Games 16-17, 2019-20
A Sunday afternoon men's game in the arse-end of a satellite town attached to our city. It's raining, so I take the train and then walk two miles to the ground alongside a busy four-lane road, passing petrol stations, dubious car dealerships and repair shops, and a lone bar grandly called the Bistro Royale with brown cafeteria tables and a sparse, all-male clientele. I reach the ground an hour before kick-off and immediately take a look at the compact cinder pitch, bordered by a huge car park, a faceless housing estate, and a grass field that looks in much better condition, but is already closed off by a protective groundsman.
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| Slightly moist conditions on the far touchline (pic: fussball.de) |
The pitch is playable at 2pm, but by kick-off at 3pm it's already developing puddles, and the rain's only getting worse. Amazingly, people are actually paying to get in at the gate and watch this, around 50 in all, most of them equipped with umbrellas. A van pulls up in the car park and its driver starts hooting and screaming out the window. When the home team goes 1-0 up after 20 minutes, he does it all over again, but after that he's mute - within another three minutes, his side's trailing 2-1.
After this, it gets chippy for a while. The away team's number 8 goes down in an aerial challenge, but his team gets the ball in a promising position and I play advantage. They lose the ball and, as the number 8 is still lying in a heap, I stop play. He peels himself out of the slime and starts to yell at me for not calling a foul. I tell him that I played advantage. "Advantage?" he repeats, incredulous. "Advantage?" Like he'd ordered and paid for champagne, and I'd just served him up a jug of steaming rat's piss. "Yep, it's part of football," I say and run off, because he's back on his feet and remarkably unhurt...
Want to read more? Click here to order Reffing Hell: Stuck In The Middle Of A Game Gone Wrong by Ian Plenderleith (Halcyon Publishing), published on August 8, 2022.
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