OLD MEADONIANS FOOTBALL CLUB 2012-2013 SEASON

---

OLD MEADONIANS FOOTBALL CLUB KICK OFF 2012-2013 SEASON

Meads' friendlies called off for the first time in club history

For the first time ever, in its over eighty year history, Old Meadonians Football Club suffered a total mid-play wipe-out and abandonment of Saturday’s home programme, causing around two hundred players, officials, spectators and club members to stream off Riverside Lands for an early towel-down in the sanctuary of Meads’ Boathouse changing rooms and an adjournment to the warmth of the bar after only a half hour’s play. Players had welcomed a pre-match intermittent softening up of the surface and endured a further twenty minutes of torrential rain driven by near-gale force winds, but a last straw ten minute bombardment by hale stones like grape-shot snuffed out any residual resolve, for the refs to lead the mass exodus. By the time players were coming off they were to wading ankle deep through extensive puddles in a semi-parody re-creation of Alistair Brownlee in training for his Olympic Triathlon, but without plaster casts. However, what would have clinched the refs’ decisions was the sight of streaks of forked lightning splitting the horizon, bringing back, for older participants, the memory of the sad death of Spurs’ inside forward, John White, struck by lightning on the training ground in 1964. Meads’ first team, having abandoned a useful friendly against vaunted Southern Amateur League neighbours, Civil Service, now find themselves facing the start of the season proper well short of match practice, not a satisfactory situation.

August 29, 2012