Barton Town Old Boys' Euronics Stadium

In northern Lincolnshire is a football club that I had never heard of before we played them in a pre-season game. Much like Hyde, this seems to have the badge of another local team posted around the place.

It takes a team to be very low down in the non-league structure for me not to have heard of them, but that's exactly what happened when the Imps announced their first pre-season friendlies after relegation back to the Conference. I don't mean that as an insult, but I had genuinely never heard of Barton Old Boys before this game.

The thing about Lincolnshire is that there are virtually no major roads going through it, other than the M180 but the only two games you're likely to need for those to go and watch the Imps are Grimsby and Scunthorpe, so this meant a trip up dual carriage ways and single lane roads for the better part of an hour to get to the ground. It seems almost tedious that a ground that is relatively close takes a long time to get to.

There didn't really seem to be a lot to do in the area from what I can recall, and other than a chip stop, it was hard to find anything to do in the area and it was straight to the ground.

Once inside that was one thing that immediately struck me, the numerous uses of the badge of Hull City. I appreciate that Hull is quite close by, but it just seems strange that Barton Town Old Boys seem to use their badge quite a lot. When I asked the simple response was that the Barton Upon Humber section of the Hull City Supporters Club was based within the ground, certainly something that was unique to say the least as I can't recall once going to a ground and having a supporter's branch for another club within the ground.

We did venture into the supporter's bar that was in the ground and it was actually quite good, one of the better bars within a ground....not that many clubs have bars within the ground, and the only one I can really compared it to is Farsley.

The ground itself is what you would expect from most non-league clubs to be honest and is largely just a wall around the pitch with the odd stand here and there, the strangest of which is behind one of the goals (picture above). This terrace is very, very small effort that can't be more than about 20 feet wide and it's not even directly behind the goal, it's slightly off to the side.

If you head around the ground in a clockwise direction you go into a stand that is just a flat surface all the way along, this is the location of the bar and the way into the ground. This offers a half reasonable view of the game if you don't mind being the same height as pitch level.

Heading further closewise you get behind the other goal and this is again a flat area and the view from this end is ok, but obviously due to having no height there is a poor view of the other end of the pitch.

The final stand is a pitch length stand that isn't quite flat but doesn't really offer a overly different view from the stand opposite it. There is a rof if you want to protect yourself from the elements.

To be honest I didn't really see any Barton fans so I couldn't tell you anything about their fans (I've given them five on those types of categories by default), however, there was no antagonism from anyone in the ground, although one of the Barton fans did try to convince me to go and watch Grimsby Town instead.......I politely refused.

There was a programme on offer but it was pretty much just six or seven pages of nothing. Basically, if memory serves, there was a section from the manager, the chairman, a page on us and their fixtures....and that was pretty much it.

Overall Barton was an ok visit but there isn't a chance in hell I would ever visit this ground again unless Lincoln were playing there, and even then it's something that I would have a serious think about.

Whilst not a negative experience, there was nothing to encourage me back. For the record below is the video that I did for the game.