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Hachioji Park, Sunday 25th January
If the 6 am alarm clock and the 2-hour drive into darkest Saitama don't do it, if the stinging snow flurries and the express-delivery-from-Vladivostok winter wind don't do it, then the first slide tackle that sends several litres of ice-cold surface water through your shorts to give a rude awakening to your Nobby Stiles will definitely get you thinking "What the fcuk am I doing here?". Yet the Albion Old Boys and Jetro each had a dozen (fool)hardy specimens prepared to put aside such existential musings and get down to the serious business of battling both the elements and each other for some TML Division 2 points, with a late Jetro equalizer evening up the score at 2-2 to deny the Old Boys the full bag of frozen goodies.
In an attempt to improve his aging warriors' ability to cope with the vast acreage of the Hachioji Koen pitch, Old Boys' Silver Supremo Karl Twohig had spent the whole of the previous week memorizing every diagram in "Inverting The Pyramid", Jonathan Wilson's classic study of the history of football tactics. After mulling over catenachio defences and Hidekuti-style deep-lying centre forwards, he finally decided that we would play a 4-2-3-1 formation, with two holding midfield players to give a bit of extra protection to the back four. His attempt to explain this to his innumerate and tactically illiterate troops was almost painful to behold, but we did eventually manage to line up for kick-off with 11 players in our half of the field all facing in the right direction.
Far more impressive for most of them was the fact that our usual superannuated line-up was bolstered by a much appreciated injection of youthful ability, with George Bates, an energetic teenager, giving us some extra mobility up front, plus a couple of bright twenty-something prospects from our feeder team the Hibs. Andre Pinto may be Brazilian this time around, but you feel he must have been English in a previous incarnation - that muscular all-action style is definitely more Manchester than Maracana - and though he didn't get on the scoresheet he gave the Jetro defence a torrid time. Our third ringer was Mike McGirr, who showed great touch on the ball and gave us our go-ahead goal with a strike of rare quality.
Many of the Old Boys had played for Hibs teams against Jetro in the top division, and knew them as a very skillful outfit whose inconsistent results in the TML were usually caused by commitments to other competitions - with their best team out they could give anyone a game. So it was no surprise that they came at us hard from the kickoff, and the Albion back four had cause to be immediately grateful for the presence of two holding midfielders in front of them. The first ten minutes were a bit of a rearguard action for the Boys in Blue, but just when they thought they'd seen off the worst of it the Old Boys conceded a penalty, Rod Cramblit (for the second game in succession at Hachioji Park?) proving the point that you should never, ever, use inside the penalty area techniques that you have learned from the Paul Scholes Big Book of Tackling. Albion custodian Kouka did really well to block the spot kick, and was unlucky that the rebound fell almost right at the feet of the taker, who had no trouble tapping it home at the second attempt. The fire lit under them by conceding the goal finally managed to thaw out the Old Boys' brains a bit, and it wasn't long before they were back on level terms with a very neat goal, Andre getting into the box on the right, picking out Mike in the middle who moved it on to Rod at the far post. A classy pivot, a low shot right inside the post, instant redemption.
After that it became a game of few chances with possession shared and defences on top. The Old Boys took the lead midway through the second half with a cracking first time strike from McGirr from outside the box that whistled low over the astroturf into the bottom corner of the net. And it looked as if that would be enough to bag the points until almost the last minute of the game, when the Old Boys defence couldn't clear their lines properly and the ball fell to the most skillful of the Jetro midfielders who finished clinically from about ten yards out. For the Old Boys, giving up the the equalizer so close to the end made it feel more like a loss than a draw, but this Jetro side had a lot of their better players on parade, so to get a point from the game without any of our players losing any testicles to frostbite has to be seen as a reasonable morning's work.
Report by Terry Cooney
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