Goal

I stood on the terraces at Bloomfield Road at 2.30 this afternoon wondering what to write my Goal blog about. By 3.45 I knew it wouldn't be about Blackpool FC as we had just put in one of the most inept performances I have ever witnessed - no obvious tactical strategy, no togetherness, no fight. We were second to everything and 1-0 down to the Wombles. Surely the manager would sort it out at half-time. The second period couldn't be as bad? Well, of course it could, and it was. We were a shambles and by 5pm we were 2-0 down, second from bottom of the league and the fans were chanting for the manager to get sacked. At 7.30 this evening came the formal announcement that Steve Bruce and his coaching staff were gone. Thank goodness for that. However, it's all too painful to dwell on Blackpool's plight tonight, so I'm switching play with a magnificent cross field pass...

...to the first extant record of the word Goal in English. That can be found in a poem by William de Schorham, a 14th century cleric from Shoreham and vicar of Chart Sutton in Kent, from around 1325. It appears in verse 46 of his long religious poem written in the Kentish dialect of Middle English, 'Fools think there is no God, Heaven, or Hell':

(46)
])a3 hy nabbe ende ne for]}e gol,
Jet ouer al he hys y-hol,
WyJ)-oute drede ;
Nau3t o del here, anofer fere,
Ase great body, as hyt were,
J)at al by-3ede.

There it is written 'gol' and there has been much debate over its meaning. Take your pick from any of the following interpretations: boundary, domain, limit, obstacle, target.   

Its use in footballing parlance probably most closely allies with domain, where the act of firing the ball into something symbolic of the adversaries 'domain' had by the 16th century become known as gaining a goal. Posts, nets, a goal line and VAR all followed on later.

That early provenance got me to wondering if, 700 years after William de Schorham, the town of Shoreham-by-Sea (population some 20,000)  actually has a football club. Indeed it does.

Shoreham FC ground

It was founded in 1892, its nickname is the Musselmen, after the town's ancient mussel picking tradition, its home ground (capacity 2,000) is Middle Road as pictured above, and the club currently plays in the Southern Combination Premier Division (a feeder to the Isthmian League) in the ninth tier of English football.

Shoreham FC is a club on the up. It has reached the second qualifying round of the FA Cup twice since 2010, the third round of the FA Vase six times and in the 2022-23 season it was the last unbeaten team in England at any level, not losing a game until the end of February. That record-breaking season saw it winning Division One of the Southern Combination which clinched its promotion to the Premier Division. Its next ambitious goal would be promotion to the Isthmian League.

Shoreham FC players celebrate a goal

All of that is a far cry from the woes of Blackpool FC languishing one place off the bottom of the third tier of English football tonight. It's a shock and a shame that my main team, supported since I was a lad and the reason I now live in the town, is doing so unaccountably badly. It makes my role as the club's supporters' liaison officer particularly tricky at the moment. It is also little compensation that the other teams I follow (Arsenal in the Premier League, Coventry City in the Championship and Grimsby Town in League Two) are all flying high at the top of their respective divisions this week-end.

I've no new poem today. Instead, here are links to two football related poems I've written in past blogs. The first  is my homage to Blackpool, the town and its football club: Jewel Of The North The second was prompted by an earlier blog this week about England winning the 1966 World Cup: Giving Birth In A Time Of World Cup Just click on the links.I hope you will enjoy them.

By the way, in case you're interested, Shoreham FC lost 7-0 away to Eastbourne this afternoon, the Musselmen comprehensively outmuscled in front of a crowd of 225. So it goes.

My goal's beyond. Thanks for reading, S ;-)