PERHAPS it was a bit of a giveaway that the referee was stood in full kit at a papershop some distance away from the ground, newspaper and pint of milk in arm and talking to a bloke walking his dog. But I was one of the many disappointed spectators who turned up at Brinkburn Road two weeks ago to learn that the Division Three cup final between Brown Trout and Mitek and Wheatsheaf Albion had been postponed.

Well I say many, there were actually only two elderly men and a gaggle of teenage girls, as well as a few Darlington Ladies players walking towards the adjoining pitch where they were due to play a game. But I'm sure many more grassroots football fans arrived before and after I did only to discover that the waterlogged pitch was too wet even for Brown Trouts to cope with.

That game now takes place this weekend, meaning that Axa's scheduled game against the Brown Trout - our last of the season - has been put back a week. This could well be the decider for fourth place, with Axa currently occupying the position but Neil Jollie's side are still capable of catching us.

That we are still in pole position for fourth - which in the Premiership gives you a Champions League place, in our league gives you nowt but would still be our highest ever finish - is down to three straight wins.

Last weekend we recorded a narrow victory over a rapidly improving Sherwoods side thanks to goals from Alan Percival and Paul Tills. With Alan currently second in the leading goalscorers' table for our division, it might have been an idea to pretend he scored both, thus giving him a better chance of winning some silverware.

But with it being Tills' first goal of the season, there was no chance of it being taken off him. Plus Alan is ginger with not much hair whereas Tillsy has a dyed blonde mullett and looks like the fifth member of McFly, so they don't exactly look alike.

That win sees us finishing the season in style, just as we started it. Unfortunately, during the middle stage we had about as much style as Falchion defender Daniel Taylor on the dancefloor, and that is not much.

In fact, maybe we should take up cricket rather than football.

Not because we're any good at cricket - it is a civilised and gentlemanly game and few of our players fit that description - but because we only seem able to play in the summer.

In fact, according to manager Chris Johnson - the man with so many stats that he makes Arsene Wegner's approach to management look positively slapdash - we won only one game throughout winter and all of our other wins have come at the beginning and now the end of the season.

It seems we have a team full of Jose Reyes', whose manager admitted that his poor form for most of the season was due to the climate. Unfortunately, unlike the soft Spaniard, none of our players are likely to be linked with Real Madrid this summer.

Published: 29/04/2005