Nantwich Town 5 Boston United 0

Tuesday 21st April 2009, Unibond Northern Premier League

I’m tempted to leave it right here. Tempted to just stop typing and leave just the title. After all, it tells you everything you need to know. But, maybe in the months and years to come, writing this might offer what psychiatrists would call closure. For this experience was the footballing equivalent of shackling yourself to some sort of pole and allowing yourself to be whipped bloody and senseless by a brick concealed in a sock.

Wars have been won on less meticulous organisation that this. Ok, I exaggerate, but the midweek journey presented a logistical nightmare not confronted since Munich ’08. Andy, starved of sleep, was returning from Ireland. JB, also starved of sleep but only because he went on a Monday night bender, returned from Lincoln. Jambo and I were required to get out of bed. Bloody nightmare. Anyway, thanks to ruthless ‘£1 for a piss’ Ryanair and some ‘aggressive’ driving from the county town, we were all located within the same area code by 1pm.

The 120-odd mile journey to Nantwich, near Wales (yes, that’s Wales) takes 3 hours. Consequently, because we don’t exactly trust ourselves, we allowed six hours, you know, just to be on the safe side. We were supping our first pints in the Cheshire town by 6pm following a characteristically boring journey which involved gaffer-taping the car’s cigarette lighter to the infuriatingly non-stick dashboard, consuming a crate of Tuborg (Carlsberg’s barely-legal little brother) and revisiting the same shit-splattered motorway embankment (see Hednesford) for impromptu nostalgic keepie-uppie. Just to be on the safe side.

For a frontier town, Nantwich looked surprisingly attractive in the early summer sunshine and was a nice place to be on a midweek matchday, not than any of the locals gave a toss that Nantwich were playing. The Weaver Stadium, named after a nearby river, sorry stream, sorry trickle of off-colour piss, was attractive, though fell into the smaller than garden shed category of ground classification. The crowd was 514, including about 40 from Boston, three or four sheep and four FC United supporters who had inexplicably come along in the hope that a United win would boost their team’s play-off chances. First rule of following Boston is that you travel in hope, not expectation.

In a modern sequel of Groundhog Day, Boston were losing 2-0 at half-time. Nantwich, one of those annoyingly good-but-only-because-we’re-shite teams, had also seen a goal chalked off for showing off, or was it offside. The locals revelled in our misery, particularly one blonde, who later turned out to be a Nantwich WAG and whose gesticulations were replicated by the gaggle of small children who surrounded him. ‘Are they all yours?’ and ‘Do you know their father?’ were some of the more broadcastable chants. It had to be asked really, one of them looked straight out of the Jackson Five.

You can guarantee that Steve Welsh told the players not to concede early doors in the second half. At 8.46pm the Pilgrims re-emerged. At 8.48pm they were 3-0 down. Hmmm. It could only get worse, really, and it promptly did. One Nantwich supporter, who gets my vote for Adolf Hitler lookalike of the year 2009, was particularly antagonising to the Boston supporter’s club pre-pubescent division beneath us on the terrace. Mysteriously, the equally totalitarian stewards told our kids to behave. Strange town. We gained our revenge at the final whistle by unleashing the spectacular tickertape display we had been reserving for when we scored. Clean that mess up, b*****ds.

Post-match, we waited around in the car park for a glimpse of our heroes; tell them to keep chins up ahead of the crucial game on Saturday. Funny really, many of these lads are younger than us, and possess half the ability! We must have looked too menacing lurking around the Corsa in the moonlight, they didn’t dare emerge from the dressing room!

We consoled ourselves with another car park kick-around at the same service station, adjacent to the world’s most innavigable roundabout, which continues to mock our feeble attempts to find the right bloody exit. Observed only by a seedy-looking gentleman in a white van, most likely some sort of paedophile with a mature taste, and a most inebriated Brummy ladette who told of her night watching Basement Jaxx while annoyingly booming our ball across the concrete in her stilettos, we played football late into the night. It was the perfect remedy.