In fairness to Dan, he got back immediately saying that there was no way he could do a 6pm kick off because he was off to Man City vs Arsenal. Okay, no worries I thought, no one else had said they weren't going to be there. However, this morning on my way back from Bristol I got contact from Tom and Jamie saying they couldn't make it, and Manny was too hungover/ill/"I can't breathe". We were down to Nick, Richard and myself. The Nick who played last week couldn't make it, nor could the first six or seven people I asked. Then Jim, a mate who was over from Belfast for the weekend offered his services. Excellent. We only needed to lump one more body into the mixer. I didn't find that body until 4.58pm though, and he came in the unlikely form of my Xboxing housemate Ed. Neither Ed or Jim had played 5-a-side to my knowledge, but still, we had a team!
Before the game we began to boot a ball about a bit and it was clear we were weaker than ever before. Damn. So much for playing an easier team.
The first half was okay though. In fact, looking back on it, it's probably the best 22 minutes of football Dynamo Diabolical has ever played. We were only 3-1 down after ten minutes, Nick having scored a consolation after we let in two dreadful goals. Ed responds well to being yelled at though, so whenever I left defence I could bellow at him to get to his left or right, and the other team wasn't very good whenever they weren't allowed to run in a straight line. For a while, this tactic held on. Then we went 4-1 down, but struck back immediately as Nick and I played a one-two, and I hit in the rebound on his shot. We clung on to that for a while too, before Ed said to me he was feeling a bit tired and might not be able to carry on. He wasn't joking - the shouts stopped having as much of an effect and we went 7-2 down mainly through their pacy winger. They had one bloke in a Liverpool training top who refused petulantly to wear his bib, and kept doing tricks which involved bending his knees a lot and losing the ball. Because of this, he lost the ball in defence, Nick shot, it pinged off all their defenders, fell onto my chest (giving the impression of excellent close control) and I then slid in a third. But they ran down to score another before half time. Considering the makeshift nature of our team we weren't doing at all badly. 8-3.
The second half was shit though. Really shit. Nick's hamstring went, Ed's tiredness got the better of him, and Jim had more difficulty getting into the game. All I did was chase the ball around like a headless chicken, occasionally booting someone's shin. We conceded silly goal after silly goal as any pass at all split our defence horribly. Richard pulled off a hell of a lot of blocks in this second period but as often as there was someone to mop up the damage there was someone to whack the rebound into an open goal. One particularly painful rebound trickled in as Richard watched on like a sloth surprised by its own limbs. Apparently we got a goal in this half, but I don't remember it. Nick was the scorer, before I had one disallowed for apparently being in the area. I dispute this bitterly and intend to release a statement about the referee. He kept allowing play to go on before the whistle, routinely ignored high balls and whatnot and forgot the score a few times. (Well, he kept track of our goals, but I think he made up the 22 for FC Spire. I only counted 17.)
Not that bad though for a skeleton team. Not really.
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