Morning all, welcome to another week. Before I get into Friday’s game, a quick word about the game on the 20th October. It would be remiss not record in the annals of the Friday Night Football saga the wonderful goal that David scored; I think his team ran out winners by several goals, but the pick of the bunch was undoubtedly his left foot volley that almost sang on contact and flew into the right hand corner, just inside the post. My other memory of that evening was a terrible own goal that I scored; I deliberately ignored the exhortations of the specialist goalkeeper – Marco (dressed for the evening as Manuel Neuer) – who clearly told me to leave the ball, and instead I decided to get a foot to the ball and sent it gently trundling over the line past the helpless goalie. I have been experimenting with bifocal contact lenses – a truly horrible experience, akin to trying to read the Bible while peering through two milk bottles with a migraine – and I am definitely blaming them.
Anyway, we go again, as the players say. After a week one week interregnum in which Simon Gas picked the teams and sent them out in Cinemascope, I returned as Head of Selection.
Friday 3rd November’s game seemed in doubt an hour before kick off as the kid’s Fireworks Display on the adjacent Coram Fields playing area got underway, plunging the field into darkness, but all was well and we had 17 players on show:
Yellows: David, Simon Ink, Simon Gas, Andrew*, Johnnie, Oleksandr, Joe, Gio
Blues: Ian, me, Paul, Danny, Nick, Klaus, Anatoily, Yev and Alan
The Yellows won 9-0. See you next week.
*I definitely got the team selection wrong; not that it would have made a huge difference, but I was under the impression that ‘Andrew’ was a fifty-something Chelsea-supporting left back, as opposed to a box-to-box Scotsman in his twenties, who I had not had the pleasure of meeting before. But the main problem was that with both Gio and Oleks on one team, and six of the Blues’ players being 50 year or over on the Yellows, we had a slight issue with legs.
I am not convinced that 9-0 was necessarily a fair result, as the Blues had plenty of chances to score that either just squirted wide or were squandered because of wayward footwork (the dead leaves on the ground were a factor here), but Gio in particular was absolutely lethal. I think he got a hat-trick, but such is the quality of his footwork that any situation where he is either one-on-one with the ‘keeper or has just one defender to beat usually results in a goal. His X-G must have been very close to his total number of goals.
Simon Ink was also on the scoresheet (I thought it was a own goal from Paul to begin with), as was Johnnie and Oleks. We had a mild contretemps following a disputed freekick for a late trip on, I think, Klaus, but Yev sportingly prodded the ball back to the Blues’ goalie to defuse the situation. All in all, a bit a shocker.
But a tremendous night at the pub, as Oleks, Yev, Ian Alan, me, Paul, David and the main man himself all celebrated Simon’s 64th birthday. Ian generously bought a round of single malt whiskeys to mark the occasion and delivered an impromptu speech thanking him for years and years of dedicated service to ensuring we can all argue over the handball rule each week, whatever the season. On the week that marked the release of The Beatles’ final single, we can all agree that we definitely still need Simon now he’s 64.
See you all on Friday.
Stick that in yer blog! 