Indeed....
It wasn't long ago, that we posted about "The Tuesday Experiment", and how nocturnal social activities were straining the desire to play our weekly fun day game on Thursday.
So we switched to Tuesday. The main change apart from the day, was the venue. Powerleague@Shepherd's Bush had always been our go to site. But they didn't have a Tuesday game at 6pm. But so what, let's give Rock Lane@Chiswick a go.
First impressions were great. It's right opposite Turnham Green station, so within 3 stops of our headquarters in Hammersmith. It's probably the nearest venue to the actual tube, so a matter of a couple minutes walk before we could get into footy.
The area was nice too. No offence to Powerleague, Westway or Westminster, but they are a bit run down. Rocks Lane is on Chiswick Common, so surrounded by independent shops, restaurants and bars, not a fake KFC chicken outlet in sight.
But that's where the positives end.
The pitch itself, is really poor. The dimensions are great, they seem longer than other 5-a-side pitches we were used to, if slightly narrower. There were also more poles surround the pitch, which meant more options for our camera angles, which in turn meant we could capture much more action for our YouTube Channel (link below):
But the pitch itself was sorely poor in quality. I changed into my boots just outside of the cage and it immediately hit me as I entered, how hard it all felt. The pitch itself, was 3G, at a push. Maybe we have gotten too used to luxury. Powerleague was previously a new venue called PlayFootball, which had gone bust and taken over.....but they were 10 x new pitches nonetheless. Lush, thick, 3G turf. Westway has been around a lot longer, but I think roughly 2 years ago, all the surfaces were relaid, so beautiful as well. The same had happened at Westminster Academy, so we had an embarrassment of riches.
Coming to Rocks Lane, well it was underwhelming to say the least. As said before, it was definitely 3G. But hadn't been maintained very well at all. It had be flatten so badly, that any length to the turf had all but disappeared.
That all meant that underfoot the surface was very very hard. This is not great, especially for 5-a-side footy. The real shame, is that they have 7 x 5aside pitches, Pitch 1, believe it or not was worse than our usual pitch 2 or 3. So hard that we saw people playing tennis on it! Pitch 4, 5 and 6, were the same BUT pitch 7 was newly re-laid, so perfect. People obviously knew about this, so had been blocking that pitch out for weeks in advance. There was no chance that FottyAddicts could book it out for us.
In the aid of fairness, I wear boots, and after the first game there, I could definitely wear them. If push came to shove, I'd prob pick astro trainers though. But there was this niggling feeling in the back of mind that the whole matchday experience was a bit shit. I wasn't the only one, everyone was saying the same thing, including the Rocks Lane staff.
The bigger issues came in the next few weeks. People started to get injured. Mo hurt himself a couple of time, Jumbo was getting serious pain for days after and Raul had a nasty calf injury, which side-lined him for about 6-8 weeks. No one wants to see anyone get injured, and just during a pretty lightweight game of 5-a-side, it's not a great experience.
We want to add value to our weekly football. So this was becoming an issue....
How do you solve a problem like Rocks Lane?
Well, you don't.....you wait for someone to take it out of your hands ha!
We don't know the exact reasons, we think it's because Rocks Lane were starting their own leagues, so needed the pitches, but either way, they couldn't offer the 6pm game anymore. Just the 8pm one to FootyAddicts, which was too late for us. There were no other 6pm games available on Tuesday, so what choice did we have?
Go back to good ol Thursdays!
And so we did......the day named after the God of Thunder......here we come. This article was half a review of Rocks Lane@Chiswick and half a brief summary of our short lived Tuesday adventures. We'll be doing another one soon, about the specific switch back to Thursdays, as its fair to say, there's more to this switch than just the venue!
See you next Thursday!
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