Date: Tuesday October 27th 2009
Ground: Brinsford Stadium
Match:Â Wolverhampton Casuals 2 Dudley Sports 2Â HT:Â 2-1 ATT: c45

Additional: Entrance £3, Programme £1.00, Coffee/Tea £0.60

Brinsford Stadium in pictures

This was my first ever West Midlands Regional Premier League game.

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In the olden days, local aldermen and dignitaries would be the people that kept football clubs going. These butchers, bakers and candlestick makers were far from perfect they were often autocratic, completely insular and frequently treated the supporters of their clubs like dirt but, for the most part, they partly ran their clubs for the honour of their local communities.

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It requires some planning, quite a lot of peering of timetables and unintelligible weather forecasts, but we decided to go in the end. The bus chunters up through Kemptown and Hanover, eventually depositing us in the centre of Whitehawk, which feels like the very top of the world. The wind is gusting at sixty to seventy miles per hour and as we walk down to The Enclosed Ground the heavens open and rains falls horizontally, a lacerating experience made all the worse for the creeping suspicion that Whitehawk FC is hiding from us.

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Date: Saturday October 24th 2009
Ground: Bill Stokeld Stadium
Match: Carlton Town 5 Leek Town 2 HT: 2-1 ATT: 97
Gent 26, Ball 38 Jenkins 64p, Whitman 73, 76: Johnson 1, Cope 89
Additional: Entrance £7, Programme £1.50, Coffee/Tea £0.80

Bill Stokeld Stadium in pictures

Leek Town were in need of a win here.

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Weymouth Football Club, one of the ongoing financial basket-cases of the last three years in non-league football, might have finally reached the end of the line. Reports on the BBC this morning confirmed that, with talks with new buyers having collapsed, the club's administrators are planning to wind the club up this morning.

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Q. Where do you see Chester City FC and Steve Vaughan in 5 years time?

A. Chester City in the Championship or even the top flight. As for myself, still chairman unless of course you know something I don't! Are you the VAT man, or the Taxman or maybe even the police?

In October 2004, Stephen Vaughan was interviewed by the independent Chester City website "Blues Mad" and volunteered that answer to a question from a supporter of the club.

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They wait and watch. That's what they do. About three hundred or so of them on either side of you. The older ones seem to be to the right of you, with the younger ones on the left. Watching football in the away end at Millwall is a strange, surreal experience. It starts at South Bermondsey railway station, where you're funneled away from the home supporters and down a long walkway with metal fencing on each side.

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Date: Tuesday October 13th 2009
Ground: Barton Stadium
Match: Winsford 0 Newcastle Town 1 HT: 0-0 ATT: 97
Boast 79
Additional: Entrance £6, Programme £1.50, Coffee/Tea £0.80

Barton Stadium in pictures

This was a late decision. I was originally going to watch Leek Town at Market Drayton, but MDT had an FA Trophy replay.

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Whilst it is normal for one or two Football League clubs to be given a bloody nose by a non-league club at some point during the early rounds of the FA Cup, predicting where this will happen is a slightly trickier business. Yesterday, ITV went with the "romance of the cup" and saw Norwich put seven goals past a Paulton Rovers side whose defence's pre-match training didn't appear to contain any extra "hap" sessions.

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The second of our articles to mark the First Round Proper of The FA Cup heads west to Paulton, a village between Bath and Bristol tonight. This weekend, the village team, Paulton Rovers, plays host to Norwich City in a live, televised match, but the club has already won financially, at least.

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One of the things that many people that usually inhabit the world of the Premier League regularly comment upon when they visit the singular world of non-league football is how close one feels to the action. Every shout can be heard, and every gesticulation spotted. What supporters at that level often seem to forget, however, is that this works both ways and the average non-league footballer can pick out from a distance that it was you that called him a "useless sack of shite" half-way through the first half.

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To the surprise of absolutlely nobody that knows anything as much as an iota about the way in which they run themselves, the Football Conference bowed down at the altar of Stephen Vaughan for (depending on which way you look at it) either the second, third or fourth time yesterday. They decided, having issued a stern warning to the club at the end of last week, to adjourn the issue of whether this hollowed out, withered shell of a club can actually, realistically, viably continue to trade for anything like the long term future yesterday for another three weeks.

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At later stages, clubs are now fairly open in their contempt for the FA Cup, fielding reserve teams and compaining about fixture congestion, but at this stage it still matters. This weekend sees the Fourth Qualifying Round, the sixth stage of the competition and that at which Blue Square Premier clubs enter.

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We are occasionally reminded that, although the amount of money in football has increased dramatically over the last two decades or so, football isn't quite the "big" business that we might occasionally believe it to be. Real Madrid's annual turnover is reported to be over £300m, which sounds like a lot until you start comparing it with other businesses.

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Chester Fans United, a coming together of the different fans' groups at the stricken Blue Square Premier club, meet tomorrow night to formally agree their formation. They have a few thousand pounds in the bank, which is enough to get them up and running, but it certainly isn't enough to save their club and the general consensus now is that they already know it.

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In his 2006 book "Floodlit Dreams", writer Ian Ridley brilliantly summed up the small town politics that drive the running of so many football clubs. He had taken the chairmanship at Weymouth Football Club with big ambitions, but a combination of under-achievement on the pitch, vultures circling overhead and internal squabbling saw him eventually removed by a coup d'etat.

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Non-league football has a tendency to be more transitory than league football. There remains a culture of boom and bust within the non-league game and this has always existed, but sometimes a match is thrown up which represents something more solid and more permanent and so it was with this afternoon's FA Cup Third Qualifying Round match between Dartford and Chelmsford City.

