Rubbish football appreciation thread

[Gassin's finest]

Sunday league was brilliant. I was only 16 and me and a mate joined the The Durham Ox, the underage drinker pub in Northallerton.

Training was a game of 5 a side every Tuesday night in Thirsk, and then a run around town on Thursday's. I'd get to the pitch behind the leisure centre every Sunday morning at 10am, ready to warm up for the 10:30 KO. If we were away, then it'd be 9:30 at the pub car park to get a lift to wherever we were going. Then after 90 mins of brutality, chasing long balls and the right back hoying up at the corner flag, it'd be back to the host teams' pub for a Sunday lunch and a pint.

For a 16 y/o it was initially intimidating, and eye-opening, mixing it with these blokes ranging from mechanics and factory workers in their 20s to some office based guys in their late 30s; But it matured us quickly as well, and gave me a grounding. Loved it.

 

[edson]

 

[Gassin's finest]

 

[SlotBadger]

This doesn't strictly qualify for the thread but made me chuckle nonetheless:

 

[Gassin's finest]

 

[McFlash]

 

[Gassin's finest]

Ah well... Could be worse:

 

[Kingellesar]

This should just be moved to Spurs chat

 

[Gassin's finest]

 

[Gassin's finest]

I can't wait:

The return of five-a-side

There are few better feelings than playing football with total strangers at Goals' version of the Stade de France. Five-a-side is back

theathletic.com

His name is Keith. Keith is a solid name, and Keith is a solid goalkeeper. So solid a goalkeeper, in fact, that he’s pretty much everyone’s goalkeeper: for a fee of £4 (some say it’s £5; some say that, in more normal times, it’s merely a post-game pint) he will position himself stoically between your posts and repel far more than any well-rounded 61-year-old goalkeeper should.

It is an irritatingly cold Wednesday night at Goals Sutton (technically, we’re in North Cheam, but that’s another debate) and Keith is already deep into his second fixture, keeping goal for Noddy’s Giants as they ease to an 8-5 victory over Bunch of Contes and maintain a 100 per cent start to their Veterans’ League Premier Division campaign.

Keith’s five-a-side existence is very straightforward: he plays a lot, concedes very little, and says even less. He wears a cap to guard against the glare of the floodlights because he is Keith. A fellow spectator claims he is a taxi driver by day, another says “I’ve been to Keith’s house”, a tantalising bit of information that is not expanded upon.

For now, behind the chain-link fence, Keith remains an enigma.

The post-lockdown COVID-19 measures have stripped away much of Goals Sutton’s classic weekday-evening mise-en-scene. Where small platoons of business-like five-a-side faces would otherwise have gathered in the corridors between the pitches, waiting for their kick-off times and revealing that Chelsea are 1-0 up against Porto, there are now stern one-way arrows and a quietly firm Goals employee “asking” that you go and wait in your car instead.

Soon, though, the teams for the 8.45pm kick-offs begin to drift into the tightly arranged Goals compound. Perhaps it’s the sheer concentration of 18-45-year-old testosterone levels, but it’s an oddly tense, stern atmosphere, with the same straight pre-kick-off expressions you see on the faces of Champions League teams in the tunnel. This genuinely awkward sizing-up of nobody in particular is only punctuated by an eight-year-old child — someone literally always brings their eight-year-old child to Goals at 8.45pm — kicking a ball at your shins.

The stony-faced mind games between the caged pitches (they are numbered from one to nine, but also arbitrarily given the names of historic stadia, from Wembley to the Estadio Azteca, which is the absolute textbook definition of a #nicetouch) belie the undercurrent of mid-range, self-deprecatory banter that pervades the rest of the Goals Sutton administration, most notably in the rock-solid naming conventions.

Their veterans’ five-a-side competition, which they claim is their biggest over-35s league in the country, consists of four divisions, and the team names adhere to one or more of the three golden rules: 1) an exotic European football reference, often incorporating 2) some sort of wordplay to bring your footballing expectations back down to earth, and/or 3) a humble allusion to the average age of the squad.

In the Premier Division, Geri Hat-tricks are pitted against Bunch of Contes. In the Championship, my new team (a signing swiftly thrashed out via Twitter DM) are Pension North End — the West Brom of Goals Sutton, who find themselves perennially yo-yo-ing between the battle-hardened top flight and the more forgiving second tier, where they now reside alongside Old Spice and Dads FC. Further down the veterans’ pyramid are Inter Orbit, A3 Milan and Pension North End’s unofficial reserve team, The Stiffs.

Elsewhere in Goals Sutton’s sprawling league system, there is Spartak Tesco (a personal favourite, even if the pitches are right next door to a giant Sainsbury’s), Notso Athletic, the rather questionable Paralympiakos, the unwieldy yet ever-present I See A Little Silhouetto of Milan, Dyslexic Untied and Fiorentina Turner. These are not tedious, they are reassuring.

