Nirvana

Greetings, Blog fans, and welcome back to this week’s round-up of all things Coram Fields. Our numbers were swollen to bursting this week, as we fought out a nine aside game with none other than the Prodigal Ian returning for his first turn out since returning from the dead (twice).

Here were your teams:

Yellows: me, Bristol Paul, Danny, Andrea, David, Simon Ink, Ed, Will and Morgan

Blues: Ian, Simon Gas, Kanat, Joe, Geoff, Bogdan, Steve, Johannes and Yev

The consensus before the game seemed to be that these were two very evenly matched teams – words like “humdinger”, “cracker” and “excellent” were bandied around – and I had secret hopes for what is very much the nirvana of Friday night football: the goalless draw. More of that anon.

Despite the eventual final score and the pre-match punditry, the game actually felt quite one-sided, with the Blue team dominating the middle of the park, chiefly thanks to a typically imperious performance from Johannes. The Yellow team did manage to get up the pitch at times, but found a defensive quadrilateral of Kanat, Joe, Steve and Simon Gas almost impossible to penetrate, as they adroitly shuttled the ball around the tentative Yellow press. Ian’s nearest and dearest may have worried about his first run out post heart procedure, but I don’t imagine that his blood pressure was unduly troubled by the occasional foray forward from the Yellows, the odd trundling shot notwithstanding.

All that said, the Yellows defended stoutly – Morgan played an uncharacteristic yet effective role at the back, and Andrea was as efficient with ball possession as his opposite numbers on the Blue team. The Yellows’ ultimate defeat was probably due to a failure to utilise Will as well as they might have, and other than some fairly speculative late long shots from Will and Morgan the Blues’ clean sheet never looked like being sullied.

The only goal of the game came from Johannes, perhaps inevitably, as the Yellows took advantage of a temporary one man advantage when Paul left the field for a few minutes, and Johannes dropped off into space and calmly nudged the ball home into the bottom left hand corner from the edge of the box.

Final score: Blues 1 – Yellows 0 (Nirvana narrowly avoided)

Plenty of handball shouts again this week, some more contentious than others, but precious little drama other than that. And so to the pub!

And a bumper turn out in the Skinners’, as Ian caught up with everyone who made the journey down there. There was a nice riff on Simon Gas’s stance on prioritising the Friday night football match over player welfare, but then again you don’t successfully run a game for 30 years by pandering to snowflakes. We came up with a tableau that had Simon as a World War One platoon captain ordering us all over the top to retrieve lost footballs, rifles and the regimental goat (who would be our GOAT? Suggestions welcome!), despite bullets whistling around our ears and fatal wounds being sustained. “Corporal Walmsley! Jarvis! Private Gough has left the bibs in no-man’s land – form a search party. No, not for his body – we need the Yellow bibs to dust the mess!”

See you on Friday….