Well, this seems like an exercise in futility but we’ll go with it anyway and, assuming that all the weather forecasts are wrong, consider the club’s prospects for the matches that are scheduled to be played on Saturday, 10^th January.

The First team are due to have a local derby this weekend, when they hope to be welcoming Cheltenham Civil Service to Bishops Cleeve Playing Fields.  This will be the first match of the season between the two teams as the game at Tewkesbury Road fell victim to the floods that engulfed the early part of the season back in September.  That game has now been rearranged for a midweek date in April and, at the time of the original postponement, Civil Service would probably have been quite buoyant, having only just taken their leave of the Northern Senior League Cup, at the Quarter Final stage, and suffering a narrow opening day defeat at Broadwell Amateurs.  Since then, they have been a model of inconsistency, with thumping defeats punctuating excellent victories and an inability to put a string of decent results together throughout the campaign.  When they did get started in September, they lost 9-2 at Brimscombe & Thrupp but then followed this up with a 1-0 win at home to Brockworth and then a 3-3 draw at Kingswood.  At the end of November, they lost 6-0 at Tetbury Town and then beat Lydbrook Athletic at home, 2-1, seven days later.  With the Shortwood United game being postponed a week later, this meant that the 3-1 triumph over Wotton Rovers at Tewkesbury Road  on December 20^th allowed Civil Service to register their only back-to-back victories of the campaign to date – a landmark that they then followed up with a 7-2 defeat at Gala Wilton on December 27^th.  All in all, their away form has let them down even though they have lost 4 games at home and a tight game is to be expected as our visitors this weekend are only 4 points worse off than ourselves, albeit having played one game more.  Paul Dean returns to the squad this week, having been unavailable last weekend - not that anyone much would have noticed - to bolster a side that will be missing the services of Jon Marchant and Simon Delaney

The Reserves will be hoping that, this weekend, they will actually get to play against Randwick in the Junior County Cup as they can ill afford to have League games, which might otherwise have been played, cancelled week after week whilst we all await a thaw down in deepest Stroud.  Otherwise, it is very much as you were as far as the match prospects are concerned, with one notable exception.  Subsequent to the posting of the preview of last weekend’s matches, it became apparent that Randwick’s first team don’t actually play on the side of a mountain, as it was originally supposed.  The ground with the 1:2 slope is still used by the club but only by its minor teams, whilst its first team have decamped to a pitch at Archway School, just down the road.  No real intelligence with regard to the topography of this pitch is available but we are certain in the knowledge that it cannot be as, erm, “idiosyncratic” as the one that is actually in Randwick and so that must be a good thing – especially as there is a very real prospect that it might even be flat!  Hoping to take advantage of this rarity in the Stroud area, the Reserves will be calling on the services of Ben Norman and Dan Wood whilst both Piper brothers are also available to a full strength squad

If they actually play, the third team will have their biggest League game of the season so far on Saturday, when they are due to travel to Dowty Rotol to take on Division Five League Leaders C & G.    C & G entered the Cheltenham League at the beginning of last season and immediately looked set to sweep all before them.  They won each of their first five league games, scoring 40 goals in the process, but then came back down to earth with a bump when they lost at home, 3-2, to Southside.  They never managed to hit such heights again and the third team managed to take 4 points from them, with a 0-0 home draw and a 3-0 win away, during the latter stages of a season that had originally promised so much more but which ended up with C & G finishing in 5^th place.  There was ample consolation in the Minor Charity Cup, however, in which they played Div 5 Champions, FC Barometrics Reserves, in the final.  C & G’s opponents had knocked the third team out in the Semis but found themselves held to a 4-4 draw, after extra time, that meant that the game was settled on penalties, with C & G winning 4-3.  This season, C & G have emulated the thirds achievement in reaching the Semi Final of the GFA County Primary Cup and also sit on top of Division Five, with just one draw and one defeat in their 10 games so far.  They have had some pretty impressive victories – 6-0 at FC Electrics Reserves being the most noteworthy – but had a bit of a wobble in mid-Autumn, when they drew 1-1 at Charlton Rovers and then lost, soon after, 2-1 at Tewkesbury Town, with the goal scored by Trident in C & G’s 5-1 County Cup Quarter Final victory at home last weekend being the only one they have conceded in their last 5 games – games in which they have scored 28 times themselves!  Following last week's success in the County Cup, Mark Cottell is unavailable this week but the squad is able to welcome back Stefano Pucello following the Christmas break and will also benefit from the services of Rob Vaughan and Guy Tyrell as the club is able to name 44 players on the teamsheet for this weekend's matches