HERNE HILL HARRIERS

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Tooting Bec ought to be a Herne Hill heartland in the Southern Men's League. But, for reasons which continue to baffle me, it isn’t. So often, when we should be at our strongest, we produce our weakest performance: in 2005, a dropped relay baton condemned the team to third place in the opening fixture; a year later, winning all of our away fixtures (including a precarious trip to Plaistow in which we were nominated the “home” club), we dropped points only at Tooting, snatching a draw from the jaws of defeat at the death. Last year’s mid-season win, then, was something of a rarity.

 

In the end, despite much canvassing from the team manager, the turnout was historically low. Perhaps we are suffering from “second season” syndrome which often sees newly-promoted Premier League football teams prosper in their first season in the promised land, only to dramatically under-perform the next. There are differences, though. Herne Hill Harriers is, of course, an athletics club and, at times in this Southern League fixture was hardly a team at all.

 

The word “depleted” has recently become worryingly commonplace word in reports of senior men’s fixtures, yet with Saturday’s team bearing only a minor resemblance to the team that travelled to Mile End with title-winning aspirations as recently as last August, it is a word I am sorely tempted to recycle once again. Instead, to illustrate our badly our resources were stretched, I will say no more than the vertigo-suffering team manager resurrected one of the most unimpressive high jump careers in club history and, it is rumoured, went as far as to practise the pole vault in the early afternoon when beady eyes were looking elsewhere.

 

So, with a lengthy list of absentees, for a whole myriad of reasons, and with Dick Whittington and his cat may have been nowhere to be season, it fell to a hardy and committed few to take up the fight and prevent this story becoming a very grim tale indeed, to take an oath and stick it out to the end at a time when, (metaphorically, given the warm spring sunshine to which we were treated) it was raining more than ever.

 

Akin Oyedirian’s regular programme featuring at least 5 events, including a 13.45m triple jump, was matched by similar efforts from Mark White and Mike Cummings. Mark had expected only to hurdle but willingly threw javelin when both of the throwers selected failed to appear; Mike, selected to run the 5000m, was happily persuaded into lobbing the discus a centimetre short of 10.00m to prevent his team manager throwing a tantrum.

 

Des Austin was another to graciously agree to more than he bargained for, throwing javelin despite a suspect shoulder, while Eustace Northey scored a valuable win in the pole vault.

 

After dominating the 100m and 200m, the sprint relays should have proved a formality. Think again.  I have never before seen, and will probably never see again, circumstances contrive to catapult an A string 5000m runner into a sprint relay team, yet that is precisely what happened as voter apathy alarmingly prevailed. Fresh from their exploits in the sprint relay, and with no sprinters left within a 1-mile radius of the track, Mike and Mark were then joined by Jeff Cunningham and the team manager, who had themselves completed the 3000m steeplechase only minutes earlier, in addition to the 800m and 1500m earlier in the afternoon, for the 4x400m relay. Middle-distance runners filling a relay team? Some things never change!

 

No matter how committed the hardcore may have been, in the context of a team competition, we could scarcely have complained had we suffered the ignominy of finishing last on what is supposed to be our home turf. Quite how we didn’t remains a mystery, although the fact that we failed to contest only 2 events, the B string high hurdles and pole vault, may offer a partial explanation. Yet again, every point really did count as we finally overtook Serpentine late in the afternoon to claim an unlikely second place behind a much-improved South London Harriers.

 

Tempting though it is so speak of descending from a near-nirvana, after narrowly missing out on promotion last season to a nadir in just one match, I will refrain from doing so, for with the same number of league points as we had at this stage last year, we are, statistically at least, in the same position. A significant improvement will be needed, however, if this is to remain the case come August.

 

James Ward