A very warm welcome back to the Spizzenergi Friday Night
Football blog, after a Summer long hiatus in which the England football team
reached a new low, contriving to lose to a country with a population smaller
than that of Cornwall, forlornly chasing the shadows of a team of Nordic
ubermensch. And if you thought things couldn’t get worse, they then appointed
Sam Allardyce as the new manager.
What else has been happening? Jose Mourinho showed why he’s
the best man at spending other people’s money manager in football by
spunking £80m on a half decent midfielder who his new club had previously let
go for next to nothing and then slating his own players after a couple of early
season reverses. Oh, and we have a new Prime Minister who is going to reintroduce
Grammar Schools, mainly because she went to a jolly good one.
Some things remain reassuringly stable, however, and as we lurched
into the second week of September the phone chirruped with a text from Simon
Gas to announce the return of football. Hurragh!
There’s been three games played so far in 2016-2017, of
which I’ve played in two, so a massive apology for the dearth in match reports.
What can I say, I’m a very busy man. Hopefully, normal service will be resumed
forthwith.
Of the two games played up to Friday, I can reveal that the first
game was a little lopsided thanks to a combination of people arriving late and
my inability to count; my chief memory from the season opener was Ian Gooner’s
tour de force of an appearance, scoring at least twice and generally giving the
impression of having spent August at a pre-season Alpine training camp. There
was also a return to action from Ross, whose better half apparently shares my
wife’s predisposition for looking for online parenting tips at 3.00 am.
I missed the second game, but apparently Steve scored with
his nose. You heard it here first.
Last Friday’s game was billed as nine aside, but there was a
phantom Morgan Stanley employer slated to take part and as such, it ended up
eight v nine. But the Ninth Player was none other than the lesser spotted
Spizz, mercurial post-punk idle idol. (Hurragh again!). Actually, he’s not been so idle, as evidenced here.
And here are what your two teams looked like:
Blues: Peter, Liam, Steve, Tony, Michele, Joe, Bristol Paul,
Mick
Yellows: Mark, Simon Gas, Danny, Andrea, Mario, me, Tom,
Spizz, Ed
Tom arrived slightly late to the fray and by this stage the
Blues had already taken the lead through an own goal – something which became rather
a theme of the match – via Ed, who attacked the space in which the Blues would
have had a striker and promptly attacked the ball into the vacant net. Steve
nodded home from a corner shortly after as everyone tried to mark Peter, rather
like Lilliputians trying to tether Gulliver, and the score became three nil to
the Blues when Michele fizzed home a shot into the roof of the net as I groped
in vain at thin air.
My usually ignominious spell in nets was brightened by one
notable save, however. Using my newly acquired spidey-senses, (these have come
along with a vicious spider bite and a swollen leg picked up in the tropical
glades of SE20 that has necessitated a ten day course of antibiotics) I managed
to get something in the way of Liam’s point-blank header and push the ball over
the bar.
Thereafter there ensued something of a mini-comeback from
the Yellows, as Mark hit home a real daisy-cutter which took a deflection off
of me and trickled into the net past a surprised Liam in goal. Soon after Mario
scored what was arguably the goal of the game as he picked his shot and blasted
in off the upright to make it 3-2. However, calamity once again befell the
Yellows’ defence as Danny and Simon Gas got their wires crossed and managed to
concede another own-goal with Peter lurking menacingly just behind them.
Spizz did make his presence felt by loitering close enough
to the goal keeper to force yet another own goal from one of the Blues’
defensive titans (Steve, I think) which made it 4-3, but with time running out
and the Yellows trying to press forward Liam managed to intercept Simon Gas’s
forward pass and calmly lob the ball from all of about twenty-five yards to
complete the scoring.
Final score: Blues 5 – Yellows 3
Honourable mentions to both Danny and Tom, whose sterling
defensive work didn’t deserve to end in vain, while Michele, Peter and Tony’s
movement proved too much for a Yellows midfield that saw plenty of the ball but
couldn’t hang onto it.
Just the one pint of ‘Doosra’ for me this week, which sadly
seems to be to the norm these days (one pint that is, not Urdu word for ‘the
wrong one’). As such, other than a quick discussion of 1970’s cigarette
advertising and Simon’s new job, I can’t report on the full goings on in the
Skinners.
Until Friday!
