Spidey senses

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!