It has been 397 days, eight hours and 39 minutes since I last played five-a-side. A year of working from home has made my hamstrings devolve, my footballing muscle memory is closer to zero than at any other time since primary school, but there are two sensations that remain vivid: the acute state of panicked hypoxia that hits you after precisely two minutes of competitive five-a-side and, more rather more fulfilling, the heavy metallic slide-and-clink of the pitch’s gate, the universal sound that says “my time has come, and yours has gone”.
To make potential physical matters worse, Pension North End arrive in the most feared state of all: we have a “bare five”. My new Twitter DM friend Andy introduces me to goalkeeper-manager Don and the all-purpose pair of Brad and Ben, whose names I am guaranteed to use interchangeably for the next 45 minutes or so. Our opposition are Hatfield, the longest-serving team in the veterans’ league, who simply ooze five-a-side savvy.

My body has two precious minutes to reacquaint itself with the artificial turf (4G? 5G? Just how many Gs are we up to now?), and its lush, consistent sponginess that unapologetically bears almost no resemblance to the real thing. A quick check of the rules, of which there are essentially two: 1) The ball, thank the lord, can go over head height, and 2) something about passing the ball back to the goalkeeper twice in a row that I still can’t quite get my head around.

From the moment we kick off, a lifetime’s worth of five-a-side lessons come flooding back:

• Playing against strangers is, for some reason, mortally intimidating.
• Chasing the ball into the corner of a pitch at Goals is the most futile act known to man.
• At this level, you will never have more than one option available to you on the ball.
• Success, individually and collectively, essentially comes down to two questions: Can you be bothered to move after you’ve passed the ball? And can you be bothered to run after the opponent who has just done that very thing? If at least one of the answers to those questions is “yes”, you are in with a chance.

Aware of my late-pandemic cardiovascular limit, I happily volunteer to fulfil the highly technical role of “just sitting”. In my head, that makes me Bobby Moore or Franz Beckenbauer, surveying the horizons of Pitch 4 (sorry, “Stade de France”) and avoiding the hopeless cul-de-sacs on either side of the giant D-shaped opposition penalty area. Handily, Andy does the running of two men, and if Brad/Ben and Ben/Brad are furious at my refusal to sprint upfield in support, they’re commendably not showing it.

The good news for my one-man low block is that veteran’s league strikers are glacially slow. The bad news is that they are also the size of glaciers. Every time Hatfield’s front man receives the ball, back to goal, arse sticking out, I feel like the stricken Apollo 13 lunar module about to slingshot itself around the moon. Instead, I crouch behind him — the ball might as well be in Carshalton for all the hope I have of getting to it — and wait it out. This happens 47 times.

After half-time (an almost subliminal opportunity to gasp for air and gulp down some water), I am more or less acclimatised again. At that point, the age-old language of five-a-side echoes through the air from nine pitches of varying states of competitiveness. “Here if you need” (or “back if you need”) is perhaps the most ubiquitous phrase, an oddly tender set of words when you read them back to yourself but which really are the only words you want to hear when you’re shuttling the ball back out of the tactical black hole that is the corner of a five-a-side pitch.

Making your debut for a five-a-side team is an underrated exercise in kinship. After all, where, when and how else in civilised society could you spend the best part of an hour instinctively barking “FUCKING BRILLIANT” at someone you barely know?

Meanwhile, roughly every six seconds or so, you will hear the very precise outburst of “AAAA-AAARGH!” (important to get the emphasis right), a two-syllable roar of self-admonishment at a dragged shot, a cut-out through ball or an untracked runner. It is a sound of unmet expectations, a furious lament at not being able to do what you could 15 years ago, and also to let your team-mates know you hate yourself for it too.

(For anyone still unclear about this sound, it’s the exact same noise Lou Bega makes at precisely 1 minute 11 seconds of “Mambo No 5”.)
By 9.31pm I have, in a way, marshalled Pension North End to a hard-fought 4-3 win that takes them — us, I mean us — top of the Championship, ahead of Wild Bunch on goal difference. The latch of Pitch 4’s gate slides shut with that satisfying noise but, with the bar at Goals Sutton still yet to reopen, Keith has long gone. I like to imagine he never gets changed out of his extremely tight goalkeeper’s top, black tracksuit bottoms, giant white gloves and anti-glare cap and just waits… for Thursday night.

I lumber through my front door and prise off my trainers to witness the final confirmation that five-a-side football is part of my life again. Out they pour, scattering across the carpet like terrified ants, the allegedly carcinogenic rubber crumbs of Goals Sutton. Keith’s DNA. We are back. Here if you need.

 

[Partizan]

Bit old school and happened in top flight football but nevertheless pretty funny

 

[tototoner]

 

[Marty]

How has he done that? In a winner goes through World Cup qualifier too

 

[carmeldevil]

 

[michaelden]

10 matches for sexual assault?! That isn't that bad.

 

[Gassin's finest]

That is definitely rubbish football.

 

[Marty]

That is definitely rubbish football.

It's not even the least bad code of rugby.

 

[Yid-ol]

How has he done that? In a winner goes through World Cup qualifier too

Canadian born keeper vs Canada from what I can remember also. Or if not born has links with Canada somehow.

 

[LSUY]

 

[al_pacino]

Made me chuckle too.