FRUSTRATED Badshot Lea boss Gavin Smith has spoken of the “nightmare” of yet more postponed matches in a season dogged by bad weather.

The Baggies were due to play a league game at Molesey on Saturday and their Aldershot Senior Cup quarter-final tie against Westfield at their Westfield Lane ground on Tuesday – but both games succumbed to more bouts of torrential rain.

“This is the worst spell I’ve ever experienced in football,” said the former Bracknell Town player. “It gets to you, you just want consistency and to keep playing. It’s a nightmare.”

The upshot for Badshot Lea, who lie 12th in the Premier Division of the Combined Counties League after a troubled season but are confident of staging a late-season move up the table with a settled squad, is that they face the daunting prospect of another 13 games before the season is due to finish on April 25.

That in itself is going to mean playing two or three times per week until the end of the season, but the Baggies now must also factor in a new date for their Aldershot Senior Cup tie as they bid to each the last four.

“You get frustrated by it,” he said. “You know a game is going to be off but you still try to prepare properly and carry on training knowing that the game is going to be off.

“Everyone has struggled. We’ve got a decent pitch but even we’re struggling now.”

Heavy rain at the back end of last week unsurprisingly put paid to the Molesey game, while further periods of the seemingly endless wet stuff this week put paid to Tuesday’s cup tie.

It’s certainly not a situation exclusive to Badshot Lea, with the likes of Sutton Common Rovers, Raynes Park Vale, Colliers Wood and Banstead Athletic particularly hard hit.

And murmurings have been growing this season that the timing of league games may need to be looked at by the various leagues in order to minimise future end-of-season fixture congestion, with cup games taking precedence over league games.

“At the start of the season you have a lot of cup games, such as the FA Cup and the FA Vase, and then you are liable for replays, but maybe if they scheduled in more midweek games at the start of the year it would probably help to get as many games as you can out of the way at the start of the year,” suggested Smith.

Curiously, Smith said he would relish the prospect of playing on Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday each week until the end of the current campaign, and he was confident that his players would stand up to the test too.

“I would have loved it as a player, games are better for me than training,” he said. “The only thing is that it is tough to play that amount of games in quick succession, so we will have to look at rotating players.

“I don’t think player availability will be a problem with the lads that we have got because they are always there for training on a Thursday. This season, whichever group of players we’ve had we’ve had good numbers at training, they’ve always made themselves available.

“And we’ve more or less got two players for each position, so we’ll be fine.”

Badshot Lea seem certain to resume their league campaign tomorrow against Abbey Rangers, but the venue is as yet unclear. It is scheduled to be a home game for the Baggies at Westfield Lane, but if more rain makes the Wrecclesham pitch unplayable the game will be switched to a 3G surface at Abbey Rangers.

Lea are then due to head north to face fellow mid-table side Colliers Wood United next Wednesday.

Smith said: “I don’t see any reason why we can’t beat Abbey Rangers on Saturday. We’re really excited by the players that we’ve got and we’re enjoying the games and seeing what they can offer.”