Last Friday saw me supporting our local team, Haverfordwest County AFC, against another West Wales team, Llanelli, in a Welsh Premier League game. Llanelli are one of the few full time professional football sides in Wales and have the luxury of being able to train every day, whereas our boys are all working in their normal day jobs and can only train once or twice a week in the evening. Anyway the game itself was pretty entertaining, the presence of the the TV cameras from S4C (Welsh Channel 4) probably helped raise the game. There were some vocal Llanelli supporters in the crowd and to be fair they did add a bit of colour and noise to the game. Of course they went a bit mad when ex-Haverfordwest player Nicky Palmer scored against his old team, but there was some witty responses from our fans which helped take the pain out of the goal.
Llanelli brought their bear team mascot with them, but after trying to wind us up a bit he attracted the attentions of a dog belonging to a Harford fan and immediately the home supporters started encouraging the dog to go and savage the Llanelli bear. The bear sensing he was going to get a few chunks bitten out of him took off and was not seen again!
Moments later Haverfordwest equalised and a few hundred home fans took great delight in noisily pointing out to the silent Llanelli fans that they weren't winning now!
The score remained the same and I think everyone there witnessed a very good game. The match did have a sting in the tail as Peter Nicholas the ex Arsenal player who is now Lanelli's manager was allegedly sacked after the game by the club's owner. The club issued a statement saying this was all nonsense, but after a very poor run of form by the team in recent months there's bound to be a bit of pressure on the management and perhaps there was some heated words on the bus back home on Friday night!
That's football anyway!