View from the Cemetery

So, we have turned into a team of cloggers then? Two sent off in half an hour, is this good for the revered name of Ryhope I ask? Mind if the same rules had been applied when I was a lad, there isn't a side in Ryhope would ever have got to half time with a team on the pitch. Came up against some right assassins playing for the Railway or the Top Club over the years, me being the more refined sort from over the water, tha knars.

Middle of July, three or four weeks to go, plenty of grass on the pitch, lots of hammering and banging in the clubhouse, level on points at top and bottom, must be time to think about the season ahead. Worked out all right in the end last year, though there were a few more grey hairs around at the end than the start, thats for sure. Usual raft of new faces at pre season training, most of them been and gone before you can learn their names, but a couple of blasts from the past even I can recall seeing before, and a promising young keeper. And Owensy returns, and is a wizz at the pre season beep tests, just wind him up and let him go.

Where have you been? I hear you cry. Yes, gap in reports from over the fence during the winter months, but I have an excuse. Thanks to the little known Anglo-Australian Corpse Exchange Programme, I spent Christmas and New Year down under watching the cricket. A tough life, or death, I know.

Good sport though, there’s little to beat the pleasure of thrashing the Aussies on their own soil. But by far the best bit is listening to the insane Aussie commentators, who all subscribe to the Japanese emperor school of mindless optimism, as in “the war hasn’t turned out necessarily to our advantage’. Well, you don’t say so sunshine!

Was that the trees a rustling, or the hinges of the gate? Or Ernie’s ghostly goldtop a rattling in its crate?

No, it is I, Leclerc, the voice of reason from over the cemetery fence, back to bring you down to earth, or possibly under it, if things go wrong, as they likely will.

Couple of 1980’s comedy quotations there for the sharper amongst you.