We Are Social 11 – FC Aubergines 8
The photo was taken by our future opponents – let’s hope they play football as badly as they use an iPhone
Welcome to the 2012/13 5-a-side season for We Are Social. A season that promises to bring new vigour to the game of football at large, or if not quite that at least to our battle-hardened flop of a team from last year whose match reports read like the counselling sessions of a jaded Sunday league team.
There’s been a fair amount of investment in the transfer market over the Summer bringing fresh legs to the team. New starters Tom, Joe and Joewhomustnotbenamed (don’t ask) joined myself, Rob, Ed and club captain Joe W at the pitch and the positivity was tangible from the off – gone was the worrying about tactics from last year and in came the testosterone fuelled chat of ‘whose boots look the nicest’ whilst playing keepy-uppy by the kids swings.
Our opponents were FC Aubergines – a team name that conjured up pre-match visions of skinny vegans with substitutes protesting in trees – but they were in fact completely normal members of society. Regardless of this shock our strike partnership of Joe and Tom got off to a flying start with goals firing in from all angles. For the first time we actually managed to spook the opposition – they gave away a sloppy penalty that Joe calmly nailed home and only managed to sneak goals by firing them in with handy deflections and occasional lazy defending. Probably from me.
With Ed orchestrating from defence and Joe acrobatically in goal the rest of the team was left to demonstrate the finest free-flowing football ever seen in South London. Even Rob, who has definitely referred to a football pitch as a ‘court’ before, got on the score sheet. As the opposition succumbed to cramp and infighting I began to appreciate the enormity of the situation – we had managed to score more goals than the other team, which meant an historic victory for We Are Social FC!
Our victory pints weren’t tinged by a familiar sense of despair but actually had a taste of well deserved success in them. As Joe W remarked, it was “a mixture of the sublime and ridiculous”.
The world now expects. And this year We Are Social FC look like they might actually deliver.
Final score: We Are Social 11 – FC Aubergines 8
Team: Joe (captain), Joe, another Joe, Ed, Tom, Rob and me.