Selby Town 0 Birds Eye Athletic 3

Pre Season Friendly

Previous entries into this soon-to-be-award-winning football blog may have given the casual observer that your hero isn't much of a fan of pre-season friendlies, and that with such a mindset, it was unlikely there would be many more match "reports" posted before the first actual factual proper game in mid-August. And you know what? That casual observer would be 100% correct. PSFs remain good for only one thing so far as I can tell, and that is watching football in flip-flops.

That said, when you are moping about on Twitter on a slow Friday afternoon at work, and you see that Selby Town are at home that very evening to a team called Birds Eye Athletic, you would have to have a heart of stone to not at least contemplate attending. How many chances do you get?

So, let's get it all out the way shall we? The captain was not a kindly looking older gentleman with a big white beard. He was, for the first half at last, an imperious, if ungainly, centre-half who dealt comfortably with everything the Selby side could throw at him.

And on the rare occasion he couldn't, due to them having the temerity to use parts of the pitch he wasn't on, the visiting keeper was playing out of his skin. One save towards the end of the first half deserved a far larger audience.

After a bit of googling, it turns out Birds Eye Athletic are a Sunday league side. And that being the case, I can only assume that either standards in the Lincs and Humber leagues are much higher than elsewhere in the country, or they had drafted in a ringer or two. The final 3-0 scoreline did not flatter the supposedly weaker side, and if the two-goal number nine truly is a Sunday leaguer, the management of NCEL and arguably NPL teams need to sort out their network of contacts.

But it wasn't all bad for Selby. Actually, yes it was. Birds Eye could have had more, and whilst the visiting keeper had a blonder, pulling off another excellent save in the second half, in truth anything other than an away win would have been unjust.

If you are of a mind to, there are some more photos over on the Facebook site (ain't the interweb wonderful) They do nothing to enhance this post, amazingly. And anyway, Blogger is being an arse. Which goes some way to explaining the delay in posting this report. Although that doesn't take in to account my inherent laziness.