So we had ten. Then John dropped out the night before with food poisoning. Then an hour before the game Gerald saw a physio (must be more expensive on a Sunday morning) who said he’d be out for four months. Then at 10am Kevin, who lives 5 minutes walk away, discovered he couldn’t change a puncture [piss off Dan, what a load of bollocks. Kevin] and James mentioned something about a book launch. On the plus side John had a lazarus-esque recovery and came along. A 30% drop in attendance….and we even moved the game a month to help. With a guaranteed game every week without any of this kafuffle, why do I bother (rhetorical). For those of you that did come, thank you.
Anyway….
Red (3): Tufan, Richard N, Daniel
Yellow (4): Jeremy, Richard P, Paul, John
Now let’s be clear, if we had archive films of all our games, the loss of footage from this one wouldn’t be a great loss. And if it had been made clear at the beginning that someone would swap at half time then yes, Red tactics may have been a little more defensive. However, if the half time score had been close, then a swap of a player wouldn’t have happened and therefore a full-time critique from Yellow lacked significant merit.
Red opened the scoring and all seemed to be going well as 10 minutes into the game the score was a respectable 2-2. But then the rot set in. Yellow packed the defence and after the breakdown of most of Red attacks, they passed well and racked up a sizeable score with little reply, 9-3 to Yellow at half time.
Mr Piper kindly swapped teams but for the first 20 minutes there was no dent in the six goal deficit, it even got worse at 13-5. But then, Red concentrated, used the extra man and prevented a tiring Yellow threesome of scoring again. They broke down attacks and ruthlessly broke forward in numbers and finally discovered how to score. 13-6, 13-7, 13-8, 13-9, 13-10….
Unfortunately for them the time ran out before the comeback was complete.
Final score: Red 11 – 13 Yellow
Winner of the day? No, not Daniel, who after a nine game drought had been stuck on 399 goals since June 12th, finally scored his 400th goal. No, Richard Piper’s your man. He came all the way from St Albans and was on the winning side for both halves and therefore personally won the game 17-7!