Port Vale, Children and Modern Technology!

I told you!
By Poolie Kev
November 1 2005

Poolie Kev's visit to Port Vale brought back some happy memories - but getting there was an experience in itself. In his opinion, it seems that Footy, SatNav and Women don't mix....

Having missed all the previous matches during October due to holidays, ill thought out commitments, idleness and general malaise I was eagerly looking forward to Port Vale where I had been on the last two successful forays. I was indeed one of the Neale Cooper christened 95 nutters who braved the snow for a 5-2 win the season before last and the 1-0 last season where Joel scored in 2 minutes and errrmmmm, nothing much else happened.

Now I’ve bought one of them new fangled SatNav things for the car so I thought rather than printing off the directions for Vale Park, which is a hard ground to find even if you’re Sam Collins I shouldn’t wonder, I put in the postcode and pressed ‘Start Navigating.’

Now for this one I had foolishly extended an invitation to my daughter to come and see what all the fuss is about. She’s newly single, Liverpool and Notts County for some strange reason, the teams, not the boyfriend, he was just a drunk apparently, but she’s a girl so you don’t ask too many questions, and being a girl, any period of silence is an absolute travesty to be filled with all sorts of inane chitchat. Now when your SatNav says ‘turn right’ and you don’t hear it because there’s a recreation of some conversation with a woman you’ve never met from the week before going on, you have to busk it. When you busk it and your SatNav says ‘recalculating’ you know there’s a U-turn coming right up.

After several of these and about 40 miles of unnecessary motoring and the loss of valuable drinking time and some of my hearing capacity, we arrived and managed to park directly across from the away end and located a good few Poolies in the pub down the road who’s name escapes me. Well not so much escapes me as I never noticed it due to the same conversation that caused all the difficulty at Uttoxeter still going on. They must have spoken non-stop for three days and never said a word with any value.

Anyway after the regulation couple we made our way to the ground and then it hit me how much football can actually cost ‘cos 2 x £18.50 is £37 and there was no move towards the purse. I expect that’s what your father is for, although mine used to make me get my round in.

I guess an away attendance of 211 in our division in a crowd of 4550 is still just about respectable, but there were various notable absentees and sad tales of ‘can’t be bothered any more’ and ‘giving it a miss with three home games coming up’ which is regrettable because as everyone knows we’ve been a much better, if more fortunate, bet away than at home. But the boys did the business in fine style and it was nice to see Effion celebrating at the end. He looked so pleased you’d have thought his biopsy had just come back as benign, and all the lads looked well pleased with the result. Maybe we don’t appreciate how much it means to them as well as us.

Well as everyone knows the journey home is always easier when the results been good and we duly set of SatNavving back to Worksop. Via some of the most obscure, unmetalled, narrow, uninhabited lanes in Derbyshire.

Do you think we’d have a better ozone layer if women could shut up for a bit??