FC Inter Avinit

First, the name. Alright, as puns go it may not be the subtlest, but it was sufficiently under-the-radar back then for it not to have prompted an EGM of the South Notts Sunday Football League, of which FC Inter Avinit would enjoy a solitary and glorious season’s membership. Nor did the name invite a visit by WADA to the Forest Recreation Ground, Inter Avinit’s 70,000-stander stadium.

(You have got it, right? The joke? Inter is the shortened name for grand old Milanese club, FC Internazionale – wisely, they chose the first five letters as the abbreviation, and not the next four – and Avinit, with more than a nod to the Liberator DJs mix CD, It’s not Intelligent…It’s not from Detroit…But it’s F****n ‘avinit! was slang for, you know, getting on it. We were a football club that was – are you still following this, kids? – into ‘having it’. Ergo: FC Inter Avinit.)

 

It was a name fit for a techno sound-system Sunday football team – a name fit for an unfit techno sound-system football team, in fact. I cannot be sure how much time you’ve spent knocking about with techno sound-systems, but 10am on a Sunday morning is not really the time to catch them in their tip-topmost physical condition. Not usually. Mind you, on the plus side, unlike with most civvy teams there’s a good chance they’ll all be wide awake. Often, that’s still awake from the night before, but the point stands. Occasionally, they’d still be awake from the night before that – although you’d have to be fucking mental to fancy a game of fitba after two nights on the adult confectionery. And being mental helps in Sunday football. Obviously.

 

Inter Avinit, then, was the footie team dreamt into existence by the Samovar sound-system, who threw pounding acid techno nights and site parties in and around Nottingham and beyond during the mid-to-late 1990s while up here as stoodoes. Not that I was part of Samovar. Nor was I exactly a ringer – if by that is meant someone of indisputable talent parachuted in to improve a team demonstrably below their ability – although I’d like to think I possessed a Pirlo-esque command of the centre circle, that scaled-down territory of the chubby, wheezy, engine-less midfielder. No, I was no ringer, just someone who happened to be available one Sunday when someone where I happened to be, happened to be called: “Yeah, fuck it. I’ll play. Why not.” Romantic, eh? And that was it: I just drifted into playing the rest of the club’s existence.

Mine was a fairly typical tale, too. Although Inter Avinit had 14 officially registered players, it was later worked out that we’d actually used over 50 during the season, often scaring up teams from an assortment of after parties while the city yawned off its day-of-rest dawn mist. Mattski, Sketchy Pete, Non-Rambling Andy, Flat-Top Matt: many heeded the call. Of course, this presented a few administrative problems (and, as you can imagine, Inter Avinit weren’t so big on administration). Thus, before each match, anyone in the team who wasn’t part of the original 14 had to be assigned one of the names of people who were, just in case they found a way into the referee’s notebook. See, a yellow card incurred a £5 fine, whereas playing an unregistered player was £25 of sting, not to mention docked points – not that the latter penalty would have hit us too hard (though more on that shortly). So, before kick-off, we simply doled out names – Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub – and took the not unreasonable chance that one and the same ref wouldn’t book the ‘same’ player in close enough proximity for him to realize that either the player had recently had a face transplant or was not in fact the same person.

 

We winged it. This much can be judged by the way our two wingers – or better, our wide forwards – and co-founders, Nibble and Allan, jinked and swerved their way through the monthly league meetings that they were obliged to attend at Beeston Working Men’s Club, meetings that took on an increasingly predictable air, usually ending with the refrain: “And could FC Inter Avinit stay behind, please”. Concerned to keep the self-evident decorum of Sunday parks football in tact, the old sausage who ran the league asked them, ever so politely: “I don’t have a huge problem with the spectators drinking cans of Stella, but if the players are going to do it, could they be a bit more subtle?” Sunday morning football is clearly for running booze off, not tipping more back in the system, so half-time Stellas were not exactly run of the mill. “And can you try and keep the dogs off the pitch?” “Yeah, sorry Trev. Will do”.

 

These meetings were, all in all, fairly constructive affairs. For instance, a phantom 2-0 loss was ‘arranged’ at one by submitting fabricated match reports – one of the better results, it has to be said! Still, a sign of how good an impression the team made – or possibly of how desperate the league were for teams – can be gleaned from us receiving an invitation to play the following season.

