2012/13 Uncovered: Wednesday 11th July - Bowers? Really?

   Blimey, I forgot all about this one until I saw the pics.

   It's hardly surprising, though.  Putting it kindly, Pitsea is a forgettable place, no worse or better than thousands of tiny suburbs of towns.  It's the sort of place you don't notice if you go by it on your way to somewhere else.

   The Len Salmon Stadium, the home of Bowers & Pitsea, is in an out of the way part of Pitsea, too, more Eversley than Pitsea, at the top of a housing estate.  They have a catchment area of dozens of homes within a 5 minute walk to the ground and thousands of people within a 15 minute wander.  Yet attendances remain firmly entrenched in double figures.

      It's a typical non-league tale.  Some good people working behind the scenes to make a go of it, but because of the actions of one or two knobheads, for one reason or another, the club has flattered to deceive for a number of years.

   The club lost me as a regular attender some years ago.  They used to play in red and white stripes.  I like stripes of whatever colour, even the horrible mag variety, simply because you know it's a 'proper' football shirt. 

   Yet some guy comes in with a bit of money, he's a West Ham fan, so the club change their colours to claret and blue.  That one gesture, putting two fingers up at club tradition to massage an ego, has cost Bowers an awful lot of pounds I haven't given over since then. 

   It simply hasn't felt right the times I've wandered in since then.  It didn't matter tonight though.  There was nothing else to do.  Brian picked me up and off we went, in search of fun, Bovril and balls being kicked.

   We get through the turnstile, and there he was.  Wino.  I'd forgotten he was still doing his bit for the club even after Colin Cook's departure.  He's indestructible, you know, especially after a doctor shoved his hand into his appendix wound without anaesthetic, so I should've sussed he'd still be around. 

   Jules was there too, doing the PA, and there were plenty of other locals that are well known in non-league circles.  In fact, because of the chat, and the looking at the clouds because of the weather, I can't remember hardly anything about the game.  Bowers won but I can't remember by how much.

   It's a tidy little club at ESL level, good clubhouse, decent facilities, certain fit for higher league football.  Over the past four seasons, though, it's not been translated on the pitch. 

For the sake of the chappies and chappesses that work behind the scenes year in year out, in spite of knobheads sticking their oar in, I hope they start to realise some of their potential.

  Just change that god awful claret and blue and you might get a few more quid in your coffers as well.


  Bowers & Pitsea 3 (or 4),  Grays Athletic 0