Ground: Holker Street Stadium
Competition: 2016/17 Vanarama National League
Result: Barrow 1 – o Aldershot Town
Pie: erm…beef…burger…
Price: £2.00

Comments: Ok, let’s address the massive great elephant on the pitch. No, belly flopping heffer Shefki Kuqi hasn’t returned. I’m taking about the picture above which looks remarkably like a burger and not a pie. That’s because regretfully it is.

Now I know better than anyone that I am the Pie Pundit and my job is “Assessing the title contenders from the relegation specials in the footballing pastry world”®™ but I couldn’t leave Barrow empty handed. Barrow is a deeply inaccessible town where they make submarines located in the darkest depths of the Lake District. It’s a football ground that almost no one will ever visit or even contemplate visiting, so to getting a pie from there was my very own Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade style journey. Unfortunately, there was no holy grail as there were no pies.

It was an utter disaster (worse still Aldershot lost a pretty awful game one nil), but I had to eat – I’d been waiting all day for this pie! So from a strange little mobile grease shack in the ground I bought a burger. Being the only option, a £2 cheeseburger seemed a logical choice. Try all you like, but a burger is not a pie and will never be one. Not even Aldershot’s ginger nut manager The Wadfather could magic a burger into a pie. The patty was pulverized to something more abject than Aston Villa and the cheese was a sad slice desperate to escape its own dreadful existence. To overcome such a blunt slab of stodge I doused the whole thing in luminous burger sauce which made it palatable if nothing else. If in doubt, drown it in that shit, that’s what they always say. Sound advice indeed.

So there you have it, an experimental pie (burger) review for the start of the new season. Let’s hope the impending return to Wigan yields enough pies to make up for this shambles.

Rating 3/10