Sporting Nostalgia

I got home from a hospital appointment at lunch time to discover that Bromley football club's National League game against Altrincham was on BT Sport. As a boy, I spent many hours at Hayes Lane watching my local non-league team, but never before have they been on live TV - following their promotion at the end of last season, Bromley's current position is the highest it has ever been in the English football pyramid. It seemed surreal seeing the Hayes Lane ground, which has changed little in the intervening years, on television, but it brought back many happy memories. As well as being Bromley's ground, it was also the scene of the  highlights of my own Saturday league football career - in the late 1980s I played two local cup finals there as a goalkeeper and kept a clean sheet both times. Unfortunately the Bromley keeper today was less successful, and my boyhood team lost 3-1.