chester of the Northern Premier League.
The Premier League is again a case of totting up balance sheets. The Championship's glorious
unpredictability is gradually being eroded by the distorting effects of parachute payments. The
most important aspect of Leagues One and Two could again be those dreaded asterixes against points
totals which don't add up to games won or drawn.
July, some say, is a little too early for the football season to start. The new season lumbers
to life each year likein the manner of a bear awakening from hibernation. We don't merely leap to
life, ready to jump into another year of those twin false gods of hope and despair, though. We have
to be spoonfed our addiction, as if on a drip and we have to be cajoled back into action.
It's starting to become known as The Vaughan Effect, and it's a very modern phenomenon. Whenever
any mention is made of the slightest possibility the involvement of either of the Stephen Vaughans
getting involved in a football club, there is a reflex reaction from the supporters of the club
concerned and from various social media outlets, and this time the club with which this most dread
of names has been associated with is Stockport County.
Was it really two years ago? I am in the middle of rebuilding this site for a summer
relaunch, and some of the new pages that will be available will be covering various running themes
that we have gone into over the course of the last five years or so. I thought that I may as well
put these up as posts as well, so that you can trace back some of longer running sagas.
That it wasn't a great surprise doesn't mean that it wasn't a disappointment. Geoff Moss, the
owner of Wrexham FC, had the chance to do the right thing just the once before handing over
ownership of the club to someone else, and he couldn't even manage to do that in the form of
handing ownership of the club to the Wrexham Supporters Trust, preferring instead to hand it over
to a group of individuals with no prior interest in Wrexham FC, one of whom is also banned from
acting as a company director until 2018 and was as recently as the end of last year was struck off
the Solicitors Roll as well.
We have a lot of videos to get through for this week's non-league videos of the week, as the
non-league season comes to an end and the end of season play-offs begin. First up, comes a match
from the race for the play-off places in the Blue Square South. With Braintree Town already
promoted to the Blue Square Premier as champions of the division, most eyes on the last day of the
season turned to the question of who will be joining them.
The end of the domestic football season can perhaps be best summarised as a full sensory
overload. It's an intoxicating mixture of the stifling warmth of the spring, mixed with
stomach-wrenching nervousness and the occasional feeling, or realisation, that something, or rather
something else, is happening elsewhere.
With the AGM Cup looking set to decide the non-league pyramid's final placings once again,
Jenni Silver looks at some of this year's possible contenders.
It should be the most exciting time of the season, promotions, play-offs and relegation
dog-fights, the glorious month which ends the football season.
Revenge, it is said, is a dish best served cold and, while the imprisonment of Stephen Vaughan
for fifteen months at the North Liverpool Community Justice Centre yesterday was an incident
unrelated to his involvement in football, there may be some people in Chester that will regard this
sentence as some degree of providence, held over for what he did to their club.
On a Saturday afternoon, it usually takes quite something to draw attention away from what has
happened on the pitch. At Wrexham, however, the truth is proving to be stranger than fiction and so
it was that on Saturday even a 7-2 home defeat at home against mid-table Gateshead was overshadowed
by a protest the likes of which The Racecourse Ground has seldom seen before.
He's back, and it's almost if he never went away. The return of Stephen Vaughan onto our radar
would be funny, if it weren't for the fact that his involvement in anything to do with football
(or, indeed, rugby league) wasn't such a portent of doom for those likely to be on the receiving
end of him.
Ahead of this weekend's FA Cup games, we thought it only right to bring you just a teeny weeny
taste of the 'Magic of the Cupâ„¢' courtesy of one Wayne Hatswell, a name that will live long in
the memory (possibly) a man who, in one moment of pure unadulterated technical incompetence,
smashed home arguably the worst own-goal ever.
After weeks of trialists, it seems that Graham Westley has finally found his man. Chris Holroyd
is the striker that the Boro boss hopes will be able to fire the Conference champions back up the
League 2 table. The Argus reports that Holroyd is set to sign for Stevenage on a 3 month loan deal
and that it should be finalised by Thursday evening.
The Union have won the $50,000 Pepsi Refresh Grant for the Chester City United soccer
organization. The money will be used to build a full-sized grass soccer field for the Chester
Upland School District. The award was determined based upon fan voting so, if you took the few
seconds took to vote, give yourself a pat on the back—you did good.
At The Exacta Stadium yesterday afternoon, a crowd of 2,689 people saw Chester play out a goalless draw against Brackley Town in the Blue Square Bet North. It was a result that left the club seventeen points clear at the top of the table with a third of the season left to play, albeit with second-placed Guiseley having five games in hand on them.
Football and fiction have not always made for the happiest of bedfellows. Perhaps there is
something about the pure drama of every aspect of the game which results in the budding football
fiction writer, perhaps, feeling the need to stretch the limits of their imagination beyond the
credible. How, we might well ask, can a fiction writer come up with a story that remains plausible
whilst paying lip service to both the sheer ridiculousness and complete mundanity of modern
football?
There are several clubs which will turn up more than once on this list, and one of those is
Chester City FC. The story of this particular clubs last twenty years is one that could fill a book
on its own, but its demise can largely be traced to the activities of three men. One, Stephen
Vaughan, is unlikely to openly become involved in the running of a football club after being banned
under the FAs Fit & Proper Persons rules, from being involved in the directorship of any business
at the end of 2009.
After looking at the number of doubles (one side winning both league fixtures between the two
clubs) that the South Wales derby has produced in history (0), I thought it would be interesting to
cover the other derbies in the Football Pyramid to see how many doubles they have accrued over
time.
A few interesting points from the results:
Arsenal and Manchester United have managed 14 doubles over their rivals, more than any other
derby.
