NLP columnist Andy Smart shares his experience playing the game in its earliest medieval form in The Non-League Paper this week after getting stuck into the mad world of Royal Shrovetide Football!
I’ve had a busy two weeks. After dreaming of it for 51 years, I finally rode the Cresta Run! It was fantastic. Then it was a dash to Bergamo Airport to fly back, because on the Tuesday I drove to Ashbourne for the Royal Shrovetide Football.
This is how football was originally played, 400 years ago. The goals are three miles apart, and it’s 300-a-side! The Up’ards, born North of the River Henmore, and the Down’ards from South of the stream. I have played in it since 1980.
The ball (the size of a medicine ball, and made from leather wrapped around a solid core of cork), is thrown up at 2pm in the town’s car park.
It is seized by the hug, about 40 players from each side. It is then heaved and pushed around the town. To score, you have to jump into the freezing river and bang the ball three times on a millstone buried in the bank.
If a goal is scored before 5pm another ball gets introduced. If there is no goal by 10pm then the police confiscate the ball.
It was a cold day in the Peak District and the river was swollen with all the rain we have had but that didn’t stop the two teams working it round to the water.
Tom Leighton scored for the Up’ards at 8pm, and we headed to the pub to get warm. For the third year running I played for over five hours without touching the ball once.
The Down’ards got their revenge in the Ash Wednesday game but I was back in London. Still, at least there was no VAR!
Saturday, and the weather yet again won the day. Farnborough‘s game at Gosport was called off so I decided to go local and see Wingate and Finchley versus Lewes at the Maurice Rebak Stadium – a bottom- of-the-table clash.
Old mates
I have never been into a boardroom at a match before, but I met up with my theatrical agent Mike Leigh, who has ties to the club. His great uncle, Major Harry Sadow, along with Frank Davis, George Hyams and Asher Rebak, set the club up after World War II to fight the ignorance of anti-semitism.
Jewish players were finding it hard to sign with teams, so they set up a Jewish Football Club, joining the Middlesex League in 1946.
The game started well, with Lewes going ahead through Ronnie Conlon on seven minutes but Wingate and Finchley equalised through Great Evans on 25. That was it really.
The wind grew stronger as the game went on and made it difficult to control any pass over five yards. The 18 Wingate Ultra’s tried hard to get their team going, to no avail.
A few days later, I went to see Berkhamsted v Halesowen, as the guest of co-manager Lee Bircham. I met Lee and his brother Marc last year at Cheltenham Festival and he’d been on at me to come and see his team play for months.
This was a very different game to Saturday’s match – a top-of-the-table clash between two sides who play good football on the deck.
Halesowen were coming off their impressive win over Barnet in the FA Trophy, although they made five changes.
Both sets of centre halves were very impressive and it wasn’t until the 67th minute that Berkhamsted took the lead with a breakaway goal from Jonathan Lacey.
Halesowen seemed to suffer a bit in the second half after playing 120 minutes on Saturday and their frustrations grew when they had an effort ruled out for offside.
I was joined in the second half by Marc, who has just landed the job of Bahamas national team coach. So if you are a Non-League player who has a mother, father, or even grandparents from the Bahamas, then get in touch with Marc through Twitter and maybe you’ll be playing in the next World Cup!
Make sure you get your copy of The Non-League Paper on a Sunday for the latest news from across Non-League over the last seven days and the growing impact of the coronavirus on the game and society.
Images courtesy of Press Association
