The magic of the Cup

I love the FA Cup, my days following the "Glorious Gooner Gunners" meant I've seen many great games and finals but since giving up the sky premiership circus my love affair with this fantastic competition has however not been as exciting and fun filled. Far from it in fact.  Tooting and Mitcham have quite a good record in the FA Cup but of course I've missed all that. The cup run in 1959 and the defeat by Nottingham Forest is still sung about on the Bog End terraces despite the fact that most who stand on there weren't born then. A couple of runs in the 70's and which lead to games against Swindon and Crystal Palace and Bradford are still talked about by older Terrors as great moments in the clubs history. The game in the 1st Round in 2005 an away tie against Stockport was a well attended game by a large group of drunken South Londoners who saw the club loose 5-0. But it's not all about victorious games and celebrating winning trophies when following a club like Tooting and Mitcham, if we wanted victories and a packed trophy cabinet we'd all go and watch Crystal Palace.

 

But as my time following the Terrors only stretches back about 12 years my memories of FA Cup glory are very limited. A game in 2013 at Leatherhead which as per normal ended in defeat which sticks forever in my mind for their goalie getting his shorts pulled down by a couple of herberts with the travelling bogend when he was about to take a goal kick. The following week in a league game there we lost 5-1 and In the second half Bogend Ant got stung by a wasp which caused quite a scene and yet again made me question my decision to take the poor little sod to games.... especially ones in Leatherhead. They had also beaten us in the FA Cup the year before... and in the league which we both attended.  I've never seen TMUFC beat Leatherhead which makes them one of the 73 boogie teams the Terrors currently have at the moment. Leatherhead along with Berlin have had a wall that fell down in resent history and helped changed the course of events afterwards. Ask any Dulwich fan for an explanation if you get the chance.

Then the season after there was a very small FA Cup run that took us to "Mighty" Bishops Stortford after a last minute winner took us past Cray Wanderers. We dominated the game getting a draw before beating them at Imperial Fields. memorable for some of The Bishop supporters who turned up, called us minnows and refused to buy programmes and entre the "golden goals competition"etc. so as not to give any money what so ever to TMUFC and acted like total smug bell ends in the knowledge that they were a "bigger" club. Their manager was also a lovely smug prick of a man who got sacked shortly afterwards. Some victories are made even better when the opponents fans are class A twats. Of course we lost to East Thurrock in the next round but both the Stortford games were special. Now I'm not saying all Bishop Stortford fans are wankers, just the ones I've met and the ones I've spoken to.

Bog End Ant, Leader of the Tooty Wooty Boot Boys taking total liberties over at Bishops Stortford


Nothing else springs to mind since then apart from various other defeats the in worlds greatest cup competition.... But maybe this could be the year. A great crowd of over 300 turned up on a wet and windy Friday night to watch us beat Horley Town, A game moved to Friday due to the Pink and Blue Squatters having a "Home" league game on the Saturday which out ranked the FA Cup for some reason... But in truth the Friday night thing worked, of course the victory helped but the bigger than expected crowd and the packed bar meant that the Bank Holiday weekend started with a bang and an awful lot to drink for many. We were "Blessed" with a couple of Sutton United Supporters including the world famous musical sex machine @bornatotter who knows a lot about the magic of the FA Cup and the magic of FA Cup songs. All of us wait with baited breath to see who Sutton get when they enter the FA Cup this season, while he stares at his guitar dreaming of Pop Stardom and the chance to get on Football Focus again as the comedy time filling bit at the end. We'll I'm hopping to get either Spurs or Man United in the next round... We'll probably end up with bloody Leatherhead again... Let hope it pisses down with rain.....

Continuity and revenge - Words of wisdom from Sir Timothy Megone

CONTINUITY AND REVENGE




More words of wisdom from Sir Timothy Megone. The leader of the Tooty Wooty Boot Boys. Trade unionist and old punk rocker... So make yourself a nice cup of tea and settle down with this excellent piece of literature from this glue sniffing lefty yobbo.

