www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/20355792?...p;utm_medium=twitter

This thread was sooooo crying out to be called Histon Broke...

Histon fail to fulfil a match at short-notice, leaving Colwyn Bay, the club they were due to be playing out-of-pocket.

Both teams have a free Saturday this weekend, but the Conference has allowed Histon to move a midweek match in February with Chester to this weekend. So Colwyn Bay won't have a home game between 30th October and the 6th December and won't receive any compensation for expenses incurred while Histon are rewarded with a big home crowd they otherwise wouldn't have got.

Seems rather unfair.

There seems to have been a shift in attitudes this season in these leagues towards allowing clubs to call off matches at the last minute because they've dropped themselves in the shit, apparently without a single thought being given to the clubs that suffer as a result of it. Another little barrier to financial basket-casery removed.

I guess this differs from the Truro situation where matches that potentially could have been fulfilled were pushed back due to the possibility of them being expelled.

I have to confess I'm suspicious. On Friday, an apparently unforeseen crisis effects their cashflow to such an extent that they can't fulfil a fixture. On Monday, everything's fine.

Was it brinksmanship on the part of the current and former directors? Or were they actually in trouble and the Chester game amounts to a bail out? In which case the inevitable bankruptcy is being pushed weeks or months down the line but it is inevitable. Could all this not have been sorted on Friday, so that Saturday's game could have gone ahead?

The Histon statement doesn't even attempt to offer an explaination or apology as to why they couldn't fulfil the fixture.

Not fulfilling a fixture seems to have been a gambit played by the club management to resolve their dispute rather than an action forced upon them by circumstance.

Horrible little club.

I'd like, if I may, to qualify that "Horrible little club" epithet, by suggesting that it has been appallingly run since 2010. It wasn't always thus. As this WSC article suggests www.wsc.co.uk/wsc-daily/982-February-201...ard-times-for-histon

So that's where I got "Histon broke" from...

The other club affected by this is Cambridge University Press who have been forced to postpone their home game on Saturday to make way for Histon v Chester (the two clubs groundshare at Bridge Road).

Cambridge City are (or were) organising a bucket collection for Histon's Supporters Trust tonight. Given the actions of certain Histon supporters and players towards City in the past, they could be forgiven for being apathetic towards Histon's plight. Turns out Supporters Trust run clubs are just classier than everyone else.

Coo. And I hardly ever look at this board either ....

ad hoc wrote:


Histon were charmless even before they got into difficulties and don't have many friends in football.

From the "RIP City" t-shirt, to their chairman telling anyone who'd listen that they were the biggest club in Cambridge, to the Craig Pope affair*, they went out of their way to build up antipathy from the two Cambridge clubs. Given my trips to Bridge Road, they weren't much nicer to non-Cambridge sides either.

* the Craig Pope affair does seem less dramatic after the John Terry affair or the Luis Suarez affair.

They were a small well run club who punched way above their weight. The winding up of the bigger sides in Cambridge is pretty standard, no? It seems a bit rich to complain about that. You may as well complain at every team with a local rival. The Craig Pope thing is a different matter, and fair call on that, but aside from this, I reckon you're being extremely harsh on pre-Roach Histon there. (And I speak as a sort of part-time Us follower)

Histon survive for now thank to a debt amnesty.

They still haven't explained how they failed to fulfil a fixture.

Gangster Octopus wrote:


Histon-ectomy?

Histon, we have a problem?

We used to have a guy at Musselburgh who was signed by Cambridge United and got farmed out to Histon - Colin Hamilton. Came through at the same time as Jody Craddock but I think he got a bad injury which stopped him in his tracks and he didn't quite make it.

Bizarre Löw Triangle wrote:


Brilliance!

Shrewsbury lost there in the Cup once. Their first defeat to a non-league team below conference level. Repeated the following year by losing at Blyth Spartans.

My Name Is Ian wrote:


Hinckley v Bishop's Stortford off tonight as Hinckley can't put together a team.

Actually they could. They had eight players available and could have fielded a team. They chose not to.

Didn't some club fulfill a fixture with just nine players towards the end of last season? And got roundly criticised on here for doing so, as it was against a team battling relegation who needed a 2 goal win to stay up?