Welcome back and Happy New Year, one and all. As is the custom in January, especially after such a lengthy Christmas hiatus, we had more legs than the Folie Bergere on Friday night, with (in the end) twenty men turning up to burn off some calories and stay warm.
It also marked the final appearance* at Coram Fields for Johannes, who by common consent has become one of the most popular players to tread the astro-turf, to say nothing of the most effective and talented. Apparently he has been playing here for six years, which seems impossible, but such is the inexorable march of time.
Anyway, we have a match report on.
Here are your two teams:
Yellows: Danny, David, me, Steve, Bogdan, Johnnie, Johannes, Morgan, Yev and Simon Ink
Blues: Marco, Ed, Paul, Simon Gas, Alex, Joe, Nick, Will, Alan and…. Geoff (!)
(Geoff kind of gate-crashed proceedings, although as it turned out it was no bad thing).
But what about the goals, I hear you ask? Fear not, we have goals to report!
In amongst it was Johnnie, who bagged a brace, the second of which I particularly enjoyed as it sang in off the far post (possibly via Morgan), as well as Morgan who scored at least one excellent goal by cutting on from the right and firing past specialist ‘keeper Marco Neuer. The main man himself was also in on the act – arguably the goal of the night, at least from the Yellow team, was a rasping drive from Johannes that Yev dummied outrageously to wrongfoot the excellent Marco and allow the towering midfield maestro to get on the scoresheet.
For the Blues, Nick was the chief threat with ‘two of the jammiest goals that [Joe] had ever seen’ – one was a scored direct from a corner a la George Best, which only Nick can say whether or not it was deliberate. Alex also weighed in to score past Danny.
The game was reasonably close until the final ten minutes or so, when the asphyxiating Yellow press finally wore down the Blue defence and the scoreline moved away from the Blue team. Alan was ploughing a lonely furrow up top, exhorting his Blue team-mates to go long, but their adherence to the beautiful game stymied any chance of Alan getting amongst the goal-scorers.
Will’s pregame macchiato did not quite work the wonders he might have hoped, although I am wondering if it might spark a trend to imbibe massive amounts of caffeine before we kick off, which could make life interesting the next time there is a disputed penalty shout, so say nothing for the state of the toilets.
Final score: Yellows 6 – Blues 3
And so to Dishoom, via the Skinners Arms, (at least for those who got out of the dressing room promptly). With sixteen of us, I thought the restaurant did well to keep the beer and spicy plates coming. I can only report on the chat at my end of the table, which chiefly focussed on twenty-first sexual identity and post-industrial architecture. I mean, you don’t get post-football chat like that on any of the main football podcasts, do you?
The meal was a fitting way to say auf wiedersehen to Johannes, who will hopefully forgive us all the gushing accolades and tributes he’s had over the past week or so. I’ll just say that his combination of (on the one hand) wonderful feet, sumptuous passing and peerless decision making with an ethos of involving everyone in the play regardless of age and ability is very rare and will be very much missed. Oh, and he doesn’t moan, either.
*Bit of breaking news – the big man will be here for one more week, owing to visa issues associated with his move to the Big Apple. Assuming that the British Home Office may be partly responsible, this could finally be the first tangible benefit of Brexit. The sunlit uplands are finally here!
Stick that in yer blog! 