Portishead Town Football Club Walking Football

The fastest growing walking football club in the South West

In March 2025 we set out a strategy that this age group should come under the control of a manager that would have oversight of all the post 60 age groups. Rod Sowden took on the role for the first year.

Guiding principles

  1. Support the goals of the Portishead Town FC and the Walking Football section objectives
  2. There would be one manager that oversaw the age groups to manage the high level of interdependencies in the limited pool of players in the squad
  3. Each age group would develop its own squad under a dedicated captain, who would look after matchday management.
  4. The group would focus on developing our competitive capabilities and compete in tournaments.
  5. We need to develop a consistent playing style that works across the teams to enable players moving between squads easily.
  6. Developing players who do not want to play in competitions is outside of the scope of this strategy.

Winter Season 2025/26

We wanted to try out some of the other popular leagues in the Region, namely the GFA tournament at Almondsbury and the WFA league at the Hutton Moor. These are both well established leagues and it gave us an opportunity to test ourselves against different opposition from Gloucestershire and Wales at Almondsbury whilst the WFA tournament gave us access to teams from further down the M5.

We also entered the Clevedon winter tournament again. We knew this was a risk and 3 tournaments really stretched the squad, so we supplemented the squad with a couple of “loan” players from other teams. Without them we would have not been able to meet our fixture obligations.

  • Gauntlet Cup – We started the Winter with the Western Rebels Gauntlet tournament in October, and we won it. So that was a great start and our first cup.
  • Gloucester FA Over 60s. with our average being nbearer 70 this was always going to be tough, but we did well and ended in mid table, largely due to a large amount of draws.  What we didn’t expect was the lack of willingness of our own 60 to 65 group to attend tournaments. We were dependent on the Over 65 age group players to fill the fixtures along with a loan player from Western Rebels, Paul Smith, who we are very grateful to. The tournament arrangements are GFA were not the best, it was almost a self serve tournament with no obvious match day organisation.
  • Hutton Moor Over 65s, once again these games on a Monday proved a challenge with two key players not being available due to other Monday commitments. Our squad was not as strong as we would want, and we were fortunate to have a loan player from St Pauls, Nigel Walker, playing every games.  We didn’t lose many games but lacked the cutting edge to really challenge so finished in mid table.  The Hutton Moor tournament was very well managed but the actual facilities were not the best, as players were exposed to the elements with no shelter, there were also schedule clashes with the Clevedon tournament after late changes.
  • Clevedon Over 65s was our best tournament and we were consistently able to field a strong squad which showed in our performance. We only lost 3 out of 21 game. were part of the leading pack and finished top scorers in the tournament. What let us down was the amount of draws which we can almost entirely put down to running penalties. We were also disadvantaged by the scheduling of WFA tournament, on two occasions there was only 36 hours between them in Jan and Feb.