 

Our small but hardy smattering of streaker dogs and Stella-quaffing supporters, headed by the ever-present Lil’ Jo, was drawn from the crusties, anarcho-hippies, travellers, New-Agers and others trying to sidestep capitalist drudgery who would come a-tumblin’ and a-stumblin’ down the hill from the terraced warren of Forest Fields to look on at our somewhat chaotic brand of football. Our strip was black and orange stripes – yes, football hipster, you can call us the gialloneri if you must – and quite itchy. The Samovar coffers only stretched to fourteen such jerseys, so had our crusty ultras been minded to show their solidarity with us through the medium of coloured apparel rather than catarrhy guffawing and slapstick pointing, they’d have had to have got busy knitting. But no, the FC Inter Avinit merchandising wing never did get going. China was never cracked. There were no replica tops, just the originals. And unlike all this new-fangled space-age clobber they have nowadays, the original Avinit strip kept you warm in the warmth and cold in the coldth. It was all static electricity and jogger’s nipple, exactly as nature intended it.

It was certainly a strip into whose unforgiving man-made fibers were hewn the acrid stench of defeat. Literally. (Literally literally, not Jamie Redknapp literally, for this was not a team that raced through boxes of Daz.) There was a game in God-knows-where – generally, I had a thumping headache and little desire to have my eyes open while en route – when we played on a boggy pitch (again, not exactly narrowing it down), uphill and into a howling wind, and I’m pretty sure that not only did we not manage to get out of our half for the entire first 45 minutes, we didn’t get out of our half of our half. The opposition’s central defenders actually sat down on the halfway line. There’s a well-known saying in top-flight football: you’re always going to struggle when your goalkicks aren’t getting out of the penalty box. And so it proved. Never mind, though, because to cheer us up someone broke out the whizz at half-time! If it’s good enough to rev up yer English Tommy before charging to certain death against the Hun, then it’s good enough against Atlético Bilborough, PSV Lenton, Deportivo Dunkirk, Borussia Bulwell or whoever it was we were playing.

 

To tell you the truth, the details are sketchy: where we played our away games, our opponents’ actual names, the division we were in. There are team mates I can barely recall (other than through their assigned name), while a lot of the results have fallen into the same fuzzy oblivion as the nights that preceded them. But the aforementioned game was definitely up in the high teens. Against, obviously. Perhaps 17-0. Evidently, we were unable to use the wind and slope advantage to the same effect in the second half.

 

There were at least three or four games that hit double figures. We were the San Marino, the Andorra, the poor old Liechtenstein of Notts Sunday footeh. Not that these minnows would drink cans of Wife Beater or dab jazz sherbert during the interval – at least, not as far as I’m aware. And I presume they don’t go into games having had 18 hours sleep – collectively, I mean, albeit shared between three men – which was the prep for one of our tealeaf-confirming drubbings. Perhaps that un-somnia might explain our lack of tactical cohesion. Dress it up as an expression of anarchism if you like, but we – gafferless FC Inter Avinit – essentially played the ‘Brownian motion’ formation, occasionally reverting to 10-0-0 (one that wasn’t as defensively secure as it might have been) as the lung capacity faded. If we’d wanted to park the bus, you’d have thought we’d not have been short of options, since many of our hardcore fans lived on them. But no, there was no high press, no false nines, no inverted wingers. Our only concession to tactical sophistication was that we liked to play between the lines – have a line, play, have another line…  

 

The batterings – both on and off the park – continued through the winter. Impact, the Nottingham University student magazine, picked up on our story – that is, someone who wrote for them wound up at an after party somewhere just as people were incongruously eschewing the lines that had been racked up in order be in decent shape for the fitba, for which they were presently departing – and sent a reporter along to cover our game against Durham Ox, out past Beeston Marina. I not-quite-vividly remember buzzing across the city’s Western suburbs in the back of some rattler with eardrum-splittingly awful gabber techno drilling into my synapses. Gabber – pronounced ‘habber’, as though tugging a recalcitrant greeny from the back of your throat – is the 200bpm strain of industrial techno spewed up by Rotterdam in the early 90s and described by Simon Reynolds in Energy Flash, his seminal study of electronic music cultures, as having a “berserker frenzy [that] seems to plug in to the Viking race-memory of ginger-pubed peoples across Northern Europe”. All nice and relaxing, then. Morning has bro-ken, like the first mor-ning…We lost 4-1. Bitten your hand off for it. Perhaps it was the gabber: inspired a bit of Oranje­-style total football…
 

