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YC&AC, Sunday 2nd December,
Having shamefully surrendered their 100% record the previous weekend by failing to put a team together to face Stoneds, the Albion got their Division 3 title challenge back on track on Sunday with a hard-fought win over YCAC 2nds.
The YCAC pitch, like many of the visiting players, has clearly seen better days, with a surface as pitted and uneven as Carlos Tevez's neck. And with two combative sets of players willing and eager to punish the merest whiff of a messed-up first touch, it was no surprise that for most of the game the ball spent more time in the air than Happy, Doc and Grumpy at a dwarf-tossing convention. And when it did come back down to Earth it was usually a defender who claimed it. A goalless first half of much huffing and puffing but few real chances.
The game came to life a bit early in the second half, when a goal-bound header from an Albion corner was saved on the goal-line by YCAC's Paul Wood, who unfortunately was not YCAC goalkeeper Paul Wood. The penalty was a no-brainer, but Albion's grey eminence Karl Twohig had to recite several pages of The Laws Of The Game, two chapters of the Geneva Convention, and the entire text of the Kyoto Protocol before finally getting the offending defender sent off, though Karl himself did incur a yellow card at some point during his tirade, presumably for misquoting some statistics about east European emissions trading quotas. When the game finally restarted Mick O'Hagan stepped up and dispatched the penalty with impressive ease.
With the lead bagged and the opposition down to ten men it should have been time for the Old Boys to take control of the game. In fact the tide turned so much the other way that several Albion players failed to realize they were the team with the extra man. YCAC dominated possession for the last 20 minutes, though the Old Boys' counter-strategy of bringing on an extra central defender and reverting to a slightly more defensive 8-1-1 formation meant that they were able to see out the game without too many threats to their goal. Time to pocket the points and make a run for it? Nah, time to pocket the points and enjoy a beautiful sunny late autumn afternoon with several pitchers of beer on the YCAC patio, looking longingly at the perfect emerald sward of the unused bowling green.
Report by Terry Cooney
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