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Hachioji Park, Saturday 27th September
I went to the doctor yesterday to ask him what I should do about this increasingly disturbing short-term memory loss. I wish I could remember what he told me. I definitely need some kind of help because by Sunday afternoon large chunks of Saturday's game had just vanished. And I hadn't even had a drink.
Not that my synaptically-challenged team-mates were much help, as the few replies I received to the group email I sent asking for confirmation about key events in the game revealed several cases of incipient Alzheimer's. However, after pooling our few remaining brain cells we did manage to piece together some possible occurrences:
- Mauritzio apparently started the game with just ten men, though most of the Old Boys seemed unaware of this fact after the game or indeed, at the time.
- Having comfortably survived this short-handed spell, it is generally believed that Mauritzio celebrated the arrival of their eleventh player by taking the lead through a rather needlessly conceded penalty.
- Albion probably missed several good chances to equalize, mainly due to good work by Mauritzio's stand-in keeper Vernon.
- The Old Boys also got a penalty, though no-one could help me remember why (handball seems to be the best guess). Everyone remembered the next bit though. O'Hagan, having had his penalty technique exposed in these pages a week ago, stepped up to take it. Would he change his method? Well sort of. He tried for the usual corner but hit it even closer to the middle than usual, and just for good measure he hit it chest-height instead of ankle-height. Vernon parried the shot easily but couldn't hold onto it, and O'Hagan saved a wee bit of face by burying the rebound.
- It seems that Mauritzio regained the lead after a mis-hit clearance by Kouka from a backpass went straight to an opponent, who coolly lobbed it back over the stranded custodian.
- Several people concur that sometime early in the second half Albion equalized again when Vernon got in a muddle with one of his own defenders to leave Albion striker Hitoshi Ono with a tap-in to an empty net.
And for the final part of the game I can pretty much rely on my own addled memory, since, shameful to relate, it was this reporter whose enforced departure with a hamstring injury reduced the Old Boys to ten men for the last 20 minutes of the match - ten men, because as is so often the case the stubborn old geezers were scorning new-fangled tinkerings with the game such as substitutes. Some of us started competitive football in the days when footballers thought only effete, tea-drinking, white-trousered quasi-sportsmen of the summer months used a twelfth man. I remember my under-11s coach berating one of my tearful pint-sized teammates for wanting to come off with blood streaming from a gash in his shin - "Bert Trautmann played 75 minutes in a Cup Final a few years ago with a broken neck, and you want to come off for a little scratch like that!" Very true, Mr Roche. And so as a child of that era I was mortified to go off and leave us a man short, especially with a soft-cock injury like a hamstring, the amateur footballer's equivalent of wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "I'M AN OUT-OF-SHAPE TWAT WHO DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO WARM-UP PROPERLY". But a well-pulled hamstring will immobilize you faster than a Botox Martini, so the Old Boys had to see out the game with ten against eleven. To hang on for a draw against a useful Mauritzio side would have been a great result, to come back and win it was a bit of an ask. But the Old Boys, too demented to know the meaning of the word "defeat", managed to get the go-ahead goal as Hitoshi rose highest to head home a well-flighted Karl Twohig free kick, and with centre forward George Pele Clarkson looking disturbingly comfortable at centre half alongside man-of-the-match Karl, the reshuffled defence held on and the Old Boys got their first Div. 2 win.
After the game the rest of the Old Boys headed back into town to celebrate another hard-won victory. Your reporter slunk off shamefully to spend Saturday night in the company of an overweight ice-pack.
Match report by Terry Cooney
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