In hindsight, I suppose gabber was apt psyche-up tuneage, since the spine of our team was, by and large, ginger-pubed (assuming curtains and carpets matched, that is). Thus, our twin carrot-topped engine room of Paddy in the hole – a hole largely created by standing still as he demanded the ball into feet – and Ginger Rich as a box-to-box merchant with shin splints, was complemented by Aussie Marc (pronounced ‘Maaaaaaaarc’) Forrest Gumping his way up and down the right flank – a man who, if you could get shin splints from the impact of a sharply fizzed and awkwardly bouncing football, would most certainly have had them.  

 

Now, as your stereotypes and prejudices may already have led you to surmise – correctly, as it happens – there wasn’t always red-haired harmony in there (none of Neil Lennon, Billy Bremner or Gordon Strachan has yet been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize). Club historians record a 3-2 loss to a team that had turned up with nine men in which Aussie Marc, repeatedly left in an outback-and-a-half of space on the flank (doubtless a quick tactical readjustment of defensive resources by our opponent, having observed the opening skirmishes) was our ‘out ball’; repeatedly, however, he roadrunnered his way to the byline, only to slice the cross unfailingly and waywardly over the bar. Ginger Rich, tib-and-fib not built for futile 70-yard supporting runs, was not long in twanging his patience, too, perhaps at the fifth or sixth such shank, and threatened to deck his fellow redhead if he got another one wrong. (We were not a team that lost its shit that often, and were thus very much the black sheep of the league. There was a red card incurred by DJ Ricardo, dismissed for shoving a player who was off the pitch at the time.) Later, Aussie Marc scored a header from a drilled, this-is-how-it’s-done-you-effin-muppet of a Ginger Rich cross; or rather, he scored a facer, since it was a combination of hooter and kisser that guided the ball into the net, Marc being left with heavily streaming eyes, a throbbing conk, and a lifetime sporting highlight for his trouble. One to tell the grandkids, no doubt.

 

That was one of our memorably improbable and not quite hen’s-teeth rare goals. On another occasion, Colin – the real Colin, not the four or five who’d played as Colin – another man lacking some of the natural ball player’s poise and liquid movement, it must be said, somehow managed to shin-lob an opposing keeper from inside the six-yard box, the ball tracing the sort of implausible arc that golfer Phil Mickelson might conjure with a sand-wedge when trapped behind a 14th green portaloo. Golazo!

Regularly battered we may have been, although in amongst the defeats and the narcotically-induced surrealism there were those odd odd goals and glimpses of glory. In one game, we even went 2-0 up inside the opening ten minutes, only for the scorer of the brace then to come up on the industrial-sized line of ketamine he’d surreptitiously hoofed just prior to kick-off, requiring him having to be subbed off since he was just stumbling around in the opposition’s half, hallucinating and offside (I suppose it was a different take on the notion of ‘playing in the hole’, although Zinédine Zidane he was not). Not that he’d have been given offside, mind – mainly because his fellow K-snorter was actually running the line for us. At least, he was until he collapsed on a nearby pile of coats at around the same time. Evidently, there had been sufficient ambiguity in the pre-match question: Do you want to do the line?

 

Anyway, by the time the blackbirds were singing in the springtime, Inter Avinit had failed to register a single point. Chipper still, but pointless. It’s the taking part, innit? Yes, the taking part. However, we hadn’t been taking part as often as the league fixtures would suggest we ought to have been taking part, and so by April, due to the unusual amount of eleventh-hour cancellations, we still had a number of matches remaining. (One game was abandoned when four players were arrested while driving back from a squat party in South London, and ended up spending the night in Elephant and Castle police cells. They used their permitted phone call to contact Big Steve, who was thus tasked with cancelling the game, telling the League Secretary that the car had broken down on the M1 “with half the team on board”. The exact same excuse was used a month later when only five players could be raised at 9.30am, the aforementioned League Secretary, Trev, helpfully advising Allan that he might consider getting a new set of wheels.)

