It’s a trip to the seaside for Hereford FC on Saturday as they embark on their 2021/22 FA Cup campaign with a tie at Lymington on the Hampshire coast, a campaign that will hopefully not start and finish on the Hampshire coast, unless it finishes with a quarter-final defeat to Southampton, which would be just about acceptable.
As well as wanting to progress in the tournament, the Bulls will see this as a good opportunity to belatedly get the season started with a win, and transfer the winning habit into their league games.
Lymington Town, founded impressively in 1876, if being really old can be impressive, which I suppose it can, were promoted to the Southern League Division One South last season, two rungs below the National League North, having bounced around some of the lesser-travelled cobwebby corners of the English football pyramid for 150 years.
So, despite being really old, their star has remained a resolutely unshiny presence in the footballing firmament since the late 19th Century, and to put ‘late 19th Century’ into perspective for people reading this on TikTok, that was when a slim Adebayo Akinfenwa first rolled a defender and bundled in a two-yarder.
They’ve never got beyond the qualifying stages of the FA Cup before, they sit in mid-table in the SLDOS (and that lengthy abbreviation is without the additional letters of the divisional sponsor I was too lazy to look up, although with those additional letters it would probably end up spelling ‘asbestos’ in Welsh), and after five games are one point ahead of Evesham. They are, as any club one point better than Evesham would be, eminently beatable.
The Bulls should be raring to go after last Saturday’s trip to York was scuppered by a positive Covid test in the Hereford dressing room, which was followed by what seemed to be a thinly-veiled suggestion from York manager Steve Watson that the test may have been a tactical one. That should add a bit of spice to the fixture when it does actually go ahead.
New signing Krystian Pearce should belatedly make his debut here, possibly in slightly humbler surroundings than he may have expected, and supporters will be keen to see if he is indeed the second coming of Jamie Grimes, or rather the first coming of Krystian Pearce, which is probably how he’d prefer to be seen.
Loanee Dan Smith returns to the home county of his parent club Eastleigh, and will fancy getting off the mark for the season with a goal or two against lower-graded defenders, more the sort of defenders he was prolific against as a Bognor Regis Town player.
With the squad gradually getting better, the league position (now absolute bottom after Darlington’s surprise midweek win at Brackley) looks increasingly to be a false one. If it was a deliberate ploy on the part of the club to start the season with an incomplete squad, and to add the finishing touches when better quality started filtering through once the transfer window closed, it was a brave one. Time will tell whether it was a risk worth taking, but Josh Gowling’s confidence in his charges is always quite seductive, and October should see an upturn (and OK admittedly it can’t actually get any worse in home matches or in being bottom of the table).
For those poor, misguided souls who prefer the coast to the mountains, this will be an attractive opportunity to visit a part of the country seldom invaded by the Hereford visiting contingent.
After Lymington, it’s Leamington. What are the chances eh? Slimmer than an away win here, certainly.
COYW