A short history

A View From The Halfway Line or VFTHWL started some seasons ago when I got fed up with the lack of content in the pages of the official match day programme. The original editor Ian, and latterly Adrian, have been kind enough to publish my occasionally libellous and insane rantings ever since!
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This season I am hoping to publish every article that makes it into the programmes ahortly after the relevant game.
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From the first programme of 2009

I normally prepare a vision of what I think is likely to happen in the sporting world every year, but the 2008 edition had to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances………
This year is different. The goats have been ritually sacrificed to provide the entrails, the Ouija board has come out of the loft, the pine cone has been retrieved from its nail on the shed and the crystal ball has been polished.
It can only mean one thing; here are my predictions for the remainder of the season, otherwise known as
Old Bores Almanac for 2009
January
The club decides to save on electricity by disconnecting the P A system and launching "Bees Unplugged". Local acoustic bands will provide all pre match and half time entertainment. Announcements will be made by the local town crier……
The Premier League is bought outright by a group of 20 Saudi billionaires, and each is allotted a club. The new owners vow to retain the traditional values of English football, including kick off times. It’s only when a revised fixture list is published that those times are revealed as being Saudi local time which is 3 hours ahead of the UK, a noon start on a Saturday, 4.45 weekdays
The Disney Corporation sues the FA following their condemnation of Newcastle manager Joe Kinnear for his remarks about Mickey Mouse referees. In their law suit they maintain that their flagship character is a major factor in raising corporate income, loved by millions of children worldwide and easily recognisable by 80% of the world’s population. They challenge the FA to find an official with similar credentials………

February
"Hutch" reveals that he almost signed 60’s pop legend Dave Clark in the January transfer window. He only ditched the plan when he realise that DC hasn’t got an "e" at the end of his name. "We’ve had such good performances from Ashley, Ben & Chris that I thought I’d try and build a team of Nobbys" said the Gaffer………
The FA decides that in view of the economic climate in the UK, any new club takeovers must include one foreign investor as part of the deal. Although the club aren’t looking for new leadership or ownership the Bees ask for clarification; are Dorchester and Yeovil far enough East and North respectively to be considered foreign?
Faced with disinterest at home the Saudi owners rename some of the teams. The Potteries will be represented by Stoke Camels, Pompey will become Portsmouth Pyramids and in West London we will have the Fulham Fayeds…..
March
Desperate to reduce costs while retaining their viewing figures, the BBC announces the launch Non League Football Strictly Come Dancing! Selected in a random draw, Mark Kenway reluctantly has to decline the invitation.
"I don’t do Saturdays, I told them that" sighs a dejected "Kenners"……
The FA ditch the much maligned "Respect" campaign and replace it with "Keen", as in "Keen to Play", "Keen to compete". Missing the point completely, former Sunderland boss Roy Keane is installed as the figurehead of the campaign. In a bizarre attempt to appear modern, all teams will now make their entrance to the pitch to the strains of Brit Pop veterans Keane and their hit "Is It Any Wonder""……
Bridport Cricket Club occupies the new changing rooms and claim squatter’s rights. A spokesman says "Look, it’s called the Derek Cash Pavilion, and in our books that makes it a cricket facility"….

After misreading the latest FA guidelines limiting the number of foreign players a team can have, Hutch signs the Bees first Brazilian player. "Oyez Oyez is a midfielder and he’s come here to learn everything about free kicks that Wisey and Matty Condliffe can teach him." Hutch tells the "Wip-Wop".
April
For an April Fools joke, "Hutch" reveals that he is about to experiment with a team consisting of players whose surname start with the letter "C". At the next training session he discovers that several squad members didn’t realise it was a prank and we now have Ryan Chayter and Darren Clock in our team….
Weymouth FC go bust. The Echo, with fifteen pages of sport to fill in an average week, increases their coverage of local football. Subsequent enquiries reveal that reporters have been sifting through the rubbish bins of the committee and coaching staff. Strangely Andy Mason is the only name that doesn’t appear in print, although there is a report of a journalist being mown down by a pedal cyclist on the Portland Beach Road……….…..

The town crier resigns after being told that the team for the penultimate home game is:- Cuff, Chayter, C Clarke, Clock, Chris-Senior; Coggins, Clegg, Condliffe, Churchill; A Clarke, B Clarke, Subs:- Oyez Oyez, Cleal, Connolly ……..

