Defeat

My aging legs (in footballing terms I am reaching the twilight of my career) trotted back across the white line today as I captained CCK (Church of Christ the King) Seconds. With kick-off minutes away I was summoned hither and thither to pluck dog excrement from the grass with a plastic bag and my warmup routine became a jogging between poo treasure hunt. Once the pitch had been cleansed I walked towards the centre circle to shake stinky hands with a chap, Antony Turner, who I haven't shared conversation with for fourteen years, since we went our separate ways at the end of secondary school. His inclusion in the opposing team was slightly concerning because I remembered that he was a far better footballer than I was when at school, but perhaps time would have been kinder to me than to him. I doubted this and my doubt was a justifiable position for he headed our opponents, Montreal Arms, into a lead within two minutes.

From that moment on, our goal was peppered with shots with only brief respite when our strikers made rare forages forward, but our bluntness in attack which yielded just one shot on target during the first half was in contrast to the Montreal Arms' sharpness as they dispatched six past our stand-in goalkeeper Tim Lumgair. I rallied the troops at half-time with tales of a time when we'd come back from 5-0 down to draw 5-5 and tried to draw a crumb of comfort from the fact that the wind and the incline would be on our side in the second half.

The team kept up a wonderfully positive attitude as my words proved to be mere words, powerless to prevent our net bulging at a similarly rapid rate in the face of a breeze that was failing to cause a rustle in any local leaves. The six was quickly doubled to twelve, exceeding my previous biggest defeat of 11-0, but then a moment came which pencilled a stunning silver line around the thrash shaped cloud. After a spectacular (fortuitous and bumbling) run into MA territory from myself, the ball popped about a bit and someone kicked someone and the result was a free-kick forty (twenty-five at best) yards from goal. I'd already fluffed a free-kick in the first half and I wasn't particularly confident that I could actually reach the goal with any power, but I brushed others aside who fancied themselves from this range and stepped back for an excessive run-up. I recognised that the only chance of troubling the keeper was to boot the ball as hard as my puny legs could manage and hope for the best. I did just that and the ball flew centimetres above the grass, straight as a car that's being driven by someone whose forgotten to take the krooklok off into the bottom corner (the picture at the top of the page is the goalkeeper wrapped around the post after failing to grasp my fizzler). My celebration was undignified and embarrassing for my teammates as I whisked my shirt from my torso and performed some odd vaguely acrobatic movement which was a forward roll combined with poor attempt at a break-dancing worm.

We conceded two more, but it now felt like, as Harry Redknapp would brand it, a "great defeat", but perhaps that was just me. However, it wasn't just my goal, but our cheery manner in the face of humiliation that made it great and I guess it gives us a benchmark from which to move forwards. It also, as I'm sure you're well aware, draws me level with my nemesis Fernando Torres, who has taken four games to reach the same tally as me.