 

This fixture backlogue meant we would be playing Wednesday evenings and Sunday to catch up. And as you can probably guess, the difference, performance-wise, between weekend and midweek was night and day. Chalk and cheese. Yet before this end-of-season mini-revival occurred, there was a most unusual episode – a seemingly tangential thread that really must be woven into the rash-giving synthetic fabric of this story – one that might have contributed some to our indomitable team unity…

 

* * *

 

FC Inter-lude

 

During the Inter Avinit campaign, the once-met-never-forgotten Aussie Marc, our semi-ambidextrous, enthusiastic, yet ultimately twin-left-pegged right-winger, was working in Via Fossa. One night before Christmas, as the staff enjoyed a well-earned post-shift drink, Marc got chatting to another barman by the name of Phil, a tubby, dark-haired kid in his early twenties with a slight resemblance to Frank Sidebottom. The conversation got on to dance music and partying, Phil dropping into the mix that he stood to inherit £1 million when his very sickly grandmother passed away and that his idea was to start a superclub in Manchester. He even said he’d sourced a venue: the old Boddington’s Brewery building. Marc had fast feet (on the dancefloor, if not the football pitch) and an even faster tongue, and duly proceeded to persuade Phil that, with his connections, he was The Very Man to project-manage the whole thing.  

 

So Marc starts to assemble his team: Security, Interior Design, Bar Manager, Promoters and Marketing, Bookings, General Manager. I inveigled my way in there, too, under some spurious creative heading whose exact name and place in the superclub taxonomy I forget: maybe Ambience Manager, or some equally vague and moneygrabbing bollocks. There were four Inter Avinit regulars involved – Rolf and Wal did have experience throwing Bill the Cat parties at the Marcus Garvey Centre, so weren’t blagging it – and we all met one night at the flat where Marc was staying in the Meadows. Phil brought along a couple of litres of vodka and a tray of Red Bull and we sat and got-to-know-him. He set out his vision, then told us we’d get mobile phones the following day, have measurements done for suits, Marc would get a car, and there’d be company credit cards. He also tossed out some absurd monthly salaries – Marc on £8k, others on or around the £5k mark – and said we should all go up on an inspection trip to Manchester the next day but one. It turned out the trip had to be cancelled, however: Phil’s girlfriend’s father had had a heart-attack (and without wishing to drop a spoiler in just yet, pretty much every word of that phrase can go between its own set of inverted commas).

 

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and sure, there were certain elements of the story that didn’t add up or that invited suspicion. But it seemed like an open goal, and even Inter Avinit can tuck those away. We all went our separate ways for Christmas, if not thinking all our Christmases had come at once – if not yet fully-fledged Phil-o-philes – then certainly not skeptical enough to be chucking a wet blanket over our dreams; Marc, his home 12,000 miles away, stayed in Nottingham, clutching an £8k cheque and waiting for the banks to reopen, doubtless already mentally spending the dough. By the time I’d returned to NG on December 29, it turned out that the cheque was nine bob’s-worth of dodgy.

 

Phil, meanwhile – just a pathetic kid from the ‘burbs with a personality disorder – had gone to London for New Year. To a squat party. In his twenty-some years of queasily negotiated existence, he had only ever ridden the Psychonautic Express as far as Crafty Spliff, so I can imagine it was all quite an eye-opener, sweating it hard there in his navy blue knock-off Ralph Lauren polo shirt as Chris Liberator dropped Adam Beyer's 'Drumcode'. Rolf and Wal babysat him through it all until, while driving back up the M1, Phil in the back, spent, they were informed of Aussie Marc’s cheque’s real worth and asked under all circumstances to act normally until the following night, when we’d be having a meeting to report on progress – a far from easy task for Rolf, who had been about to hand in his notice at work the next day.

Monday night. Everyone bar Rolf, Wal and Phil are at Marc’s place well before the appointed hour. Marc sellotapes a Dictaphone to the underside of the coffee table, as close as possible to where Phil will be shepherded, and tells us how the meeting will pan out. The Three Amigos arrive. Marc opens proceedings by inviting Nikki and Emma to tell us of their ideas for the decor – some gentle entrées to whet our appetites. Round the room we go until we get to Steve, head bouncer at Via Fossa. “Manc’s pretty rough”, he says matter-of-factly, “so we’re defo gonna need a couple of shooters to keep the drug gangs out”. I steal one of several glances at Phil. He swallows sharply, no idea of the rout that awaits him. The atmosphere is taut and crackling like electricity cables, unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since.

