Three of us took the relatively short trip to Arlesey for the Replay on what was a fine sunny evening and so after all of 20 minutes in the car were in need of a refreshing pint as soon as we arrived at what is an impressively large, well-appointed clubhouse for a 9^th Tier football club, extending about half the length of the pitch.

A good thing about watching football at this level is you can take your pint actually into the ground side and so there we stood by the touchline at the Barton shooting end as the players lined up… or so we thought. 

For Saturday’s match Barton as the home team were in blue and Arlesey in yellow, but tonight was the complete opposite and so soon after kick-off and we gave our first “Ooooh” at an early shot on target, it was actually Arlesey attacking – in Blue – and so that team in yellow must then be our Barton Rovers??

Pretty simple to spot if you were a regular and knew the players but at this stage, we hadn’t yet had a chance to get to know anyone!

Barton always looked in control and with two well-taken goals from defender Lewis Thomas and new season signing Kenny Watson finding the net, where 3 – 0 up on 45 minutes and so off we went to check out the FanFayre.

But what a disappointment. There was just burger and fries on offer at the small kiosk and after seeing the pre-cooked burger “pinged” in the microwave we weren’t expecting fine dining, but the hard, chewy tasteless meat thingy between the de-frosted white bread roll was worse than we thought!

The second half was more even and both sides continued the tough tackling game which demonstrated the rivalry between the two teams. Standing behind the dugout is always entertaining with every tackle met with colourful enquiries about the referees’ decisions from the coaching staff; who would be a referee?

So, our Barton Rovers comfortably breezed through to the next round, collecting £1,125 winner’s prize money. As for Arlesey, well it just wasn’t their year and disappointingly for them would only be picking up the £375 losers’ purse but which should just about be enough for a late takeaway supper for the squad and coaching staff.

But on the bright side at least they wouldn’t have to settle for the club’s burgers!!