Andover Town v Paulsgrove abandoned after Paulsgrove are reduced to six players
A Hampshire non-league match was abandoned early in the second half on Saturday, with the home side Andover Town leading Paulsgrove 8-0. The game was in the Hampshire Premier League Division One, which sits in the 12th tier of the English football pyramid, the long ladder of leagues that runs from the Premier League down to village pitches.
Andover were already 7-0 up at half-time. According to Andover manager Robbie Skeates, four Paulsgrove players did not come back out for the second half. Then, after Andover scored their eighth goal, another Paulsgrove player went off injured. That left Paulsgrove with six players on the field.
The laws of football say a match may not continue if either team has fewer than seven players. The game was called off on that basis.
Skeates did not hold back about what he saw. He described what happened after the score reached 8-0 as "a complete farce". Andover will submit a report to the league about the abandoned match, he said.
The Hampshire Premier Football League has confirmed to BBC Sport that it is investigating the game. The league has not yet said what it will decide.
Paulsgrove appear to have put the abandonment down to injuries, according to social media posts they published. BBC Sport asked the league for Paulsgrove's contact details so it could put the club's account to them directly. The league declined that request.
The two clubs are in very different places this season. Andover are mid-table in a 16-team division. Paulsgrove are bottom, and they have lost all 10 of their league games so far. Three of their completed games have ended in defeats by eight goals or more.
Scorelines like these are not unheard of at this level, but they are rarely seen in a match that ends early. Most of the time, a heavy defeat is played out to the final whistle, however one-sided it has become. Here the game stopped with more than half an hour still to play, and the question of how it got that far now sits with the league.
For the players on both sides, the result will matter less than the reason it ended. Andover's report and the league's investigation will set out the facts. Until then, the 8-0 scoreline will stand as a strange footnote to a weekend of local football in Hampshire.
