Life, pints, glory at the oldest soccer tournament you've never heard of

(by Matt McGinn espnfc.com 11-7-17)

A thick fog lingered over the pitch, obscuring the top of the church tower across the lane. In the dressing room, the clack-clack of studs on the tile floor mixed with muffled chatter coming through the ductwork from the other changing room. A cry of, "Come on, boys!" followed by three claps of the captain's hands, and I was walking out onto the heavy turf with Oving Football Club for our match against Wingrave.

It was the first round of the Oving and District Villages Cup, a title over which amateur football teams in this enclave of rural England have fought since the reign of Queen Victoria. At a meeting held in the Oving Parish Schoolroom on Friday, Sept. 6, 1889 -- one year after the Football League was established at the Royal Hotel in Manchester -- the locals created something less ambitious but equally enduring: a knockout competition open to village teams within a 12-mile radius of Oving.

Oving lies six miles north of Aylesbury, which is 60 miles north of London, in the county of Buckinghamshire, but it feels a world away from the capital. The villages that participate in the Oving Cup punctuate miles of rolling countryside linked by a web of country roads. Down the hill to Whitchurch, a left turn toward Cublington, right at the crossroads by the pond, through Aston Abbotts, down the hill, across the main road and up to Wingrave -- that was my route to the match in November 2012.

We lost to Wingrave 4-1. It wasn't close. Yet I felt a vague connection to the Oving men who made it all the way to the first cup final, where they had faced Long Crendon in the crisp sunshine of Easter Monday, 1890. The match took place at Waddesdon, roughly equidistant between the two participating villages, in front of some 400 spectators. The Bucks Herald, our local newspaper, wrote gushingly of "a splendid game" notable for "the great keenness and esprit de corps shown by the players." In that, at least, our Oving team remained true to form.

(more to come0

http://www.espnfc.us/story/3241026/the-oving-and-district-villages-cup-is-the-oldest-soccer-tournament-youve-never-heard-of