Grimsby Town | Pearcey's Blog

The first conference game of the season for the blog, and it arrived after a day of boredom during which I found out Forest Green isn’t actually that far away from Cardiff. So it was an hour’s drive down the M4 and then up into deepest, darkest Gloucestershire via Dunkirk (the Western England village), to the town of Nailsworth where the ‘Welcome to Nailsworth’ sign is accompanied by a sign warning of old people. As it turns out Forest Green is just a part of Nailsworth so it’d be like Pentwyn having a Conference side, which is a rubbish analogy unless you know Cardiff very well.

After leaving the car in the club car park, which was surprisingly full considering 90% of the home fans must come from Nailsworth and can’t live that much of a walk from the ground, I walked back around to the ticket office kiosk which doubles as a club shop and purchased the green-est scarf to go in my collection so far. Having poorly decided to get a ticket in the EESI stand behind the goal I ended up covering a fair bit of ground before getting into the imaginatively named, ‘New Lawn’, which I understand is due to no sponsor being found for the stadium yet. Having been built in 2006 it is a fairly modern stadium with two terraced stands behind the goals, with the Nympsfield Road Stand opposite myself housing the away supporters, and a large all-seater main stand, called the Western Thermal Stand to my right. The let down is the uncovered Barnfield Terrace opposite the main stand which is essentially just a few steps.

The green ticket office/club shop

The green main stand

The green away end

and the green uncovered terrace

The fan experience is a somewhat interesting one due to, and this explains the green-ness of the scarves, Forest Green Rovers being the only ‘eco-club’ that I am aware of. Green energy tycoon Dale Vince become Chairman and majority shareholder in 2010 and one of the initiatives brought in was to stop the selling of meat at the ground as well as only selling fairtrade products. I plumped for chips and curry sauce with a bottle of the finest UBUNTU cola!

The RedVeg kiosk of no meat

I don’t even want to know what a badger pasty is.

The pitch itself looked surprisingly good considering the amount of rain that had fallen over the the previous 10 days and the ground filled up quite nicely as Forest Green, looking comfortable in 15th place, took on play-off chasing Grimsby, who needed to take advantage of games in hand to keep the promotion push alive. Grimsby’s form reflected the decent number of away fans who had made the four hour journey from the North-East. The atmosphere was good at kick-off and I’d even go as far as to advocate the drum used by the Forest Green fans which does work in increasing the atmosphere at this level.

The game started well with both sides having early opportunities, but it was the visitors who took the lead after eight minutes when Ross Hannah’s good work on the wing lead to Lenell John-Lewis (his real name) being able to poke the ball home. The Forest Green fans’ song of ‘your name is a shop’ probably wasn’t that insulting but quite accurate. I resisted the temptation to point out to the annoying woman next to me that I actually work within the John Lewis Partnership. As the rain started to fall FGR hit back quickly through James Norwood’s excellent finish from 18 yards and more goals could’ve been added, especially ‘The Shop’ who might have had a hat-trick inside the opening 20 minutes on another night.

A large department store chain celebrates his goal

Three minutes later a man who’s name isn’t a shop celebrates the equaliser

Things started to go downhill on the half-hour mark, however, as the floodlights decided to interrupt the action by helpfully turning off. The referee took the players off briefly, although we were blessed with light once more and, in scenes resembling the hokey cokey, play continued for another four minutes until the lights had seen enough and the players departed once more. Despite continued assurances the problem was only temporary, and a detailed description of the electronic problem from the tannoy man which nobody understood or cared about, those lights were not for turning on and a game which had started so well was abandoned after 34 minutes with the score at 1-1. Of course Twitter was full of it, ‘somebody but another 10p in the eco-meter’ and ‘the cyclist keeping the power going must have got tired’ being the favourites.

At first we had all the lights…

…then there was two lights…

…and then we had no lights!

So it was home earlier than I had bargained for after getting a nice refund on my ticket, and before anyone says anything, I’m ticking The New Lawn off the list because 34 minutes of action is enough to say I’ve watched a game there. The Grimsby fans will have to make the long return trip on a different Tuesday night but I will now only ever make a visit to Nailsworth on a Saturday afternoon, or maybe I’ll never go back at protest over the lack of meat burgers.