You may not have noticed but something monumental is about to happen to the club.  More monumental than the latest return of Garry Lozynsky, more monumental still than the third team reaching Christmas unbeaten in the League and even more monumental than Frank possibly not getting suspended in time for his birthday in February.  The club is about to obtain a new record goalscorer!!!

The current record, as far as we can tell, is held by club legend Phil Cotton, on the back of whose shirt tales the club was first elevated to Northern Senior League Division One status back in the mid nineties.  Phil was with the club for 5 years, was Secretary for 4 of those years and scored 191 goals for the club before moving back to Leicester to become an undertaker.  This seemed entirely appropriate back in 1998 – he had spent so much of his time with the club burying opposition defences that funeral direction appeared like a logical career move!!

We say “as far as we can tell” because the suspicion remains that another club legend, John Woodley, the Club’s Life President and former Chairman, who played for the club from the very moment it was founded, back on November 13^th, 1965, until the mid eighties and played up front, with noteworthy success, for most of the seasons in between, may well have scored more.  However, the club does not have records covering its early days and, it has to be said, we would not be comparing like for like here.  We definitely do not want to disparage John’s achievements, which played a major part in making the club what it is today, but the first team spent only one season higher than Cheltenham League Division Three level in his era and the Reserves spent most of their time in Divisions Five and Six.  Therefore, as it really wouldn’t seem that we would be making a valid comparison, Phil’s record is the one that the club acknowledges.

Well, it’s the one that the club acknowledges at the moment, because it is highly likely, given a fair wind and decent luck with illness and injury, that Jamie Roberts will surpass 191 some time early in the New Year.  Jamie first joined the club as a fresh faced and relatively lithe 24 year old back in 2001, played 19 games, scored 9 goals, saw that we were rubbish and didn’t come back again the following season.  However, by the time the 2003-04 season started, he was living in Cheltenham and was, therefore, able to commit to the club on a rather more permanent basis.  In his first full season, which was also the club’s last at Quat Goose Lane, he scored 19 goals in just 24 games to become the club’s leading goalscorer for the first time.  He didn’t score the last goal at the Club’s former home, though, because that “honour” fell to his good friend Rick Redfearn – who scored it for Hatherley Rangers!!!!

To date, that was the last time that Jamie scored less than a goal a game in a season for the club.  The next year, he notched 27 times in 22 appearances but in 2005-06, his contribution to the club’s second Cheltenham League Championship was 36 goals in 24 games, giving a ratio of 1.5 goals per game!!  A further 33 goals in 30 games in Division Two of the Northern Senior League the following year preceded a drop down the club’s ranks, where he scored 40 goals in 24 games last season.  7 of these were scored in 2 games for the third team, whilst the other 33 were derived from 19 games for the Reserves.  All in all, at the beginning of this campaign, Jamie had scored 164 goals from 142 appearances, a figure that has now been further inflated, to 183, by the 19 goals that he has already scored this season.  This leaves 8 more needed to equal the record and 9 more to beat it, a target that he should reach, given his current rate of scoring this season, in 6 games time!!!

When the imminence of the likelihood that he will break the club’s goalscoring record was pointed out to him, Jamie, or “J” as he is known his friends, was shocked.  “I didn’t realise that I was that close” he stammered, before pointing out that he never kept a track of these things and that records really weren’t important to him.  When pressed, he ascribed his goalscoring longevity to a healthy diet, an abstemious life style and a penchant for training that borders on the obsessive. 

But no one believes him!!