12 August 2017
What ho! For a while now midweek home matches have felt like a novelty, but this season it’s gone the other way, so it’s nice to have a Saturday 3pm kick-off to enjoy. Well, I say enjoy, but everything points to it being something of a tough afternoon as we welcome last season’s Wessex League champions Portland to Westwood.
No matter what the result though, there’s one band of Cowes fan who are likely to be happy whatever the outcome today, as Portland are firmly the Cowes Balkan Fans second favourite team after they trumped Moneyfields in the title race last year, so there may be cheering from them today regardless of which side it is scoring. Strange lot them, but I can’t help but like them.
Great performance on Tuesday night and brilliant to see a few goals rattled in. It took a couple of great saves from Ed to preserve our clean sheet, but it was going forward that we really caught the eye. Connor seems to be settling in superbly and it seems we have unearthed something of a goal machine in that lad Darren Williams. I’m sure I’ve heard that name before somewhere…
A quick mention now for Glynn Skinner who is making great strides in the herculean task of logging our historical results from Pete Jeffery’s accumulated records. Recently he has 99% completed a record of every result, goalscorer and 1st team appearance all the way back to 1912, with just the fewest of gaps to fill in (I’m sure I’ll be begging for help on here once we’ve identified all the gaps in the database), to go with the historical league tables that I compiled a couple of years back, and the season-by-season reviews that Pete has been putting together with the intention of eventually issuing a comprehensive club history.
It’s a fascinating read and I’ve been poring over the stats since he sent it to me. I haven’t discovered any hitherto unheard-of FA Cup runs (but then I never was likely to) but there’s masses of interesting nuggets in there – expect some of them to find their way into this column over the coming weeks. Also of interest, it’s only hand written, but there’s a list of Cowes’ all-time top goal scorers pinned to the noticeboard in the clubhouse if your fancy taking a gander – some memorable names in there and more than a few surprises too!
As ever, the club is always interested in seeing any memorabilia (programmes, photos, tickets, scrapbooks, match reports and such-like) that you may have relating to the Club as we continue the task of recording our history, so if you think you have anything that may be of interest please don’t hesitate to contact Glynn, Pete Jeffery or myself.
Enjoy the game.
Toby