18.WHEN SATURDAY’S GONE By Jonaldo.

Switching Sides

Recently we had a game that involved me switching sides. This is a rarity now as the vast majority of times the players inform me that they’ll be available to play, they attend. This enables me to select two sides, via WhatsApp, the dark shirts and the white shirts, the evening before the Friday encounter weighing up the strengths and abilities of the players to select even sides.

Before the pandemic, we weren’t as well organised with our football and players didn’t pre-book, they turned up on the day. This meant hastily selecting sides with far less care as to their ultimate balance as I handed out bibs as we used back then. Inevitably, this went wrong on occasions and switches to the teams needed to be made while the match was in progress to make more of a game of it. The most notable instance is still talked about amongst our group as it had a detrimental impact upon one of the players.

Cockney Terry was a big, uncompromising centre-back with a head of flowing blond locks. He had played pretty well every week since he had joined us about four months earlier. On this particular, summer’s day in 2018, when the team I was in was leading 7-0 at half-time, we decided to swap our best player, Martyn Stephens and another for two of our opponents, Steve Prince and Cockney Terry. The final score was 7-7.

All very nice for the majority of us. But it meant that Martyn effectively played a match in which his teams scored 14 goals without reply. Whilst, conversely, Steve Prince and Terry played a match in which their teams scored sod all and conceded 14. Steve Prince still laughs about it to this very day. However, Terry wasn’t so well disposed to it all. In fact he never played again. I seen him on a couple of occasions in the year or so afterwards at shops in the area. He was friendly but showed no appetite to return to our football. I could see it in his eyes, they seemed sunken and he was noticeably bereft of that touch of bravado that had once characterised him. I am no expert but I would say that as far as being a footballer was concerned he was a broken man.

Both times we bumped into each other in civvy street as it were he said, lacking any conviction, that he might return to the football, but that he now played tennis to keep fit. I could only assume this is because the heaviest defeat he will ever have to endure in a tennis match would be 0-6, 0-6. instead of those two infamous halves of a football 0-7, 0-7.