Wednesday 5th August 2009, Pre Season FriendlyKinton's Field, Hollingwood Lane, Calverton
Calverton MW (1) 1 (Burrow OG)
Chesterfield XI (1) 2 (Smith, Watkis)
Admission £2. No programme or team sheet.
We arrived at 7.08PM and were lucky to make the kick off.The players were already out on the pitch and I was told "Any minute now" when I enquired about when the game was starting.
The kick off had been advertised as 7.30PM with programmes available. I've no complaints about there being no programme, but the early start caught a few people out who arrived on time. The sign outside the ground said home games start at 7.45PM
I'd originally made the mistake of pulling into the Calverton WMC car park and when I asked if this was where Chesterfield were playing tonight got blank looks and a puzzled "Are they here to play us at darts!?" by way of an obvious clue that we were in the wrong place. Whoops!
The ground only had hard standing concrete slabs at one end and a roof to stand under at the same end if the monsoon season continued (which it thankfully didn't tonight), it appears that they are planning to install a few seats at some point too.There is a bit of grass banking behind the dug outs for an elevated view, but that probably gets a bit precarious in the winter months.
A young Spireites team started as though they were hungry for this game, inside the first minute they narrowly failed to go ahead, inside 5 minutes they had an headed goal disallowed.After about 15 minutes I had just commented that the Calverton number 5 would have made a fortune tonight already if he was taking part in a sponsored swear-a-thon, when the referee called him over and told him straight "Cut out the bad language or I'm going to ask for you to be taken off" the profanities abated, but not the constant moaning.
It was Chesterfield's tall striker Jordan Burrow who smashed home the opening goal from a cross on 21 minutes, straight into his own net. He was back in his own box apparently helping out his defence.
The equaliser came within ten minutes when Smith ran in on goal to:
Option 1) A neatly weighted pass that caught out a flat back four and superbly drilled home an unstoppable shot.
Option 2) Superbly drill home an unstoppable shot from a blatantly offside position after Calverton had appeared to spring their offside trap to perfection.
Both sides clearly chose a different option apiece, my take on the incident was that Smith was already 'marginally' offside when the ball was played, but took his chance very well.
There are no action replays and Andy Gray freeze frames for friendly games on CMFL grounds, so we'll never know.
Either way, the goal stood.
In the second half the visitors increased their lead in less controversial circumstances.Watkis ran through from midfield towards the Calverton box and drilled the ball into the back of the net from 20 yards out.
Calverton had a shot tipped onto the bar by Chesterfield's substitute keeper and hit the post from the rebound as they tried to salvage the result, but it wasn't to be.
The score remained 1-2.
Calverton MW scored for fun last season under their previous manager and coach, racking up some huge scores along the way. Tonight they gave me a headache with their constant moaning and whining ... they obviously have some decent players and don't need to resort to the histrionics quite so much.
I thought the good old fashioned "Gerrup, shurrup, there's nowt wrong wi' you!" referee had a great game, but one or two of the players from both sides evidently didn't.
