The article below was due to be published in the Stalybridge programme on 1 January but due to space limitations it will not appear. I would like to thank Iain for the kind words, coming from the owner of the best NL website I feel quite pleased.

Southport – 01/01/05

 Happy New Year! Welcome to the new year and new hope for Celtic’s season. Unfortunately, our first opponents are Southport, currently riding high in the division. Southport are in the fortunate situation to have three web sites detailing their every move.

 The official site (www.southportfc.net) is the plainest of the three, with navigation from a pull down about half way down. This grants access to the usual suspects with a full news page without any concept of archiving. The match reports are brief, but contain videos of the goals as well as post match interviews which is something unique for web sites in this division, though with Terry “goal machine” Fearns they’re using a lot of disk-space!

 Port Pie has stopped being updated this season, but remains open and acts as a portal through to the popular Port Chat forum (Happy New Year, Mellow!). There are also one or two items of historic interest on the web site that make it worthwhile keeping open, including a detailed layout of Haig Avenue, showing sunburned, rain lashed, windswept visiting supporters.

 Finally, there is Southport Stats. This is an excellent site and the best of the three. It has statistics for the ‘Port coming out of its scrollbars. That’s not just statistics for this season, but Rob Urwin is building the statistics back through time that is quite enviable. Want to know how many goals Cliff Woof scored in his 64 appearances? One. There are match reports for the current season as well as a photo gallery, fans pages and details on the reserves. This site shows what the official site should have been. 

As this article was written some time in 2004, I don’t know how our reverse fixture at the seaside went. I hope we won, like last time, even though we probably didn’t as (apart from Nantwich in the Cheshire Senior Cup) Celtic have not won away from home this season. We did quite well against Southport last season, beating them home and away. Over the past fifteen years though, Southport have won eight, Celtic have won eight and there have been five draws. At Bower Fold though, Celtic have got five victories to Southport’s two.

 This season Southport are on a flyer, and currently sit at the opposite end of the table in fourth, a full twenty-four points ahead of us; the points achieved, no doubt, because they have the third best defence in the league. They have even topped the table a couple of times this season, fighting it out with Alfreton and Harrogate. Though they are unbeaten at home since September (their best month so far was October), they have lost their last away match – going down 2-1 at Altrincham, and prior to that they drew at Lancaster. They have taken six points off Nuneaton and Runcorn and we will be their third attempt at taking six points off a team. 

Terry Fearns is Southport’s and the league’s top scorer (with fifteen), Neil Robinson sneaks in as Southport’s second top scorer with six (all scored in the first half!). Away from home they scorer 1.4 and concede 0.9 goals per game, whilst Celtic score 1.5 and concede 2.1 (another explanation of the two teams league positions). They score most of their goals in the twenty minutes surrounding half time, with another spurt in the last few minutes. Their weak point (relatively) is around the 70 minute mark.

 Celtic are coming into the game off the back of a very poor two months in which we have not won a league game. Our last win in the league was in October. We have lost the last 5 league games despite. With the last two home games called off, Celtic have not played competitive football since the 14th of December.

 All of these factors conspire for the automated prediction to give a result of 2-1 to the visitors. However, with a New Year, there is new hope and Celtic could well sneak this one!