Naturally, despite an early rise to start packing before Ray turned up at 8am I didn't get very far. In fact I'd just about unplugged the TV when the knock came at the door. So much for packing up the kitchen and the bedroom. Still, the move went swimmingly and Nick was a first class host offering a small corner of his drive for my car. Let's hope his kids don't break my HiFi...
In the meanwhile, my little 14inch portable TV with it's habit of losing track of the carrier signal is a poor substitute for the Sony Wega widescreen.
Captain Clark gave us a good strong pre-match talk and became very
angry and frustrated when we gave the impression we weren't listening
to him. Which was broadly true. However, manager Lloyd-Jenkins'
thoughts were more pragmatic and enigmatic for that matter: Once
you score one goal then the rest will follow.
No clues, of course,
as to how to get that first goal.
Sons of Baggio have beaten us before and like many teams gave the impression of being quite good during the warm up (we tend to stand around and ask each other how we're getting on these days -- since only about a third of the team actually work for Tornado -- then take a wild swipe at the ball and either miss by miles or injure the goalkeeper). So we kicked off with the usual expectations.
Good god! It's halftime and it's 6-6! More half-time pep-talking, most of which was a disagreement about whether we were in fact a goal ahead. Funnily enough, SoB thought we were ahead as well but the referee silenced us all (metaphorically) by stating blandly that it was 6-a-piece as we kicked off the second half.
Then we were ahead by a goal, then another and by the end SoB were arguing between themselves and we were picking up on lucky balls and come the end 13-9. We'd won!
There it was, my last game and we'd won. Not just a generous gift from the team (yeah, right) but a genuinely remarkable statistic. In our twenty-five or so outings at Slough we'd won a grand total of two other matches.
Copyright 2002 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.