"Hello,
it's M---. Sorry it's a bit last minute but we've had a delivery of grapes and
I need to tread them today." One fullback lost to Bacchus. From there
things just got trippier. The weather pretended it was being directed by James
Cameron for a pilot of '2012 - The End of the World Started in Hackney', a real
turkey but one the studios seemed keen to pump liquidity into. So much that it
ended up a great big watery factory-farmed Christmas special.
But wait, there
was a football match promised wasn't there. So there we are, 12 silly sausages
standing out on Hackney Marshes for 90 minutes, in horizontal rain - the only
kind you seem to get on the Marshes - having put the nets up, warmed up, warmed
down, kicked a ball around, warmed up again, argued a bit, tried to phone a
friend with fingers so cold and wet they couldn't make the touch screen work
but did invent a whole new game called angry penguins, cooled down again, then
cooled right down, to sub zero and very very wet temperatures. Super cooled.
We
were conducting bits of information at the speed of the fastest broadband you
can buy but none of it was going anywhere. "We'll be there in 10-15
minutes" (from the oppo) was beginning to seem like a distant memory. Oh
wait - it was a distant memory. Half an hour later than advertised we kick off.
Half an hour sooner than normal the ref blew as he had to
be off to his nice warm home. Our soggy bank notes in his nice dry rain coat.
During that hour the Rum Bunch put four goals past us. We wandered about watching
them in admiration. They are very big and very good, they run really, really
fast and kick the ball extremely hard. Our spindly knees knocked together in
shorts that started out big and baggy but ended up clinging like seaweed. We
are quite small anyway and had shrunk a bit in the rain, certainly our
testicles had. It's days like this that remind you why you do it.
Team: Aaron Gayle, Adam Bradbury, Liam Greenaway, Tom
Perret, Tom Winter, Joe Haley, Ben Chambers, Chris Chambers, John Stowell, Dan
Hare, Max Bland, Joe Grubb.