Barista Barrister

As this infernal and seemingly eternal Winter shows no signs of abating, we can at least warm our cockles on the recent memories of Friday night football, with (inter alia), disputed goals, contested restarts, late appearances and missing footballs.

Last Friday night’s game took place just before the most recent oriental beast arrived (is it just me, or does anyone else think the Russians are behind this so they can sell us more Gazprom at a vastly inflated price?)

With just the one withdrawal on the day – specialist goalkeeper Ed “tweaked his quad”, apparently, (no, me neither) – we had two teams of eight:

Yellows: James, Mick, me, Simon Gas, David, Mario, Peter and Ross

Blues: Charlie, Steve, Ian Gooner, Andy, Danny, Nick, Michele and Liam

Mick aside, everyone arrived on time and the Yellow team took the lead through James, (I think). Before too long Steve had got the Blues back on terms with a fierce header from a corner and at this stage the Blue team grew stronger as Danny ended his spell in goal. The Blues then took the lead before Ross - recently married, lest we forget - illustrated the blend of composure and aggression that you’d hope for in a striker by slamming home an equaliser from just outside the area.

With the match finely balanced at two apiece, there was a sense that the fifth goal might prove to be pivotal in the game’s eventual outcome and so it proved, as a succession of defensive blunders and downright bad luck saw the Blues rattle in three in fairly quick succession: David could only partially parry a corner and someone or other (Charlie?) was on hand to snaffle the ball over the line, while James’ clearance in goal careered off of Peter’s knee and came back at the goal with more pace than the original shot, leaving him with no chance.  

David also had a hand foot in the Blues’ next goal, and although his attempted backpass was intercepted by Liam who made no mistake, his apparent culpability may be slightly mitigated by the fact I was hovering nearby, to little or no effect.

I think it was after this goal that Mario saw Andy, the Yellow goalkeeper at the time, off his line and away from his area and the Italian maestro artfully slammed the ball home from the halfway line. Given that many in the Blue team seemed to think that Andy’s absence was attributable to nothing other than a lack of concentration, the goal stood, although evidently Andy had been in the process of kicking the ball from the adjacent game back to their pitch. As such, one could argue that this was ungentlemanly conduct, although it later transpired that Mario could have had another goal when he prodded the ball home after Andy had took an aeon to take a goal kick. Again, it was subsequently revealed that Andy had caught said ball, so with him placing it on the ground Mario’s ‘goal’ should have stood.

The cumulative impact of those controversies was primarily to make Danny Very Angry. On the next restart he sallied forth over the halfway line with the ball rather like a randy bull anxious to gain access to the juicy heifers on the lower field and the next Blue attack almost yielded another goal, albeit that the ball just missed the target. In doing so, it trundled over a set of goalkeeping gloves, and they received the full force of Danny’s ire, being blamed for the miss and then getting booted off the pitch for good measure.

There may or may not have been time for one final goal, although Charlie’s final effort was dispatched at least twenty seconds after the final whistle.

The final score is therefore open to dispute, but if we discount the final goal because it was after the whistle, Mario’s goal for ungentlemanly conduct, but award Mario a goal for the goalkick that never was you end up with something like

Blues 6 - Yellows 3

And so to the pub!

We actually sat outside for around the first twenty minutes or so before the temperature started to plummet, and during this time we were treated to a sort of Tribute to the Music Hall, with a glut of Ken Dodd jokes interspersed with other one-liners, some of which were delivered more adroitly than others. Upon moving inside the Skinners topics under consideration included Ian’s imminent weekend in Skegness, which would have seemed like a punishment in this weather, along with a slew of pitches for BBC4 European noir crime dramas from David and Ian, including Barista Barrister, in which a legal eagle normally found presenting at the bar begins an undercover assignment in a coffee house in order to solve a murder. They seemed to have enough material for a fairly long narrative arc, with a series of sidekicks, akin to those in Lovejoy and Kavanagh QC (no worries on the casting for that one), joining the cast ­– as well as an Attwoodesque dystopian ‘legapocalypse’ involving baristas and barristers run amok. Must have been the beer.

Until Friday…