18
by George Street-Bridge
Programme article about the Welsh Cup:
Hats off to all involved behind the scenes at both clubs in rearranging the Barry Town Welsh Cup tie for a Wednesday and to the management team for negotiating the minefield of playing league and cup games on consecutive nights and winning both. And particularly to Elliott Buchanan and Darryl Knights who both came on as subs at Kingfield and were then in the starting line-up at Spytty.
Elliott in particular must have been glad to be hauled off in the Welsh Cup after an hour-long shift, having played the last 25 minutes plus stoppage time in Surrey, while Darryl played a more modest six minutes on the Tuesday but all 90 in the cup and must not have been looking forward to extra time.
Welsh Cup games with the readmission of three of the so-called exiles are bound to be a learning curve both for the clubs and the authorities. Fixed "conference dates" across the season encompass a Saturday and a Sunday, with league fixtures in Wales cleared at the relevant levels. It's exactly the same as the FA Cup, just that I don't think the FA uses the phrase, or at least it isn't in general use among supporters.
It has to be weekends so the cup can go national as early as the round with the last 32. We could have been drawn away to FC Cefn from the Wrexham Area League, who reportedly have portakabins to change in, one tea hut and the dugouts as the only cover. They were there on merit, but I doubt a midweek game would be on as they don't appear to have lights.
These dates often (maybe always) clash with rounds in the various FA competitions, but it's hard to see how that can be avoided. County, Wrexham and Colwyn Bay - who missed the entry deadline but will presumably want in next year - are also in the FA Trophy, which has its own round dates. And Merthyr will for the foreseeable future be in the FA Vase which has its own dates.
The nightmare for any cup is having one round not completed by the time the next one comes around, and strict conference dates are the remedy. Of course, the weather can still thwart the best-laid plans even in as slick an operation as the FA Cup.
It's by no means the first time we've played two games on consecutive days. Back in the mists of time Christmas games were often played like that, sometimes on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. I suppose the trains and buses must have been running. Often you played the same team twice. The most recent time the pre-1989 County played on successive days seems to have been in 1969 and, weirdly, our 4-3 home loss to Aldershot on 27 December was the first County game I ever saw.
We have to go back to the Newport AFC era for the most recent examples of us playing on successive days, but these were both to wrap up late-season fixtures with little at stake - a completely different proposition from this season's task of winning a relegation zone six-pointer and a tie in a cup we'd like to win, in a competition which goes to extra time and penalties first time out.
At the end of our first season in the Midland Division we played a double header at Corby and King's Lynn, losing both 2-1. (My wife remembers having to chase a mallard out of the ladies at King's Lynn, a new use for the term "toilet duck".) The archive of appearances maintained by Ade Williams indicates that as many as seven players did all 180 minutes - Tony Bird, Jason Prew, Robbie Painter, Paul Collicutt, Phil Green, Ashley Grittiths and Mark Price.
Playing back-to-back on a Saturday and a Sunday did us no harm at the end of 1995-96. A 1-0 win at Burton Albion's old ground (which I remember particularly as the last game my late dad saw) was followed by a 1-1 draw at Hastings. Tom Johansen, Ray John and Jason Donovan played all 90 minutes of both games, but being able to use three subs rather than just two in 1989-90 must have eased the manager's task.
This has set me thinking about double headers more broadly. If drawn at home in a cup on a conference date coinciding with a home league game, in circumstances where you are confident you can win both, could there be scope for playing one after the other?
One of my most memorable days at any sporting event was Manly v NZ Warriors in the Australian National Rugby League in 2009. (Refereed by the unbelievably named Shayne Hayne.) When we arrived at the ground there was a game in progress between the clubs' youth teams in their own league.
It made for a great atmosphere as the crowd could ease itself in, in both senses. Probably only a few hundred of a gate which topped 16,000 watched the whole curtain-raiser, but it was a good incentive to get there early. The main event started about half an hour after the youths finished.
Sadly, it's a bit of a pipedream. There's the weather and the wear on the pitch, for starters. Maybe global warming will really set in and Newport will get Sydney's climate - but by then Spytty will probably be underwater rather than just generally soggy.
There's also the amount of changing accommodation you'd need, not least for two sets of officials, although maybe an athletics stadium is covered for that. You couldn't really clear the ground between the games, so you'd need to add a bit to the ticket price when most people wouldn't want to watch both matches in their entirety. (When I used to do the PA at swimming meets it was usually the devil's own job to shift parents from the gallery between sessions even if readmission was only a quid or two.) But just maybe - for pre-season friendlies or end of season games in minor cups - clubs could as a low-key experiment try playing a youth/reserve game as a warm-up, just to try out the logistics?
