Who are the most successful team in the history of the top division in the Corsham Print Wiltshire Senior League?
Comparisons over the years are made difficult by the fact that the first 16 seasons of the league saw winning teams receive two points for a win, with Season 1992-93 being the first from which it became three points for a win. Comparisons become more meaningful if an adjustment is made to the pre-1992-93 period by giving teams an extra point for their win and then making an assessment on a Points Per Game (PPG) basis to allow for the fact that teams have been members of the league for different periods of time.
The table below shows the record of every team that has played in the top division over the period from Season 1976-77 to the point at which play was ended in Season 2019-20 (the league website will
include the results and tables at time of cessation in the History Section of the website). Where teams simply changed their names the records under the different names have been combined but where teams merged over the years these records have been left separate. Current members of the Premier Division are shown in bold.
On a pure adjusted PPG basis, the top four teams in the table are all there on the basis of one season, with FC Sanford leading the way on the back of their 2011-12 campaign which saw them average nearly 2.5 points per game. Melksham Town’s one season drop down into the Wiltshire Senior League in Season 1993-94 sees them in second spot with Supermarine Sports 2013-14 campaign putting them in third place, with Aldbourne Ferndale (formed from a merger of Aldbourne Park and Ferndale Athletic) in fourth spot on the back of their title winning season in 1994-95. The highest placed current member of the league, and the first where the record is based on more than one successful season, are Kintbury Rangers, who have averaged 2.225 points per game since joining the league.
Given the distortion that a single good season can create, a much better way to assess who has been the most successful team over the history of the league is to use a minimum number of games in the league, say, 100 games to make the comparison. The table below shows the position if this criteria is applied:
Applying the minimum number of games criteria the table is headed by the Park side who dominated the league in the early years, winning the top division title six times in the first nine years of the league’s existence. Their average PPG, when adjusting everything to three points for a win, was 2.074 in the 326 games they played. Two other sides have averaged over 2.0 points per game over the years from more than 100 games, the others being the Raychem side from the late 1990’s and the New College Swindon side who won the league twice in 2008-9 and 2009-10. Just below the 2.0 points per game mark are current league members Shrewton United who have averaged 1.974 in some 578 games, a really impressive record. Current manager Joe Sheldrake will no doubt be proud that his current side improved that record during Season 2019-20.
The final table below looks at the rankings based on total adjusted points over the 44-year existence of the league. In this final table four of the top six places feature current members of the league, with Melksham Town Reserves heading the table with Shrewton in third spot, Wroughton fourth and Corsham Town Reserves in sixth place.
Hopefully, the current circumstances surrounding Coronavirus will improve in the not too distant future allowing football to resume, enabling the current membership of the league the chance to improve on their historic records. In the meantime, to explore in more detail each of the individual season’s making up the club records shown above go to the History Section
of the league website.