Grove Park Rangers – September 2024

We re-join the Salads as they close out pre-season

Guest blog by Pete from Grove Park Rangers

What a time to be a football fan. Fantasy football is back and my team is somehow doing terribly. The EFL is back and my team are somehow doing well. GPR occupies my every waking thought. My girlfriend must be distraught.

When I prefaced our first contribution, I said the course of true love never runs smooth. It wasn’t an understatement. Nothing screams “new year, new me” like a glittering fresh set of new kit. That illusion was shattered in emphatic style upon hearing that our manufacturer had a warehouse fire, delaying the process by several months. I don’t remember the likes of Arsenal having this problem.

Moving swiftly along. When The Chiswick Calendar prefaced our first contribution, they wrote: “I’d be lying if I said I thought their guest blog would be genuinely interesting”. Honestly, I’ll take it. When the weekly blogs first started, they were a cathartic exercise; self-despair thinly veiled as self-deprecation. A getaway from the sinking feeling that we just didn’t have it in us to run a football team and, even if we could, why would we ever want to? These days, however, I’ve had to start giving genuine praise to the boys. Where’s the fun in that?

I’m not alone, though. We reached a record crowd of spectators (and pets) yesterday to cheer us on, and everyone got their money’s worth. Until the official season begins it’s hard to know whether our third act will be our best one, but with this weekend’s game being the most accurate indication of our place in this year’s division yet, the signs couldn’t have been much better.

In many ways, last year pivoted around a theme of redemption. After the abomination of our inaugural season, the previous twelve months were an unprecedented affirmation of friendship, resilience and success. I’ll leave it to everyone else to decide the order they should be put in. We have gone full circle, back to the league we first began in, and feeling like we have a clean slate to start again. We took some beatings, got back up again – albeit very reluctantly – and a feeling of freedom has washed over the club. For the first time, then, it feels like we’ll have some sort of say about how this year is going to go.

We’ve recruited well, securing numbers for the year ahead. Preseason is over, the league creeping into view. To give context as to why this matters: we have actually had a preseason. Whilst this may not sound important, the security you need to have in getting personnel, facilities etc. outside of the competitive framework is a very good indicator of the club’s overall well-being. I’m still recovering from the days when having eleven players rocking up, minutes before the game started, was a precious commodity.

August was filled with mixed fortunes. It began with a storming victory, as covered in our previous edition, before two defeats against two sides that are both strong contenders in the leagues above us. The first of these games, against Court Park, was a bit of a catastrophe. Their strengths played to all of our weaknesses, and we never got going at either end of the pitch. The second, played against local rivals Chiswick Celtic, resulted in a 4-1 defeat. They have been our friendly, long-standing rivals, and we look forward to playing the reserves team in our division.

September is where it counts, however, and we ended pre-season with a vintage 7-2 win against soon-to-be league rivals London Samurai Rovers. The team performed brilliantly, with attacking midfielder Joel grabbing a full deserved hat trick in the first half, and the mood in the camp throughout the game was imperious. The old guard are showing real improvements as a cohesive unit, whilst the new boys have integrated with ease.

What comes next is the great big unknown. We have never played against over half the teams in our league. Every year, new teams enter the league without any previous involvement, and it’s total guesswork as to what they’ll be like. The leagues can, sometimes, feel rather arbitrary. In this entropy of constant internal and external flux, therefore, you can only look at things within your control. And on that account, things are looking up.

As with everything at GPR, though, it’s the friends we make along the way that matter most. Of course there is a competitive element that kicks in at 10.30AM, but a crisp pint in the sunshine with your teammates afterwards is a feeling hard to beat. In any case, we have both. The anticipation is almost over, and now is the time to get to work. The break has been welcome, but trust me, three points makes your week. From a personal perspective, it’ll be nice to get back to talking about football again. We have an arsenal of talent, eager to write their names into the story books.

Watch this space. Come on you Salads!

You can find out more about Grove Park Rangers and catch up with their old blogs on their website: groveparkrangers.co.uk

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