Scientists at the Hadron Collider atom smashing plant reveal that their critic’s worse fears have been realised. They have created a Black Hole, which will consume the Earth on Friday afternoon………
The League issue a reminder to all clubs that failure to fulfil a fixture may result in a fine, points deduction or any penalty that the Fixtures Committee deem appropriate………….This article appeared in the programme for the game against Elmore on Tuesday 14th October 2008
Euro2008 is a distant memory now but I was irrationally annoyed before it even started. It wasn’t that Steve McLaren had failed to guide England through a qualifying group where the opposition seemingly took turns to give the Three Lions every chance to appear in the European summer bun fight. It was the media’s realisation that, shock horror, people may not be able to cope with watching an England free competition. It suddenly dawned on TV companies, newspapers and replica shirt manufacturers that they’d either spent money they couldn’t recoup or had budgeted for a bonanza that just wasn’t going to happen.
Seemingly no-one would want to watch. So the word went out, how can we encourage the masses to watch and more importantly, spend? The obvious answer, in multi-cultural Britain, was to support your ancestors’ home country. With the West Indies and Asia automatically excluded, that narrowed the field down a bit. And before you ask, the 1970’s plan to unilaterally declare Portland as an Island Sovereign State was still-born, leaving myself and many others born on Fraggle Rock out of that scenario.
Plan B appeared to be to support the country that featured a player from your favourite club team. Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal and all the other usual suspects would be OK but when your favourite teams are AFC Bournemouth and Bridport you’re not exactly spoilt for choice.
So far, so bad. And if you were a fan of Fantasy Football, the pickings were very slim. The 2006 World Cup saw virtually every national daily run a competition. This time around I only found the Guardian running anything and that cost £6 a team!
As a fan of football I like to think that I can fetch up at any match and understand what’s happening. You subconsciously develop an irrational bond with either a team or player. So, although I pledged, as much for family unity as anything else, not to watch every game, I was bound to take one team to heart. And as long as it wasn’t the Germans, I didn’t really mind who won….
But when people know you like the game, they keep asking your opinion. In a predominately female office you can count the number of football fans on one hand, and one of those was the mother of a recent Bees player. But this was my formula for deciding who to support, if only to have a ready answer.
Stage One. Eliminate any team you actively dislike. So that was farewell to Germany, France and Turkey (don’t ask).
Stage Two. Eliminate the no-hopers. Goodbye to Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Poland, Greece, Romania and Sweden.
Stage Three. Eliminate the teams that always look good but either argue (Holland) or bottle it (Spain).
That left Portugal, Croatia, Italy & Russia. Amazingly having checked my When Saturday Comes wall chart, these were actual possible pairings for the semi-finals. In perhaps the most ludicrous pre-planned draw of all time, two teams from the same group could (and would) meet in a semi. With the "Group of Death" including three potential favourites it seemed rank bad planning that the two qualifiers wouldn’t be separated until the final. My pick was a Portugal / Italy final with the Azzurri squeaking past whatever the Portugese are known as.
Not being a betting man I found a free on line score predictor competition where I correctly anticipated 16 out of 24 results including 5 correct scores in the Group stage. Consequently I also picked 7 of the 8 quarter-finalists (Damn those cheese eating surrender monkeys for losing and letting the Dutch in!). It all went horribly wrong after that, but refreshingly, with no England to fret about I quite enjoyed it. The only downside was considering how we would have finished.
Depressingly, I think that the truth is about as well as France……….
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Here's the one from the Shepton game on 3rd October
The decision in mid September of an Independent Review Committee to over rule the red card issued to Chelsea defender John Terry was in my opinion the biggest own goal (pun intended) scored by a football authority in recent memory.
To recap, in Chelsea’s game on Saturday 13th September, a break away attack saw Terry manhandle an opponent to the ground as he advanced on goal. Referee Mark Halsey immediately issued a red card for the offence. That evening’s Match Of The Day spent some of our licence fee calculating that the foul occurred some 40 metres from the goal. Additionally, there was a covering defender marginally up field and 10 metres to Terry’s right who may have been able to tackle the striker as he advanced on goal. Ignoring the fact that the foul was more akin to an NFL linebackers tackle and comparing it to a case on the same day where a red card might have been justified, the decision from TV’s flagship programme was, wrong decision. By Sunday night seemingly every sports news channel was echoing that Terry had been harshly punished. By Monday the ref was being asked, "to reconsider his decision". Having done so he decided that his original call was correct, prompting Chelsea to officially appeal. Even Blues manager "Big Phil" Scolari admitted to being surprised when the appeal was upheld, freeing Terry to play in the following weekend’s fixture against Man U.
In my opinion there are three blatant problems in this case.
