Greetings, Spizzenergi football blog fans. After a
mid-season hiatus prompted by a couple of Friday night gigs and a fair degree
of ennui, the match reports are back and feeling suitably refreshed. Last week’s
game at Coram Fields was an extremely one-sided affair, but I will endeavour to
provide an accurate account.
Here goes...
Simon Gas’s pre-match selection plans were thrown slightly
off kilter by the non-appearance of Yev, who has moved on from merely arriving
very late to not arriving at all. As such, the two teams lined up thusly:
Blue Bibs: Bristol Rovers Paul, Simon Gas, goalkeeping Phil,
Tony, Alex, Alex’s mate from Stoke (Alywn?), Ian West Brom, Mick
Yellow Bibs: David, me, Dan, Danny, Liam, Paul (Guvnor),
mercurial punk legend Spizz, Ian Gooner, Jay
Simon’s hopes for an evenly poised game initially looked
good, as both sides traded a goal apiece (the Yellows equaliser coming from a
charged down goal kick which rebounded off Spizz, who duly celebrated like
Tardelli in Spain ’82), but Alex’s ham was strung a few minutes into
proceedings and he could take no further part. Sad to say, that may well be
prove to be the final game for the Potteries maestro and sometime Bolshevik
this side of Christmas. In an attempt to balance up the two teams Ian Gooner
was transferred over to the Blue Bibs, leaving the teams looking more like
this:
Blue Bibs: Bristol Rovers Paul, Simon Gas, goalkeeping Phil,
Tony, Ian Gooner, Alex’s mate from Stoke (Alywn?), Ian West Brom, Mick
Yellow Bibs: David, me, Dan, Danny, Liam, Paul (Guvnor),
mercurial punk legend Spizz, Jay
From being linked at one each, the Blue Bibs roared into an
unassailable lead, rattling in goal after goal. Mick thinks that he scored
three, but it may well have been four; Tony was also on hand to increase the
pain for the Yellows. I’ll have a go at recalling some of the efforts – I was
in between the sticks to see Mick cheekily flick one off his instep from a
corner which flew in off the far post, (I was also on hand to drop a Joe Hart-style
clanger from a weak effort from Tony). Ian Gooner bagged one following a neat
ball from Mick, who was patrolling the right touch-line fairly menacingly, and
tucked the ball home past Paul who had been left shamefully exposed by the
dearth of yellow-bibbed defenders. As the score kept going up the Yellows’
efforts started to look increasingly forlorn – Spizz, Dan, Jay and Liam all
could have scored but were foiled either by specialist goalkeeper Phil, the
woodwork, or by their own wayward finishing.
In terms of other memorable incidents I missed a free kick
awarded to the Blues and proceeded to play on to try and bring some semblance
of dignity to proceedings, but such was our profligacy and ill-fortune it came
to nought.
The Yellows did manage to get two goals back toward the end
– one from Dan – but it was still a shellacking of the highest order as the
final score was 10-3 to the Blue Bibs.
All in all, a game to forget for at least eight of us and
one that saw an unfortunate injury to arguably our best player. And so to the
Skinners Arms, where a reasonable number of us repaired for a post-mortem on
the evening’s game. I ended up in a discussion with Alex, his fellow man of
letters and erstwhile school mate, Mick and Paul which veered into the realms of
Marxist theory and the seemingly inexorable decline of 21st century
capitalism. Made a change from moaning about the changes in modern football,
anyway.
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