9:3 Ali-Jazeera FC 4/2/09 9.15pm

WON 15-10
Matt, Leo4, Robbie, Dan2, Gareth9

Previously on The Molly Maguires…..

The President is black. The snow is white. The economy is red. It’s been a long time in football terms, and The Molly Maguires have been blue of late.

The team finished season 8 on a bum note. A strong hard-core line-up succumbed to an 11-5 defeat against the Sniffers, and the fault lay squarely at one man’s feet. Matt. Not content that we were holding our own and counter-attacking to a 3-3 score at half time, the gaffer ragged the team at the break, demanding less deep defending and more forward play. He got his wish, his Benitez-like tactics isolating Steve at the back, barely able to twist, turn and shout against multiple opponents, one hapless defender against the ever descending space invaders. The old man’s groin hasn’t seen action since, and so we lost. Epic fail.

As usual, despite our best efforts, we couldn’t get relegated, and so in the Championship we remained, regardless of the unnecessary worth placed on the whole relegation question.

Our first live game of season 9 was against the Local Lads in a real live-action cartoon of a match. With Alan providing the loan signings of Rob and James, there was hopefully enough ability to strike the ball, but, it transpired, not enough agility to create the chances. The result was an inevitable lack of cohesion between the new boys and the rest of side, with Gareth frustrated having to track back to retrieve, and Leo defending so deep he could see Jacqueline Bisset’s pokies.

The team did their best to combat the Local Lads’ pace and power play, but were merely the sideshow ring toss, to the opposition’s circus. They had the entourage; the fuck hard shooting ability; the psychotic goalkeeper, where every goal conceded was a slap in his mom‘s face; their captain looking familiar in a ‘our line of business’ kind of way; and the ability to rip through our defence like Afro Samurai.

Throw into the mix, the quirky and incredibly suspect way the referee kept the time for them to sub regular every five minutes; that their shooting included four times they smashed the ball over the fencing into the petrol station to waste time; the further suspect way their twelfth (or eighth in this case) man failed to call fouls by them, but awarded a nothing penalty against us, in a biased display of adulation toward our opposition; and Alan getting his ribs cracked in the first couple of minutes, putting him down for the following week and beyond. So we came away from this riot in a kindergarten, with a handful of war stories and five goals to their sixteen, but precious little else.

To be continued…