Official West Hartlepool RFC

Candy is much higher standard.

And your club can only enter 1 senior league, surely???

yep

It'll of been one of the Haswell brothers - don't ask me which one I always get them the wrong way round.

We've had quite a few Westoe Players pull on the West shirt over the years.

Andy Quinn wrote:

> And your club can only enter 1 senior league, surely???

I thought that, but I heard that Team Northumbria is made up of Falcons development players, so is that just Falcons under another name?

It doesn't seem completely stupid for a team to enter a second string, they'd have to start from the bottom, and if they did manage to get a few promotions, then you'd just have to have a restriction against the second string being allowed to be promoted in to the same league as the firsts, although I think that the likelyhood of any teams seconds string being able to catch their first team is highly unlikely.

EDF Energy Senior Cup Round 5 North :

Billingham 24 Rossendale 18
Horden 18 Sandel 13

Congrats to both teams, they are two of the last four teams from the North division, and will now join with the winners of the midlands division for round 6, I think three more wins for them and they would reach the final.

That match was the reason why the West v Billingham tie was called off, it may be a while before the tie can be played if Billinghams cup form in that competition continues.

MJ Campbell I was at the game on Saturday,when the incident with the ref occured and believe me it was not funny.The lad involved,the Club and all our members regret and are ashamed by what happened.No matter what goes on we know this type of behavior cannot be tolerated.

It came about due to the fact that it was a hard fought and passionate derby game that the Ath were deservedly winning(even though both sides did not particularly play well).At 12-5 up on 80 minutes we were battling hard against a strong Seaton fight back.We had one man in the sin bin and whilst he was there the ref called last play twice.The sin binned man then returned to the pitch and the ball left the field twice and still the ref called last play.Eventually the pressure told and Seaton scored in the corner.That was when our Full back lost his temper and grabbed the ref.It was not borne of malice but of frustration at all the hard work wasted.

This is an incident that the lad now has to live with.All in all the ref played just short of nine minutes of injury time when the only incident I remember was just before half time when Lewis Humble was injured and had to leave the field(this was only 2 or 3 minutes)

But without the ref there is no game and with no games at our level then there is no where for a ref to improve his game.As I say this is not us making excuses its just putting down the facts as I saw them.

Personally I think that if a ref needs to improve his skills before taking a competitive match he should do it on junior matches.

I'm glad to have a better account of what happened. (If it was football and his name was Paolo Di Canio he would probably only get a token ban.)

I can understand the lads frustration and his actions given the circumstances, although touching a referee can not be condoned, I hope he doesn't get too severly punished for it if it was just horseplay.