Post by sandbachhatter on Jan 23, 2017 8:10:42 GMT
Morning all
Following on from Macc Jnr, is his father, with some G-based offerings....
Gainare play in green at the rather more charmingly-named Torigin Bird Stadium - where Ecuador trained ahead of the 2002 World Cup.
And that takes us neatly to...
Get voting!
Following on from Macc Jnr, is his father, with some G-based offerings....
Gainare Tottori (Japan)
First stop on this week’s whirlwind tour: the Japanese Prefecture of Tottori, where Third Division Gainare ply their trade.
The outfit started life in 1983 as the Tottori Teachers’ Soccer Club, and for six years would only admit players practising with the Japanese equivalent of a PGCE - until, no doubt, the pool of even-halfway-decent schoolmaster-footballers was felt to be a tad limited.
There was a name-change, too - but a rather bizarre one: ‘Gainare’ apparently, and for some unexplained reason, combines gaina, a word from the Tottori dialect for ‘great’, with the Italian sperare (‘hope’)!
Even stranger is the club’s mascot - one GeGeGe no Kitarō, a Japanese horror anime character. The link has some logic, as Kitarō was created by a Tottori resident - but would you take your children along to watch Gainare’s equivalent of Martin Bellis dressed up as a scary 350-year-old demon boy with one eye and dishing out pre-match sweets?!
Gainare play in green at the rather more charmingly-named Torigin Bird Stadium - where Ecuador trained ahead of the 2002 World Cup.
General Lamadrid (Argentina)
... well, a little further down than Ecuador, but within South America at least. For, in a little-known suburb of the Argentinian capital, we find the poor, and oft-ignored, relations of Boca Juniors and River Plate.
Sounds familiar - eh, fellow Hatters? Let me introduce, from Buenos Aires, Club Atlético General Lamadrid, who, like County, play regional football - albeit in Argentina’s Fourth Division, and at a sports complex specialising in, among other pastimes, roller-skating!
General Lamadrid must have set some kind of record in 2009, when, during a match against Barracas Bolívar, 18 (EIGHTEEN) of the club’s players were sent off!
Reports say that the trouble started in the stands when a number (possibly seven) of the Lamadrid youth-teamers got into a ‘discussion’ with Barracas fans that took a nasty turn. Cue first-team members jumping into said stand to ‘help’ their young club-mates... and a plethora of red cards for the game’s participants and non-participants alike.
As coincidence would have it, this week of C.H.A.S.M. coincides with a week-long festival of paragliding activities in and around the General Lamadrid suburb. The festival, from 20 to 27 January, goes under the name of Semana del Cross... or ‘Cross Week’. Given the events of 2009, that seems pretty apt!
Gibraltar United (Gibraltar)
Closer to home for our final port of call - and an outfit that, rather unusually for a football club, was founded during World War Two (in 1943).
The founders themselves were servicemen of Gibraltar who wanted to play matches against British regiments and other military units within the Territory - and, once the War was over, this most local of teams performed rather well, as Gibraltar United - featuring native Gibraltarians only - went on to collect 11 league titles, ahead of other clubs with squads of players from Spain and the wider world.
The club had a momentary lapse between 2011 and 2014 when, in a bid to achieve even greater success, it merged with the far more cosmopolitan Lions FC. But the lure of a return to an all-Gibraltar set-up was too strong. So strong, in fact, that the reformed Gibraltar United were prepared to take relegation to the Second Division as part of the deal - although they became top-flight again at the first time of asking.
Gibraltar United play at the Victoria Stadium - and so, too, do all the other nine First Division clubs! Needless to say, ‘home advantage’ and ‘away-day specialists’ are not part of the Gib-footy pundits’ vocabulary...
Get voting!
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