Football braced for more disruption

JPCT 19-01-13 S13043159X Gorings Mead football ground under snow. YMCA, Horsham fc. Football cancelled due to snow -photo by Steve Cobb.

Published on 24/01/2013 10:25

Football clubs across Sussex may be forced to play three games a week just to finish their season after a year of weather disruption.

Last week’s snow followed one of the wettest years on record, and with more bad weather due, league officals are being forced into contingency plans.

Teams in the Ryman League may be looking at three games a week, The Sussex County Football League (SCFL) were in talks to rip up their fixture list and start again, while the West Sussex Football League was considering scrapping all its cup competitions. In the Worthing & Horsham District Sunday League (W&HDSL), teams will begin playing double header games from next month.

Several weekends of Ryman League fixtures have seen disruption, but Saturday was the first time all games were off, and just one game took place this week. Chairman Alan Turvey said: “We are doing OK, on a daily basis we are managing the situation.

But it is a concern, and those clubs who are behind may have to play games on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday, as we have before if this continues.”

For the SCFL this was the second weekend this season all games were off. Officials were looking at revising the remaining fixtures, but acting chairman Steve Nealgrove said: “We think we’ll be OK, we have 13 weekends left of the season so with two games a week that’s 26 opportunities to play fixtures so it’s not as gloomy as we thought.”

But Horsham YMCA, for example have a minimum of 22 games to play, while Hailsham still have 24 league games left, making completing their seasons tight even with no further disruptions. Most of the cup competitions are at the quarter-final stage and scraping it would be a last resort.

The WSFL is around four weeks behind and ‘struggling’. Fixtures secretary Chris Bridges said if the bad weather continues for the next few weeks all cup competitions would be scrapped, making it the third time this has happened ten years.

The W&HDSL has decided against scrapping cup competitions, but from next month teams who have a fixture backlog will play double headers.

Sport

Looking for...

Featured advertisers

Jobs

Search for a job

Motors

Search for a car

Make Model Price from Price to

Property

Search for a house

Buy Rent

Bedrooms Price from Price from Price to Price to

What is a Cookie?
What is a Flash Cookie?
Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?
About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.
This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.
Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.
The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:
- Revenue Science ►
  
  A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Google Ads ►
  
  Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.
- Webtrends / Google Analytics ►
  
  This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.
- Dart for Publishers ►
  
  This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.
- ComScore ►
  
  ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.
- Local Targeting ►
  
  Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.
- Grapeshot ►
  
  We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.
- Subscriptions Online ►
  
  Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.
- Add This ►
  
  Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.
- 3rd Party Cookies ►
  
  We use Advertising agencies to provide us with some of the advertising on our websites. These include (but are not limited to) Specific Media, The Rubicon Project, AdJug, AdConion, Context Web. Please click on the provider name to visit their opt-out page.

Football braced for more disruption

Top stories

Sport