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Fukuda Denshi, Saturday, April 25th
If you've ever tried to watch water polo for more than five minutes without slumping unconscious with boredom, you'll know how ridiculous the spectacle of grown men trying to move a ball through a swimming pool can be. Nevertheless, a couple of dozen sodden berks travelled all the way out to the dark end of the Keiyo line last Saturday to spend a freezing cold ninety minutes splashing around in the shallow end of Fukuda Denshi's unheated outdoor pool, and though the Albion Old Boys' Medley team achieved several personal bests in the doggy paddle they were unable to cancel out the Dutch Embassy's first minute goal.
Now don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of astroturf, especially the latest state-of-the art weave that's so grass-like it gives me the same hay fever symptoms as I get on the real stuff. And it's been good for football, especially at the amateur level, allowing more games to be played on each available ground, and providing a much truer surface for players to enjoy themselves on. But like any technology it's a double-edged sword, and just as with the medical technology that can keep your bald, prune-faced, fish-eyed, saliva-oozing, totally senile great-granny breathing long after her quality of life has gone, there's are times when it's better to let nature take its course. With the rain falling steadily for twelve hours already and forecast to keep falling for another twelve more, last Saturday was one of those times when nature should have been allowed to take its course, and the game should have been allowed to die a natural death long before kickoff time. But in an age of post-modern relativism Japanese groundsmen are the world's last great literalists - astroturf is an all-weather surface, and all-weather means all-weather. So when the teams eventually made it out to soaking Soga for the 1pm kickoff (trains, needless to say, well messed-up by all the weather) it was to find the pitch almost totally covered in surface water. A few of the Oranje, quite reasonably I suppose, tentatively protested that it might be dangerous to play on. But as proved by the fact that they're still out on display long past their sell-by dates, the Old Boys have a desperate football habit to maintain, and like the guy with the shakes reaching for the cleaning liquids when the liquor cabinet is bare, the Albion figured any kind of game was better than none at all, and shot down talk of cancellation in a hail of unprintable abuse.
They were soon wishing they'd listened a bit more open-mindedly, as with the game little more than a minute old they were a goal down. The first Albion tackle gave the Dutch a free kick halfway in side the Old Boys' half. The ball was lofted into the box, half the Old Boys' team took turns to try and clear it, each moving it about half a yard through the surf, the last clearance finally getting airborne enough to hit the arse of a fellow defender and stop dead in an uninhabited pond about eight yards from goal. A Dutch forward reached it first and somehow managed to plant a shot into the corner of the net. It was their only shot of the game.
The remaining 79 minutes of kick-splash-kick-splash were like some slapstick parody of football from an over-hydrated parallel universe. Just getting the ball out of your feet required a fleet of tugboats, and two consecutive passes represented a fantastically intricate pattern of play. Even so, the Old Boys did manage to produce the occasional moment of football-as we-know-it, including all of the three or four efforts on goal. Centre forward Sid Lloyd went close in both halves, sending his lob just over the bar in the first half and having a more difficult chance foiled by the crossbar in the second. And Jay Alabaster's powerful header from Naoki Ogasawara's free kick was disallowed, presumably for offside, though from my position eighty yards directly behind the scorer I could see absolutely nothing wrong with it. Jay and fellow Old Boys' Youth Team Hibs' player Yasu Yomota were both standout players in a makeshift Albion side that also included fly-in guest star Peter Widdow from Melbourne, plus the very promising Atkinson brothers, Miles and Robert, from the Old Boys' Academy team at St Mary's. All the guest players made strong contributions in a game that Albion had the best of, but which ultimately only served to provide a bit of comic relief to the long line of reluctant spectators on the other side of the fence - Urawa Reds fans queuing glumly in the freezing rain to get into the shelter of the away end at the JEF United stadium next door.
All in all this game - the freezing drenched discomfort, the howling frustration of trying to get the ball to do even the most simple thing, the injustice of losing another game against the run of play - will be another of those events that was totally awful at the time, but soon acquires a rosy glow of nostalgia.
- "Do you remember that time we drank 15 pints of rough scrumpy and drove my old man's new car into a wall?"
- "Yeah, and you puked up into that copper's helmet as he was trying to breathalyse you" - "Right, and then at the hospital you were feeling up that nurse's tits as she was pulling that shard of windscreen glass out of your eye"
- "Yeah ...and then during the amputation you asked that doctor how long it would take you to grow a new arm."
- "Yeah... God, we had a laugh that day..."
Report by Terry Cooney
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