To Westleigh Park for the last pre-season friendly - the big one with Portsmouth. No Magners in the clubhouse tonight; I had to head straight into the ground early to have a fighting chance of getting a seat. I was carrying over £100 for the purchase of all three new replica shirts plus a HWFC rain jacket, but, alas, the club shop has sold out of every size of the shirts except small, and the rain jackets are still on order. Nothing's expected to arrive until "the end of the month" - and the wait won't even end then, as our end-of-month match on the 30th is away.
The ground was absolutely packed out. Two rows of my usual section of the stand, including my normal seat, had 'Reserved' stickers on them for tonight, but I managed to find one spare seat in the row below. There were three more empty seats to the right of the one I bagged, but they had jackets thrown over them, and the bloke to my left explained that three young Pompey lasses had put the jackets down before going wandering off. It says a lot for the politeness of Havant and Portsmouth fans that nobody had thrown the jackets on the floor and laid claim to the seats with their bums. They were still vacant when the wee lassies came to claim them minutes before kick-off. The whole end section was reserved for VIP guests; someone recognised one of them as the Charlton manager Alan Pardew. I wondered if he'd come scouting our players, but a lady Pompey fan in my row said he was more likely looking at theirs.
Hawks were at full strength for the first half. Portsmouth fielded a side mostly of fringe first-team squad players, but did include regulars Glen Johnson, Herman Hreidarsson and John Utaka. Havant gave a good account of themselves but Pompey's class told and they scored two in the first half. At half-time Hawks brought on several Academy lads as subs. Their identity was a mystery to many of us in my part of the stand; unfortunately it was also clearly a mystery to Trevor, as he merely announced that 'Hawks have made six changes' and left it at that. You'd think he could have bothered to find out their names from Galey, or Academy manager Stu Page who was sitting in the stand; I wish the club had made an effort to look more professional at our highest-profile friendly and best-attended match of the year.
Nathan Ashmore, our second choice keeper, played the second half and did a damn good job keeping Portsmouth attacks at bay. Rocky Baptiste came on as a 70th minute sub to a standing ovation, but was quiet for most of his time on the pitch; the one time he had an open goal, in the last couple of minutes, he ballooned the ball over the terrace roof. Just before that, Portsmouth had made it 3-0 through Arnold Mvuemba, who'd been impressive all night. After saying "The third goal for Portsmouth, on 87 minutes," Trevor hesitated before announcing the scorer's name. Someone shouted "Mvuemba" and he finally read it out. "He didn't know who'd scored," one of the wee lassies to my right laughed to her friends, so I chipped in "He knew who'd scored, he just didn't know how to pronounce it!"
When it had looked like we were going to keep them down to 2-0, I'd been thinking that would be a fair scoreline. Alas, the final result ended up rather flattering the visitors as in the last minute of normal time Glen Johnson scored Pompey's fourth with a brilliant rocket shot from close range.
Miss B'Have have split up without even getting to release their long-awaited single ;((
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