GOOLE TOWN 1 BARROW 0 HFS Loans League Premier Division 20 February 1993 by Graham Murphy
After my dismal record of not getting to games on time last season you could be forgiven for expecting that by the time I got to Goole, the final whistle would have blown, that the players would have packed their Wash 'n' Go and Denim back into their kit bags and the supporters would be halfway back up the M6. Nothing could be further from the truth! Ask me to travel sixty miles to a game and I'll miss the kick-off. But ask me to go from one side of the country to the other and I get there with twenty minutes to spare! The journey was completely uneventful, though driving into the enemy territory of Yorkshire along the M62 began to resemble one to the outer circles of hell. The names of the towns with their harsh consonants are enough to strike terror into the heart - Halifax, Huddersfield, Castleford, Brighouse, Leeds - they certainly do if you're a follower of Barrow RL - even Brighouse would put twelve tries past them; everyone else seems to! It's a shame that Yorkshire can't be surrounded and islolated in the central verge of the motorway, like that farmhouse on the bleak stretch of the M62 across the top of the Pennines. But what really gives this journey the flavour of a trip to the Netherworld is the way the motorway meanders across the featureless, flat Yorkshire plain around the huge coal fired power stations of Ferrybridge, Selby and Drax. With their rows of cooling towers and chimneys belching clouds of steam and smoke over this Godforsaken landscape and the clouds merging together to block out the sun and cast a low grey pallor over the miserable, flat countryside, I felt like Frodo and Sam must have done as they carried the ring to the evil land of Mordor. Holding the car steady against a fierce crosswind (an unhappy omen of the game), Goole appears out of the gloom to the right of the motorway as a couple of warehouses, a water tower and a dozen or so small cranes. The football ground is right under the water tower and for a change is easily found. Right at the second set of lights, then sixth street on the right and there it is - the Victoria Pleasure Grounds, Carter St., Goole. I've even got enough time to go to the local Thresher's for a bottle of champagne and a packet of Raffles cigarettes, for it is said, in the immortal words of Bob 'The Cat' Bevan that a drink before and a smoke after are amongst the three most pleasureable things in life. I don't know about that because I don't smoke, but I do know that there was nothing pleasureable about the Victoria Pleasure Grounds or what was about to take place there. The aforementioned gale force wind was blowing fiercely from one end of the pitch to the other. Goole, playing with the wind at their backs in the first half, adapted perfectly to the conditions. Barrow didn't. Goole scored once and hit the crossbar four times while Barrow had one goal disallowed and hit the woodwork twice. It was as if the ball was on a piece of elastic, as it rebounded so many times. And it seemed like Barrow had about as much idea of what to do with it as John Major has with three million unemployed. So we returned home with heavy hearts, back through the bleak alien landscape, feeling as if we'd been to the ends of the earth and returned with absolutely nothing. Which we had. Originally appeared as 'Blown About by the Goolies' in issue 017 - August 1993