GMWFL Season 2025 Half Term Report

With half the 2025 season already completed, it’s time to reflect on the new format of 10 teams per division in the over 60s and 65s leagues.

With 3 up and 3 down, it does give teams a better chance of promotion and unfortunately also relegation from the first divisions. The benefits are obviously more variety in teams they play against each session. As far as I am aware, there have been no complaints regarding this new format, so we can only assume that teams are happy with it.

One or two complaints have been made about the order of play in the fixtures. Unfortunately, fitting fixtures in a restricted time span with 10 teams on 4 pitches is no easy task and is very time consuming. If any volunteers would like to have a stab at it themselves, please contact me, I would love to hand over the job.

With the over 70s also changing to 2 up, 2 down, that league also gives teams more incentive to do well. If we had the pitch capacity, ideally we could have one division of 10 teams and one of 5 teams, but with teams ageing and other clubs wishing to join, 2 divisions of 10 teams would not be an impossibility.

Some interesting statistics – in the 4 months half season, March, April, May and June, there were 324 fixtures played with 13 Blue cards and no Red cards. Of the 13 cards, 10 were for DOGSO offences, 2 for running and contact offences and 1 for dissent. That works out at 1 card for almost every 25 fixtures, which must be the envy of many leagues up and down the country. Thankfully, we generally have teams playing walking football in the correct spirit, long may it continue.

Thanks once again to our referees, we must have one of the best squads of referees in any walking football league.

Finally, many thanks to Kevin Williams for writing the monthly session reports, again another example of a person with an already heavy workload taking on more responsibility.

Comments welcome below.

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