Last season’s calamitous collapse and capitulation by the Once Mighty Stripes was a bitter pill to swallow and I’m not sure that many of the stricken hordes have yet recovered.
A summer time stroll to the club to sample the thrills and spills of England and Belgium playing charades stabbed home the bitter truth - with the sign of Satan proudly exhibited over the turnstiles and no similar display to mark our own increasingly flatulent presence.
There’s no question that it was the right decision to allow the Devil’s Omelettes through our gates – threatened as they were with extinction at the hands of a grasping landlord. Their demise would have deprived us of the pleasures that only searing hatred can give, though that is all fairly academic now with their elevation to loftier climes and our simultaneous plummet into the bowels of this god forsaken planet.
At the Emperor’s Pastures, we have been used to playing second, third or fourth fiddle to lacrosse, weddings and probably dogging, but to have that mob take over on the footballing priority front is surely one affront to humanity too far.
Meanwhile, we have slithered beneath just about every comparable rival club in the South London/Surrey area, with the likes of Sutton and Bromley light years away, and villages such as Merstham and Walton Casuals looking down on us from on high. Our big local derby this year will be the encounter with stockbroking farmers Chipstead (I gather all tickets are sold for the Bank Holiday Clash) while, as one embittered jester pointed out, we can look forward to other all Surrey encounters against a cartoon (South Park) and a shopping centre (Westfield).
Still as the Terrors have spent most of my footballing life demonstrating, no club is too big to be crap and we have to make the best of it in the Bostik South Central. Seeing most of last season’s squad in the bar that balmy June evening was vaguely reassuring, the players still wanting to stay with the club and hell bent on a quest to rescue our damaged pride and wreak murderous vengeance, maybe not against the likes of Staines and Billericay, but possibly society at large. They hadn’t become shit players overnight and here was the chance to prove it. All of this spiced up with spritely reinforcements from the Under 23 team, for, as Big Daddy Kane once warbled, ‘Children are the future.’ What could possibly go wrong?
Once again, I could feel the Fires from the Fields moisten my loins. No one could ever take the magic of two seasons ago away from us and we want it all back. There can be no going back, no surrender, the banners unfurled for the start of the new season … and what a fucking car crash it was, away to Northwood, a ground where corpses from the neighbouring cemetery are hastily brought in to reinforce the crowd, and balance out the large Tooting contingent. 3-1 up with twelve minutes to go, we stylishly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and it was back to the darkened room and mind-altering substances for the returning hordes. 
Surely it would all be different at the theatre of terror, as we entertained the Children of Ken Barlow, a Morris dancing troupe from Marlow. The turnout wasn’t bad but it’s hard to get a crowd going when you’ve just had your soul sucked inside out. In the end, there was almost a sense of relief at the stodgy but wholesome fare that was dumped before us, solid defending and the odd chance, a snapshot from a well fed looking Billy Dunn and a crisp header from Dominic Morgan Griffiths - both fizzing inches wide  - testament to our unrewarded superiority in a goalless thriller. At least we didn’t lose. From small acorns …

Over the parrot... Sick as the moon.

When you get to my age most of the things that you look forward to end up being crushing soul destroying events that leave you crying in a darkened rooms and spending the days afterwards writing poetry. Take Christmas and Birthdays. You look forward the big expensive presents and gifts that you really want and end up with fucking socks and pants.

When it comes to days you look forward to the start of the football season is a day like no others. Forget the World Cup and that plucky England team getting to the Semi Final and then Sky sports news spending hours on transfer deadline day telling the fans of Chelsea and Man United that their club has just forked out 70 million quid on some bloke they've never heard of from Belgium.... The first game of the Bostik South Central is the big one. The chance to avenge the ghosts of last season and bring joy and happiness to the legions of black and white Terrors. So they day we've all been looking forward to for ages finally arrives and the travelling Toots head up along the A40 to Northwood FC for the opening day fixture. The pre season had been pretty good and some interesting games took place but this is the real deal. A crowd of 146 which at least half of were Tooting settled in for the start of the 2018 - 19 season.

The last league game Tooting and Mitcham played was the epic "Must Win" game at Met Police when Tooting and Mitcham had the chance to stay up in the Bostik Premiership. A game in which we went one down after 43 seconds. Here was a chance to boost morale and get things going for the new season.

 

Then just like all those bastard Christmas and the Birthdays full of underpants and novelty coloured socks it all goes belly up. 3-1 up with 14 minutes to go in a match which we had pretty much bossed despite the fact we went 1-0 down. TMUFC ended up losing 4-3. Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Even by the high standards of the complete fuck ups in the past by various Tooting teams this was a total disaster. The supporters club at the end of each season have an award for the worst game. The team will really have to go some to beat this trip to Northwood. You would like to think that the team would learn from the game and make sure that they don't let things like this happen again.... But this is Tooting and Mitcham so you can never be sure what the hell will take place on the pitch. I hate Football sometimes... most times in fact but I still go back for more in the belief that the next time TMUFC are 3-1 with 14 minutes to go that they will score a forth goal and then a fifth.... Maybe.
Tooting and Mitchams next game is a home fixture against Marlow on Saturday 18th August at Imperial Fields.... A game which now has far more riding on it in terms of supporter morale than it should do