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The situation at Chester City, as we have noted on here before, appears to be going from bad to worse. A report in The Non-League Paper yesterday reported that the club may have just weeks to live and, as we saw from the accounts posted on the club's website just last week, this may be no great overstatement.

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When one looks at the structure of small football clubs, it is impossible to conclude anything other than that these clubs would not be able to exist without people that selflessly give up their time for them. So it was with Pauline England, who was a reader of this site and sadly died earlier this week.

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When Chester City's Stephen Vaughan won permission to start this season in the Blue Square Premier, there were several gasps of disbelief. While the issues relating to the financing of football clubs are seldom a black and white issue, there seemed to be little question that, in having an application to enter into a CVA successfully opposed by HMRC during the summer, they should not by any rational logic (and certainly not under the rules of the league in which they play) have been allowed to start the season.

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...you may find that there are a number of people outside the stadium with collection buckets. They will be collecting for Blue Square North side Hyde United, who are still fighting a winding up petition brought against them by HMRC. Manchester City are, of course, one of the richest football clubs in the world at the moment, but Hyde United are battling to save their existence over a debt of £122,000 an amount of money which is but a mere fraction of City's weekly wage budget.

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Date: Tuesday September 8th 2009
Ground: Ingfield Stadium
Match: Ossett Town 3 Kendal Town 2 HT: 1-1 ATT: 233
Hardaker 19, Lee 56, Hollindrake 71: Wain 30, Steel 77
Additional: Entrance £7, Programme £1.50, Coffee/Tea £1.00.

Ingfield Stadium in pictures

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Ossett is one of those unusual small towns that boasts two similarly sized non-league football teams.

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HMRC finally managed to swing the axe successfully against a football club today, and Hyde United were the victims. It's ironic, really. Hyde, as have so many small clubs for as long as any of us can remember, have been occasionally poorly run over the last few years, but they were by no means the worst offenders in the game.

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And it was only 65 miles Non-league outfit Fleetwood Town had a disastrous away trip they travelled to Hyde last Saturday. The trouble started on the way there when the team coach suffered a tyre blow-out. The squad and coaching staff were left stranded on the hard shoulder of the M61. Fortunately - and it's just about [. Click to continue reading...

In the eyes of some bookies, at least Troubled Blue Sq Premier League outfit Chester City have put their points deduction worries behind them and shot to the top of the table. That's according to the FreeBetting.net site anyway. Thanks to Matt Fairgrieve for the spot.

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This year's Blue Square South title race is shaping up to be as tight as last year. With eleven matches now played, only five points separate the top five clubs, and two of them meet this afternoon as Woking played Newport County at Kingfield. For Woking, the BSS may feel like a little bit of a culture shock after seventeen seasons in the Blue Square Premier.

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Bath City travelled to Dover yesterday, where they lost 2-1 in heartbreaking fashion. I was not there to see it, due to two main reasons: the Dover Athletic fixture is the farthest away of the season, and Mrs Nedved had an important work event over this weekend. Bringing both boys with me on a nine and a half hour round trip wasn't feasible (although this did not stop the supporter club chairman, Powell, from trying to convince Little Nedved Junior to 'ask Daddy to take him to the seaside on the supporters coach' during half time at the Lewes match). Click to continue reading...

Unibond League South
Sep 5 Leek Town 1 Stamford 0 HT: 0-0 ATT: 272
          Miller 51
Sep 12 Shepshed Dynamo 1 Leek Town 1 HT: 0-1 ATT: 141
             Ramsay 90                 Corden 6
Sep 19 Leek Town 1 Spalding 0 HT: 1-0 ATT: 276
             Cope 39

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Leek stay top of the league after another 1-0 victory today, against Spalding.

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When Morell Maison arrived at Southern League club Halesowen Town in 2007, he had high hopes for the club. Few, however, would have guessed that rather than being merely the manager of the club he was actually the owner, and fewer still would have even hazarded a guess at the absolute chaos that has engulfed the Midlands club over the last six months or so, a story which is now involving administration, a boycott of the club by supporters and even the involvement of the specialist fraud officers of the West Midlands Police's Economic Crime Unit.

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According to press reports this evening, the Blue Square Premier has been unable to reach agreement with the new boy in the British pay television market, ESPN. This comes as no great surprise. For one thing, lower division football doesn't exactly fit in with the profile that the nascent channel has built up over the last couple of months, a profile based upon top European football, Premier League football and American sports.

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Date: Monday August 24th 2009
Ground: Coles Lane
Match: Sutton Coldfield Town 1 Bedworth United 1 HT: 0-1 ATT: 158
Matt 90: Blair 22
Additional: Entrance £6, Programme £1.20, Coffee/Tea 60p Full food menu including Faggots.

Coles Lane in Pictures

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Between two Leek Town home matches I had a free Monday evening.

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We have three Matches Of The Week for you this week. Tomorrow night, it's England vs Croatia in the World Cup qualifiers and on Thursday night the England Ladies Team take on Germany in the final of the European Women's Championship in Helsinki. Tonight, though, we kick off with Oxford United vs Luton Town in the Blue Square Premier.

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by Joseph Millar It's great to have the EPL back. The famous names and great teams have returned - Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool - as have the not-so-great and not-so-famous -...

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A football club died at 4.30 yesterday afternoon. Farsley Celtic, formerly of the Blue Square Premier and more recently of the Blue Square North, had the plug pulled on them by their administrators, Mazars, after a consortium bid to take the stricken Yorkshire club over fell through and no new investors could be found.

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As the new season sleepwalks into life, the FA Cup is, before August is even finished, at its second round already. The names in the Preliminary Round of the competition start to have a familiar feel to them. They're the little clubs up the road that most of us don't visit that often. Worthing Football Club are in Division One South of the Ryman League.

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