Coalville's Win at Brigg is Fair Enough

Excellent non-league stadium design - a flat surface for pie parking while tweeting goalflashes 

Hopperational details
Date & Venue	Saturday 24 November 2012 at The Hawthorns
Result	Brigg Town 0 Coalville Town 3
Competition	Northern Premier League Division One South (step 4)
Hopping	Ground 495 on the lifetime list, and I am here in a weekend of awful southern weather because @BriggFC tweeted so reassuringly on Friday night that the game would definitely be on.  Exemplary use of Twitter by the club if I may say so.
Pre-match preparation
Coalville are league leaders by 7 points with both the best attack (by far) and the best defence in the table.  Brigg have picked up most of their points away from home and are a bit too low down the table for comfort.
This match in one sentence
Brigg made a bad start and made it worse by gifting a second goal, and in the end it was a comfortable win for Coalville.
So what?
Coalville extend their divisional lead, and Brigg drop to 18th albeit with a game or two in hand over the teams immediately above.
The drama unfolds
After a pre-match chat with @knockernorton1, Coalville gave us an early notice of their intentions.  After 11 minutes, a direct free-kick from full-back and captain Cameron Stuart clipped the bar with home supporters complaining that large visiting forwards standing in an offside position must have been interfering with play.  One of them, Ryan Robbins, then burst through again and rolled a shot just wide.  He and Jerome Murdock terrorised the home defence all afternoon. It was only another few minutes before Coalville had the lead.  Robbins reached the left byeline and sent in a low cross, curling away from the keeper.  Miles Fenty got his fingertips to it but only managed to push it into the path of Stuart, again in a very attacking central position, and he finished gleefully.  0-1 The second came in the 20th minute and was a defensive calamity.  A mix-up at the back presented Lewis Dodd with the ball on the left touchline but with an open goal in front of him.  He kept his cool and rolled it in for a soft but killer goal.  0-2 Coalville had the ball in the net twice more before the interval, but the goals were correctly disallowed on both occasions.  They had looked dangerous every time they came forward.  Here is a scene-setter clip – remember Brigg are known as the Zebras. @BriggFC had tweeted yesterday that the rain was expected after 4pm and the first spots arrived during the break, so we moved to the comfort of the excellent stand on the far side opposite the clubhouse.  If Brigg were to make a game of it, they needed to get an early foothold and indeed they did show some ambition.  My second clip is from early in the second half.  By 4.06pm it was raining harder. However, the game was killed off as a contest by Coalville’s third goal on 63 minutes.  A left wing corner made it to the far post, the defensive header was missed, and this time the right-back, Danny Jenno, was in the right spot to head over the line.  0-3 The game then rather petered out, to be honest.  Both sides made substitutions which broke up the flow.  Robbins and Murdock seemed to get into some sort of argument with the Brigg bench as they walked back to the changing room, but there is not much else to report.  It was a convincing performance from the league leaders.  Final score 0-3
The programme
Something random
This is the first time I have ever seen Brigg Town.  I have sat alongside the Coalville Town supporters once before, in their narrow defeat in the FA Vase final of 2010-11 at Wembley.  That game can be picked up from the tag cloud on the right of the page. This visit also completes a bit of West Brom-related life trivia.  Next time anyone asks me about whether I have been to The Hawthorns, I can say, “Yes, both of them.”
Hopping for Moorfields Update
Three goals and thus another three-goal game!
What Next?
If the roads are clear, Elite League ice hockey at Nottingham Panthers as I head back south.  (I can reveal that I made it with 5 minutes to spare – the next post will report on the game.)