Marchons, marchons!

Welcome all to a brand new week. Hopefully this post will provide some form of light relief following the appalling news over the weekend. Friday’s game saw yet another bumper crop of eager young (and not-so-young) things turn up for a game, with a grand total of nineteen players in the mix.

Here’s what the PASS supercomputer came up with:

Blues: Mario, Joseph, Peter, Danny, Mick, Chris, Simon Gas, Tim and Liam

Yellows: Alex, Jaime, Patrick, Antonio, Callum, Alan, Ian Baggies, me, Phil and Ross

As you can see, ten plays and nine and a real work-out for the highly complex algorithm deployed by the ones and zeros of data crunching.

It was first blood to the Blues; almost literally, when Peter stood on my index finger following a goalmouth melee, but Peter soon got on the scoresheet with a clinical finish following some Klopp-style pressing on the Yellows fullback positions. Callum soon equalised, for the first of his four goals, and then the scoring continued in a percussive, ding-dong fashion right across the hour’s play.

I think Patrick got the second Blues’ goal – whether or not it was the second or third Blues goal it was a fine finish. The LSE undergraduate controlled a lobbed pass on this left knee and swivelled to smash an explosive volley into the bottom left hand corner of the goal. Danny then scored a very good equaliser, guiding the ball high over the ‘keeper’s head with his left foot after a tigerish tackle from the left wing.

Callum, meanwhile, was gorging himself at the other end, clinically seizing on any errant pass and volleying home an array of goals with dead-eyed aplomb. At the other end, Peter and Liam were in similarly voracious mood; Peter got a hat-trick on the night with characteristically efficient shooting, while Liam performed his trademark roll manoeuvre to get on the scoresheet. On another night he could have had at least three, as a cheeky flicked header landed just the wrong side of the post, while another opportunity went begging after he managed to overcompensate by shooting wide of the goalie’s left and also the post.

Antonio was also in amongst the goals, capitalising on a blocked attempted clearance from Peter to ping home a nice volley, which made it something like five apiece.

After Callum had scored goal number four and Liam made it six for the Blues, Antonio was on the end of a fearsome looking crunching tackle from Chris and had to withdraw from proceedings. This should have left the Blues with an advantage and with a few minutes left the smart money would have been on them grabbing goal number thirteen on the night. However, following an abortive first whistle, play continued and Ross harried Danny and assorted Blue defenders to slam home a seventh goal for the Yellows just as the whistle was being peeped. To be fair, around half of the Blues’ players had stopped playing, but not those immediately in front of the goal.

If 6-6 sounds like a tennis score, think of Ross’s finish as a tie-breaker. We agreed that in the Golden Clog award, given to this season’s highest scorer, Ross’s ‘goal’ from Friday would be denoted with an asterisk.

To the Skinners, where a few of us watched the highly predictable death-by-a-thousand-passes 2-0 win for Spain over England. There were a few England players looking out of their depth, to be frank, which doesn’t augur well for next Summer’s Euro tournament. With Alan and Mick choosing to watch Ireland take on Bosnia-Hercegovina in the Irish pub around the corner, it was a relatively early finish to proceedings. On the way home I was checking the other scores when the terrible news from Paris started to roll in. Tomorrow night’s game at Wembley should be a highly emotional affair. I think the idea of England fans singing La Marseillaise is a very laudable one, but given that they struggle to keep time with the moronic theme from the Great Escape I think a dignified silence would best given the circumstances.

I’m off to Cornwall this weekend, so I’ll rejoin you in two weeks’ time.