Firstly the appeals committee will only consider video evidence. Does this mean that we should film every game just in case? From past experience I recommend that you don’t bother at Chard for an evening game.
More serious, and my second point, is that by over riding such a high profile decision it opened the floodgates for everyone from Alex Ferguson downwards to cry foul. I’m sure that the committee acted without prejudice, but the perception is still there that the England Captain received preferential treatment. Amazingly the FA don’t have the power to downgrade the card to yellow. It’s all or nothing, so except for missing the remainder of a game already won, Chelsea and the player have not been punished. Spectators at the Brislington game where Dan Wise was on the receiving end of a late challenge thought that the offender deserved a yellow at least. If it had been a red would the club been able to appeal as quickly and with video evidence?
Finally, does anyone remember the FA’s RESPECT campaign introduced in the close season and backed by, among others, John Terry? The tag line is "No Respect, No Referee, No Game". Hmm……
From what I’ve read the basis of the appeal was on a technicality. If the ref had told the FA that it was a professional foul instead of serious foul play, the card would have stood. So rather than stand by the on the field decision the "Powers That Be" decided to exercise 20-20 hindsight and back the appeal. Just to rub it in Referee Halsey was demoted to Division Two for a week. That always seems a weird punishment to me. For the two teams involved the implication is that their game is so meaningless that a sub standard ref can officiate it! How does this decision show respect for an official? We all make mistakes, that’s part of the games appeal. If we had perfect players, officials and fans what a boring game it would be. Later in the same week an official in the Champions League sent off the wrong player. Now that’s a serious error.
The Aretha Franklin song Respect contains the lyric "All I’m askin’ is for a little respect"."R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find out what it means to me" she implores later. Although that anthem might be on many referee’s iPods I get the suspicion that one national organisation might have accidentally wiped it from their play list recently……
The opinions in this article are Jon’s and are not endorsed or a reflection of the club’s officials or players
===================================Here's the one for the Odd Down game, Saturday 27th September
Without doubt this is the latest opening home fixture of the season that the Bees have played in many a year. You would probably have to go back to the halcyon days of yesteryear when the football season only started as the cricket finished to find a similar date.
I normally use the first or last article of the season to "award" the totally meaningless VFTHWL Annual awards, but 2007/08 is done and dusted, and frankly there wasn’t much to celebrate last term was there?
That said, belated congratulations to top scorer Shane Evans for his 17 goals. As well as earning the mythical "Golden Boot", Shane would receive the "Golden Anorak", awarded to the player with the most goals/appearances ratio (34 starts and 5 substitute appearances). Ashley Clarke receives the "Nothing Better To Do On A Saturday" award, turning out 42 times for the Bees First XI (36 starts/6 as sub). Darren Lock made 39 starts and also scored the Goal Of The Season smacking one in from the edge of the box with the outside of his boot.
Given a choice of all the players who made a minimum of 10 appearances last season my Definitive Bees XI for 2007/08 would read: -
L Cuff, Senior, Stewart, Hayter, D Lock, Symes, Coggins, Wise, Condliffe, Legg, Evans. Subs:- Cleal, A Clarke, Fellows, Ritchie, Thornton
Which wraps up last year, but neatly leads us onto the present, because writing this in the close season it’s uncertain as how many of the above will be in the starting line-up today. Primarily this will be down to the now seemingly annual appointment of a new first team manager, this year’s sacrific…sorry, new arrival, in the person of former Terra’s favourite, Ian Hutchinson.
A lot of this will be "old hat" by the time you read it but his initial plan seemed to be steeped with so much common sense that it almost seemed blasphemous for an incoming manager to say it! First of all the new gaffer had a good idea of where we finished last term and is cutting his cloth accordingly. He didn’t quite break into a chorus of "The Only Way Is Up!" but then again there were no rash promises.
As I’ve said on a worryingly large number of occasions in recent years (to Messsrs Davis, Russell and Hammond to name a few) let’s welcome the new gaffer and wish him all the best. The ground refurbishment has robbed the club of home cup ties at the start of the season, so let’s hope that this term the anoraks amongst us don’t spend countless winter evenings poring over league tables trying to work out if we’ll stay up.
I would define success this year as a top six League finish, as simple as that. If that is salted with a cup Giant Killing, a run to the Dorset Senior Cup final and the Boxing Day defeat of new "local" derby rivals Gillingham Town, so much the better…….
As a postscript to this article, I’m writing this PS shortly after the Clevedon game. Seven of "my"starting XI from last season are still here and it would probably be eight if Lee Cuff hadn’t been sidelined. Simon Radcliffe was a firm fan favourite the first time around, and has slotted back in like he’s never been away. They say the League Table never lies, but it’s worth noting that we’ve got six games in hand of some teams and aren’t bottom.
So for once maybe, it’s looking good at St Mary’s and with the new changing rooms in place, perhaps, just perhaps, the Bees might clean up this season!