Saturday, 8 April
2006
Tottenham Hotspur 2,
(Howard and his Dad would like me to mention that
This was back when English clubs were for the British. The famous Spurs side was:
Brown, Baker, Henry, Blanchflower, Norman, Mackay, Jones, White, Smith, Allen Dyson.
None of your Cisses or Tugays amongst them.
(I’m not reciting this from memory, by the way, though I reckon I could have got most of the Spurs team. I’m getting it from what I’ve just explained to my son we in the trade call a book: it’s what old fogeys looked things up in before the internet).
And
And they had a
And none of your namby-pamby substitutes then, either! Two
years before Bolton’s win, Man City’s goalkeeper Trautmann – who was an
exception to the no-foreigners rule, and by way of being a bit of a German, but
everyone felt themselves broadminded not to be holding him personally
responsible for the war – played on in the FA Cup Final despite having a broken
neck. (Puts Martin’s camping injury into a bit of perspective, that.) The
intervening year was, of course, when Man U lost to Aston Villa, only a few
months after their
But perhaps I digress.
It’s a sort of comprehensive sort of scoreline isn’t it, 2-0?
At least, it is when the game is over, though not always when it’s still in
progress, even near the end, as Australia found to their cost in that game
against Iran that we don’t talk about. And
Today’s venue, Saiala, was new to a lot of us. Eric, though, remembers a game there when the referee walked off (perhaps having sent himself off?). Not too big a pitch, and, hence, well suited to our short game, we thought.
But the start of the game was rocky. Division 3 is not turning out to be the cakewalk we’d hoped for: indeed, the West Pymble boys (this was their A reserves, not B reserves, as I had thought; but they did only draw last week, which is a bit of a worry) were pretty strong, and spent most of the first twenty minutes besieging our goal. But stalwart defending, in particular by man-of-the-match Matt, kept them at bay.
Howard (Sam – the Mann), acting as manager today as he recovers from his ankle injury, wisely decided now to throw into the mix Scott Rawsthorne [another of those old English surnames?] and Jon Prideaux, who were there mostly as emergencies. But this did seem a bit like one, particularly as our designated subs were detained elsewhere. (Scott & Jon brought the number of players for us in our first two games to an impressive 23!). Sure enough, they added stability to our game, and slowly we came back from the brink of disaster and began to create chances of our own. Some of these came from determined chasing by Mark S. This - plus his tackling at full-back in the second half - was rewarded by his third placing in the man-of-the-match voting.
So we survived at 0-0 till half-time; were reunited with our real subs, and with the wind at our backs strode confidently into the second half. In which we did a lot better and created lots of chances; but, ironically, conceded the only two goals of the game.
The first came from a hard, long-range shot, which Tony parried, only for it to balloon agonizingly behind him and into the net:0-1.
Undeterred, we pressed forward (helped by another cameo from Scott) and, for a while, looked very likely to equalize. I headed on a long throw from Scott to (as it turned out!) Ernie, who spotted the keeper off his line, and lobbed…but only onto the top of the bar.
Several corners ensued which (as last week) James flighted across tantalizingly; but we couldn’t get cleanly on the end of them. Peter (second in the man-of-the-match voting) looked dangerous coming forward.
But then, disaster! A freak second goal for them. Their right winger chased a ball wide, with Eric in attendance, but let fly a fantastic shot that rifled into the far corner of the net. It shouldn’t really have been possible. (Definition of an expert: someone who can tell you why what’s actually happened can’t happen in theory!) As Eric says, he could try that 100 times and it wouldn’t go in. But it did: 0-2.
But on we pressed, and amazingly hit the bar again. This time
it was one of a series of free-kicks that their increasingly pressured defence
was conceding: Eric’s shot hit the bar (with an assist from the keeper on the
way or the way back) and came out to Eric again, but his shot was wide. Another
free-kick was cleverly side-footed into their area where Bob’s snap-shot almost
found the target. As I say,
Things got a little heated towards the end, and Matt and an opponent rested their foreheads against each other for a moment. But, overall, it was another game played in a good spirit, and I think we’ve all enjoyed our two opening games this year more than most of last season’s.
Thanks to Bill for hobbling over with the beers, again; Jon Prideaux for arriving to be linesman (not needed), but then running on; to Scott for being there before our game even started and being such a powerful sub; to Howard for organizing the team, and Bob for being linesman for the As (who won 4-1: against a team that, it did appear to us, at least as the beers were going down, to be no better than the one we played).
Lesser teams than us might, of course, spend the Easter break worrying that it’s 8 months scored we scored in a league game. But (Easter apart) there’s always next week…
MARK BRYANT