Warrington Town 2-1 Bishop’s Stortford

Warrington Town 2-1 Bishop’s Stortford

National League North

Saturday 2nd March 2024

A crap game in crap weather, followed by crap transport home as my train got cancelled leading to chaos!

In some ways I ought to just be grateful considering I spent most of the morning wondering whether or not there’d be a late postponement anyway (and at least seeing this game now means I’ve got another ground in the National League North ticked off), but along with probably many others in the 1,000-strong crowd, I’ve got to admit I was losing the will to live at several points during a very tedious first half when it was raining torrentially and the game was so boring and lacking in any sort of quality.

Going into it, I wasn’t entirely sure what I should expect from Bishop’s Stortford. I’ve heard from various people they’re pretty poor right now. Results prove it and it speaks volumes that if you doubled their current points tally, they’d still be in the relegation zone. Of course, they don’t want to be in the National League North anyway (and who can blame them given their location near Stansted Airport), but that’s an entirely different issue altogether.

Despite my reservations about exactly what Stortford would offer, the surprising thing was that they were actually the better team for quite a while and having gone 1-0 up when Mark Haines scored from the edge of the box off a partially-cleared corner just before the hour mark, you sensed a shock might be on the cards to put an end to their wretched run of form which has seen them lose their last 10 league games in succession (before this one).

Warrington didn’t seem anything particularly special. They looked basic and ordinary but what I’ll give them credit for is they’re organised at the back - that’s what Peter Clarke and Andre Wisdom bring to the side, and they have a couple of sparks further up the pitch in Isaac Buckley-Ricketts and Connor Woods (the better of the two) and having built up some momentum in response to going 1-0 down, it eventually paid off with an equaliser with Buckley-Ricketts getting the goal to fire up the home fans who themselves were more than a bit frustrated.

Still with about 20 minutes to play, another goal for Warrington looked more likely than the Bishop’s bashing one in at the other end, and on 74 minutes the turnaround was completed as Matty Grivosti got the goal after some good work by Buckley-Ricketts in one of his better contributions of the afternoon.

A Bishop’s Stortford player was then red carded for kicking out in stoppage-time as tempers boiled over. The referee got that decision right but he can’t be given too much credit as some of his decision-making throughout the afternoon seemed to be more a case of guesswork rather than knowledge - albeit he didn’t thankfully have to make any key decisions, and in the end I suspect the biggest feeling that Warrington’s players had at full-time was just a relief at getting the job done.

It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t impressive. It was scrappy and sluggish and they’ll need to play a hell of a lot better than this if they’re going to maintain their Play-Off hopes, but the important thing is they achieved what they set out to do at 3.00pm and as unspectacular as it was as a contest with very little entertainment or excitement, making sure you get the points and win is sometimes the only thing what matters.