I'm busy at the moment planning my next trip home, to Gloucester, for the cheese rolling, but in the meantime I've found another way to occupy my time.
Went down to the beach to support the England beach football team yesterday. It was a pretty well guarded secret of a competition I have to say, when they first started erecting scaffolding down there, word had it they were building some new state of the art sea defences, either that or there was a circus in town. It came as a bit of a shock then when it transpires that England football team are involved in international football after all this summer.
These matches are qualifiers for the world cup finals to be held later on in the year in Marseille and yesterday we were playing Estonia. The stadium they have erected is actually quite impressive and we had a decent view of proceedings high up on the gantry, level with the halfway line. Of course beach soccer isn’t a recent phenomenon, as far back as the early seventies Derby County were playing it in the old first division every other week, - The Baseball Ground they called it.
We seemed quite evenly matched with our eastern rivals, but managed to forge into a two goal lead due to a dubious penalty (it would later be apparent that all penalties in this form of football are dubious), and wonderfully constructed goal which was volleyed home by our best player “MC”. That’s the initials he had on his back anyway, and through a little bit of research, it turns out that his name is Gian Carlo Giancovich, though he looks a bit more of a Gonzales to me, but anyway, he qualifies for England and we’ll take him.
As the game wore on Estonia gradually wormed their way back into it, and by the final whistle they’d got it back to 2-2. We murmured that it probably wasn’t a bad result really as we stood up and prepared to leave, - but hang on, there was no hand shaking or bollocking of the referee, or any other obvious signs the game was over, maybe we were going into extra time?. With no explanation of the rules anywhere we had no idea what was going on, but immediately sat down when they kicked off again. The kick off consists of one bloke teeing the ball up for a team mate who blasts it goal wards only to see it sail into the goalkeepers chest or fly over the bar. The pitch is about a quarter of the size of a normal footy pitch but they play with full size goals, it’s five a side and the substitutions are constant stream of players coming on and off and it’s hard to keep track. The period of extra time came to an end, - would it now be penalties?, ah, no, they came out and started all over again, by this time both teams looked knackered, they were looking longingly at the scoreboard clock and were pleading with the referee to throw them into the sea. Eventually this extra, extra time finished and we did indeed have penalties, but even then we hadn’t a clue how many they had to take and as soon as the Estonians missed one, the England team (who bizarrely only wear one, instead of three lions on their shirts) celebrated wildly. So we had won! – on penalties at that!, the first time I could remember any England team doing such a thing since we beat Spain in “Euro 96”, - I was hooked, - “ENGER-LAND, ENGER-LAND, ENGER-LAND”.
After swatting up on the internet when I got home, it turns out that they play three periods of 15 minutes, you’re not allowed to have a draw, so if it’s level after that, it goes to a 3 minute period of “golden goal”, and if there’s no score after that, it’s penalties. So there you go, - you know as much as me now.
Today the game was against Georgia, so off I toddled down to the stadium, it was confirmed to me that England were playing in there, but was slightly surprised to see that the crowd was a bit sparse. I Watched the tail end of Gemany’s game, in which they scored a late winner and went berserk, and then waited for us to make an appearance. We didn’t. The two teams that appeared didn’t include England, and it turned out that our game had been brilliantly scheduled on the little toss-pot pitch next door. In Wimbledon speak, the pitch next door is like an outside court as apposed to the centre court next to it. The few seats available here had long been snapped up and the rest of us had to stand shoulder to shoulder peering through a wire fence, whilst next door the stadium hosted The Outer Hebrides versus The Peoples Republic of Nowhere In Particular. All this in front of a crowd that consisted of about half a dozen Englishmen who were obliviously watching the wrong match, a couple of immigrants selling roses and a bored looking Chihuahua.
To be honest our game wasn’t the greatest, and I wondered if, like me, the Georgian players had been on the internet checking out the rules of the game the day before, as they didn’t seem to know exactly what was what. They were built to last, rather than for speed, and were uncompromising in the tackle. There was a good atmosphere though, probably with us being crowded into such a small place and the volume went up steadily as we started scoring goals. A Georgian defender was felled with a volleyed cross that caught him square in the plums, and the trainer was cheered vigorously when he jogged on carrying nothing more than a bottle of water. He patted the prostate Georgian on the back, took a swig of the water, and ran trotted back to the touchline!. They don’t even have the “magic sponge” round these parts.
Probably the highlight would have to be one of the Georgians getting booked for dissent, at this, the crowd gave a huge ironic cheer, and when the seething midfielder then gave an obscene gesture toward the stand, he was sent off, to even louder cheers. We won 4-1, we’re on a roll, but we play Portugal tomorrow, and they’re shit hot apparently.
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