Before I get into the match report, I should explain that we did manage to field a full team of five players, making the scoreline even worse. Jamie got back to me, stating his desire to play, and it turned out Manny wasn't hungover in Wales, merely that his phone had been out of battery. My worries over, the five of us made our way to the sports centre. We arrived nice and early, paid the entry fee, then sat about on the pitch waiting for the other team and the referee, doing nothing at all as we didn't have a ball.
Eventually the other team turned up ten minutes late, but they weren't penalised as the ref rolled up at 19:12, and didn't know that we should have been awarded a 10-0 win by default. We should really have pushed for that in hindsight, even if it would have been completely against the spirit of the game...
The game kicked off! Manny in goal, Richard in defence, Nick and I forming a loose midfield jumble and Jamie up front. Thirty seconds later we were 1-0 down as a bloke in a Juventus shirt smacked one past Manny. But then we equalised! Nick hit a left footed shot into the far corner. It was 1-1 and we sensed that we might not be the total underdogs we expected to be. But very soon it was 6-1 and everyone on their team bar their keeper had scored. We switched keeper to Nick and promptly conceded about five more, as he wasn't outfield to keep possession. At half time it was 19-1 to FC Gyro and the referee asked me, as captain, whether we wanted to continue. Of course we did! By now we'd all had a stint in goal and let in at least three goals each. Twenty five minutes left to play and the aim was to score again and not concede fifty.
Bang bang bang, and it was 22-1. But then Nick struck again, before missing a penalty. There may yet be hope! All we had do was score twenty one times. Easy. Sadly we went about 26-2 down before I hit a third through the keeper's legs, off the far post, and in. I'd been aiming for the near post, but never mind. 26-3 was a vast improvement on the first half. Ten minutes gone and we were only losing this half 7-2.
But we soon went 33-3 down... then Nick hit in a lovely goal, straight from centre whilst their keeper was doing his shoelaces up! Their team berated him as seconds before he'd said 'right lads, just concentrate and we can get the record'. The record, I wondered? Had they scored this many goals before? Oh, well, maybe we won't allow that to happen. Perhaps there is a team here worse than us. Can we play against them? That would be lovely. Soon it was 36-4. Jamie bobbled a goal in off their guy's shin, and they scored four more, before the referee blew early and told them they'd broken the all-time record score for the sports centre five a side leagues. Damn. Oh well. We'd scored five times. That's got to count for something, surely?
I shook all their hands, smiled and said it had been a good match and headed inside. There was another top division team there, clearly rivals of FC Gyro, who boasted of their success. Incredulous, this other team asked what kind of idiots they'd been playing against. "That'd be us!" "Are you a new team?" "Yeah." "Well... er... that's okay then." After listening to the rest of their chat it turned out that they FC Gyro were the champions and had held the other team to two draws before beating them the previous season. Why on earth was our first ever five a side match against this team?! Hopefully we'll be put into the worst division for when the league starts next week.
Rather than conceding fewer than eight goals, our aim will be to let in fewer than 200 over the course of the season, and score more than twenty. I think that's about right.
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