{"id":672792,"date":"2026-11-02T16:04:10","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T16:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/672792\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T16:04:10","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T16:04:10","slug":"andover-town-game-abandoned-after-paulsgrove-reduced-to-six-players-a-farce-says-boss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/672792\/","title":{"rendered":"Andover Town: Game abandoned after Paulsgrove reduced to six players a ‘farce’, says boss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking to Andover Town’s website,, external<\/a> Skeates said: “I’ve been involved in football a long time and I’ve genuinely never seen anything like what happened today from an opposition side.<\/p>\n

“All 11 of their players walked off perfectly fine at half-time with us 7-0 up.<\/p>\n

“They eventually came back out with seven, so apparently four must have managed to get injured in the changing room.<\/p>\n

“We scored pretty much straight away to make it 8-0 and from there it became a complete farce.”<\/p>\n

BBC Sport has asked the league for Paulsgrove FC’s contact details but that request was declined.<\/p>\n

However, several posts on X appearing to come from Paulsgrove’s official account claimed the players were all genuinely injured.<\/p>\n

One reply to a post from Skeates read: “Sadly can’t make injured player [sic] continue”.<\/p>\n

Skeates said Andover Town would submit a report to the league.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the Hampshire Premier Football League said: “As is standard for any abandoned game, an investigation is under way and until that process has been completed, we cannot make any comment.”<\/p>\n

Andover Town are mid-table in the 16-team league, which is in the 12th tier of the English football pyramid. <\/p>\n

Paulsgrove are bottom, having lost all 10 games this season, including three completed games where they were beaten by eight goals or more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaking to Andover Town’s website,, external Skeates said: “I’ve been involved in football a long time and I’ve…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":672793,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-672792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=672792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672792\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/672793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=672792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=672792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=672792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}