Western League Fun

As moaned about on the last post City have been very quiet recently. So due to the fact the Newport game at Twerton isn't scheduled till the 3rd (tomorrow) I decided to travel to Melksham for the game between Melksham Town and Bradford Town in the Western League Divison One.

Entrance to ground

Melksham and Bradford are both small towns in West Wiltshire and the journey for this local derby is minimal. We arrived and headed to The Conigre Ground, which is situated slap bang in the middle of Melksham.

Melksham Town have been in existence since 1876, and have a fine iron gate at the entrance to the ground with the name and year of formation proudly displayed in the clubs yellow and black colours.
The fee for admission was an acceptable £4.00 and we walked in. The Conigre is a fine Western League ground, with 3 sides covered and one uncovered end. The club have clearly taken care at one time or another and is painted with the name or initials on two of the sides. A chuckle was raised amongst us when we saw the man putting in the names for the scoreboard of "Melksham Town" and "Visitors" leading us to question why they ever take them down, or why they didn't paint the names in originally! However, as Twerton Park doesn't have a scoreboard who are we to criticise!?

We went into the clubhouse which was one of the better extreme non-league ones and supped a bottle of the Melksham brewed Moles Rucking Mole, yes unfortunately that is an ale named after a rugby term, but the beer was good and for local ales you can't really beat that! (As a side note The Old Crown at Twerton is owned by the Moles Brewery but no Moles ales are served there!)

Local ales, much more interesting than lager

We moved over to the covered side and very quickly saw Bradford race into the lead with a deservedly given penalty being expertly dispatched by Matt Cooper. Bradford were allover Melksham outplaying them easily despite the poor pitch conditions. The game finished at halftime 1-0 to Bradford. We trouped back over to the clubhouse and got another beer. At which point it rained like I haven't seen in a long time, just as the players started the second half the rain turned to hail....and the big girls blouses ran off the pitch to let the hailstorm pass! This was unusual, but play soon resumed and continued with Bradford all over Melksham.

Bradford scored a second through Matt Cooper again when he reacted quickest to some good play and shot by Matt Minnis and tapped the ball in after Minnis' effort was well saved by the 'keeper.

At this point Melksham got back into the game and scored leading to some nervous glances amongst the 30 odd away fans. However, there was no need for concern as Matt Cooper scored his hat-trick and in truth Bradford could have won by more than the 2 goals they did.


So ended my footballing drought and once again the Western League provided some needed entertainment.