SHEEP MAY SAFELY GRAZE

The kerfuffle about the state of the pitch at the new £750million Wemberley Stadium takes me back to my own playing days and the pitches I used to encounter as a box-to-box midfield dynamo with a good engine and an eye for a pass. But first, I was amused by `Sir` Alex Ferguson`s pitiful contention that, having seen the Wemberley pitch just before last Saturday`s FA Cup semi-final, he decided to field a team bereft of no less than eight first choices. Nothing to do with the pitch, of course. Everything to do with Ferguson`s scant regard for the competition. But I must not wind myself up to another rant.

Instead, I will look back half a century to the days when I trotted out each Saturday in the green and white squared shirts of Maidstone Dolphins or the fetching mustard of Platt FC. It was, of course, in the changing room at Platt that Mrs. Snopper and I first met. She was not, contrary to popular myth, playing as our ball winning midfield destroyer, neither was she there to give the team the benefit of her extensive physio experience. No, she and her mate used to make the half-time tea and dole out the half oranges which would sustain us for the second half. To be fair, her brother and cousin were in the team too so there was a family connection giving at least some legitimacy to her presence as our eyes met for the first time across that steamy all male domain.

I recall at least one occasion when playing in the far flung reaches of the rural hinterland of mid-Kent when, quite literally, a herd of sheep was driven off the field they had occupied for the week before, so that we could play our football. Each `move` in the game was a series of dainty sidesteps to avoid the obvious remnants of the sheep`s occupation and there was never any question of falling over on that surface, so tackling was reduced to a kind of token gesture rather than a determined effort to win the ball. I`m pretty sure that game was against Frittenden and finished 6-6, which seemed fair enough.

As we left the ground at the end of the game, the sheep could be seen being coaxed back on to their own domain, clearly upset by the disruption but enjoying the compensation of finding the odd copy of the Reader`s Digest (they made very good shin pads,) bits of orange peel and stimulating wafts of linament drifting on the winter air. I really don`t know what there is to moan about at Wemberley.