Biddulph Victoria 1 - 1 Leamington
360 words, 1 image 
Rainbow over Knypersley Cricket Club - (Flickr user ukslim).
After showing a great capacity for fuss in the Sainsburys petrol station, Steve drove us up to Stoke — rather a long way — to watch Leamington beat Biddulph; or that was the intention, having thrashed them 5-0 when they came to Leamington.
We braved Stoke’s long running roadworks, and despite having planned to get there i plenty of time to buy a lunch of oatcakes — the local speciality — we had only three minutes to spare, and had to get burgers at the ground instead. The snack bar was struggling somewhat, not being used to a Leamington crowd.
Leamington looked pretty commanding for the first half, with James Husband in particular setting up a lot of promising attacks. Half time came and went without a goal, but eventually Jon Adams took a cross from Husband, dribbled it a short distance and popped it past the keeper.
The spring sunshine got obscured by cloud, and it began to drizzle. Ominous thunder rolled in from the West. A few particularly loud thunderclaps caused me to say “if this was a film, it would start raining really heavily right now”. Not much later, it started raining really heavily, then started hailing. The players took it in their stride. Our closest linesman appeared to be suffering, with the hail driving straight into his face, but we had little sympathy since he’d recently awarded a throw in to Biddulph despite being right on top of them when a Biddulph player kicked it out.
I could see blue sky on the horizon, and said “we’d better get a decent rainbow out of this”. And we did, framing the scoreboard of the adjoining cricket pitch.
With three minutes to go, Leamington let go of the accelerator, allowing Biddulph to score. The Brakes responded with vigour, but there wasn’t time to claw it back.
We should have won this one, and were I a meaner person I might be tempted to suggest that as I turned my back on the game to photograph the rainbow, there was a crock of gold in front of me, and a crock of something else behind.
Oh well.