7. WHEN SATURDAY’S GONE. By Jonaldo.

MotM

On one occasion Mars Bar Derrick deviated from the norm of giving everyone a Mars Bar after the game (latterly a Jaffa cake). Before kick-off, he pulled me to one side in my capacity as the organiser, and carefully showed me a bottle of wine without any of the other players copping a look.

‘I thought we could make a change,’ he announced, ‘and instead of giving every player a Jaffa cake after the game we present this bottle to the man of the match.’

I approved and agreed to consult with him, at the game’s conclusion, regarding who the recipient should be. It helped that myself and Mars Bar Derrick were on opposing sides as this seemed to instill the selection process with a degree of fairness.

It did occur to me that I had been co-opted into this plan thus obviously MBD didn’t think I had a chance of winning it, but my disappointment was assuaged by the thought that it was a bottle of white wine, I much prefer red.

As it transpired I had an average sort of game by my standards in a fairly indistinct one-all draw, so wasn’t worthy of the award anyway. Trouble was there were no stand out performances. Myself and MBD consulted after the final whistle was blown and had our own ideas about who the MotM was. As we couldn’t agree we decided to co-opt another player, Welsh Dave, who had totally different ideas to the two of us. This then necessitated the enlistment of further players to the selection panel, which brought forth further suggestions.

By now seven of us were debating who should receive the honour and there were seven different nominations as to who that should be. The problem was, the players who were oblivious to all this were now disbanding. If a decision was not made within the next minute or so any presentation would be made in front of about two players which would have defeated the spirit of the idea behind Mars Bar Derrick’s proposal.

Realising this I quickly seized the initiative and with a masterstroke asked the hastily convened panel to vote for the man they considered the second best player of the match. The name Pete Porter, who had given the white shirts the lead with a fine individual goal, received almost unanimous backing. And although it was a somewhat unconventional approach to reach that decision, MBD was happy with it and understood the urgency required in arriving at it.

I then left the conflab huddle in the middle of the pitch with the bottle of wine in hand accompanied by MBD both sporting smiles as we headed towards Pete who had been changing on the touchline. We got about halfway there when I stopped in my tracks, turned to Mars Bar Derrick and told him that we can’t do it as Pete Porter is a recovering alcoholic!

Thank goodness I remembered in time. MBD took the bottle back from me and said that he would share it with his wife over the weekend. He also made a declaration to the effect that he would be returning to the Jaffa cakes and presenting them to everyone forthwith.