SWANWICK PENTRICH ROAD... (My poem about a strange evening in Derbyshire...)

 Swanwick Pentrich Road…

(A 2014 non-league game v Mickleover Royals…)

Hidden.

Even the access street

Shrank

From the Pentrich Road, 

Which in turn, withered into a sunlit track,

Opening eventually into a concise parking space

And a clubhouse, a shack to be frank:

Swanwick FC, where my presence was bidden…

Intrigued

By the tight, clustered

Proximity

Of the outbuildings,

Which nestled, puckered in sunlight’s glare,

Opening earnestly upon an undulating field

And shelters and dining chairs, incongruously:

Swanwick FC, where a fascination was conceived…

And I had a shrinking feeling

Of length and width and time.

The plateau on an uneven pitch

Offered accurate passing no reason or rhyme…

The shrinking of daylight and the thinking 

Of a referee, nervously predicting

Summer’s natural lustre with dusk would fade,

Resulted in an early, hurried start.

And with a crowded surface playing its part,

Only eighty of the prescribed ninety minutes were played…

Pete Ray…

Swanwick Pentrich Road, Derbyshire… 

A first intriguing visit.

Small pitch, an itchy, time-conscious official and lots of tall players, which caused the game to look like a match in a dense forest at times…

Swanwick Pentrich Road 0 Mickleover Royals 2…

A strange evening was spent in Swanwick. The August days were shortening, the width of the Swanwick pitch was quite meagre, the length of it was shortened somewhat too, but the referee decided to start early, shortening the warm-up period, then shortened the ninety minutes to eighty, leaving me wondering whether The Mad Hatter would suddenly appear on the plateau in the centre of the undulating playing surface, which looked like the pitching mound at the Kansas City Royals’ baseball stadium. 

And yet I thought I had arrived at Gulliver’s Kingdom, where Swanwick’s Andy White and defenders Shane Whitmore and Lewis Mason strut their Heights of Abraham stuff, not Wonderland. Mickleover failed to score down a first-half slope, when the sun glared at home ‘keeper Adam Jablonski but netted at the beginning and at the end of the second period to defeat a largely abject Swanwick, whose not overly subtle tactic of arrowing high balls at White (which is odd, for the Greenwood Archers practise there) had been anticipated by Mickleover and countered with the deployment of three tall, quick central-defender types in Peter Aliguma, Jordan Simpson and the impressive Ash Lynch. 

Swanwick often looked like a 1940s car missing its starting handle. 

Swanwick Hayes was used to house World War Two Italian and German prisoners, but one Luftwaffe officer, Franz von Werra, escaped, then was recaptured at RAF Hucknall, attempting to nick a ‘plane. 

The film made of this escapade would have summed up Mickleover’s feelings had they failed to achieve victory after such domination. 

Its title: ‘The One That Got Away’…