 

Next it’s Phil’s turn to speak. Yeah, Phil: sell us the dream! You da Man. Whoop, whoop! Practically purring, he tells us that contracts will soon be signed on the purchase; that we’ll be having suits made in a couple of days; that phones and laptops have been ordered. And as he’s saying all this everyone is simultaneously faux-beaming and inwardly scowling, and perhaps feeling ever so slightly bewildered as to how some poor gadge gets themselves into such a sorry, sorry state as this, mere minutes now from being reduced to a puddle. Phil gilds his presentation with a few more fantasy flourishes. Then it’s Marc, the keynote speaker.

 

Now, if ever a situation calls for being blunt as fuck, then Aussie is generally the way you want to go. He didn’t beat about the bush: “Yeah, that’s all fucken great mate, but we know it’s absolute bullshit”. Unlike his service from the wings in open play, this set-piece delivery was bang on the money.

 

As you can imagine, Phil, still giddy with his unearned huckster-glory, looked just a wee bit taken aback at that riposte, as though someone had just reached up into his asshole and turned him inside-out, exposing his tiny heart and his rotten, lying insides. Oh my. And out of that heavy, heavy silence, eyes darting among people who moments earlier had been his retinue, his entourage, his crew, he stammered: “W-what y’on abaaht?”

 

“That cheque you wrote out? Eight fucken grand. Bounced into my account and back out again like a fucken kangaroo”. And with that the jig was up.

 

Rolf erupted. For a moment, I thought Phil was going to get panelled. I suppose he did, too, although it’s difficult to ascertain much that’s clear and distinct from the vortex of emotions that must engulf a person so thoroughly, publicly, and intimately humiliated as this, but I do remember Phil being quickly frogmarched into the kitchen by the two girls, where he was consoled or counselled while our heart-rates came down from berserker frenzy to bossa nova. Marc phoned Phil’s father, explained what had happened, and asked whether he should be put in a cab and sent over there. “I never want to see the little scrote again”, came the reply (surprising under the circumstances), followed by an explanation of how he was owed ten grand by his prodigal son. “And a telly”. So, some fifteen or twenty minutes later, Phil was ushered out and on his lonesome way, never to be seen again.

 

Anyway, the following month Samovar put on a night under the FC Inter Avinit banner at the Marcus Garvey’s ‘Ballroom’, all eleven acts on the lineup being represented by bug-eyed Subbuteo figures on a flyer designed by Chaz, of “chaz-ball” (i.e. hospital pass) fame. The Garvey had a distinctive atmosphere: a typical village hall set-up but on the second floor of a council building in one of the city’s toughest neighbourhoods, a village hall at which the wares being hawked were not prize vegetables or floating spongecake. That said, as long as you avoided starting a drugs turf war, you could get bongoed to your heart’s content.

 

Along we went in our orange-and-black polyester livery – what we sacrificed in comfort in the sweltering room, we gained in visible unity – to see several of the team knob-twiddle: DJ Ricardo, Dave Centreback, while Nibble and Allan played a live set together under their No Ball Games moniker (chosen because their one and only stage prop was a sign half-inched from the Arboretum park). They bounded on stage to a roar and, in the time-honoured, no-frills approach of live bangin’ techno, simply announced: “This one’s called ‘Bullshit’…” and were straight off into it. Up we all jumped, bouncing on the Garvey’s unintentionally yet serendipitously springy wooden floor, and ‘Bullshit’ fairly yomped and squelched along until its breakdown and the vocal sample whence it took its name: Like a fucken kangaroo… Like a fucken kangaroo… Like-a, Like-a… Like a fucken… A fucken kanga- … A fucken k-kangaaaaaa… Like a fuuuuckeeeennnn… Drop the kicks, the mid-range, the tchk-tchk-tchk of the hats, bar of silence, then, in faithfully un-timestretched fair-dinkum Strayan: That’s all fucken great mate, but we know it’s absolute bullshit.

 

Yeeeeee-haaaaaaa!! Not catharsis, exactly, but the absolute perfect ending to a most peculiar episode. Avinit, indeedy!

 

* * *

 

No Ball Games were, in a manner of speaking, playing for the shirt (inasmuch as we were all bouncing around together somewhere down the front) and it would be all too easy for me to suggest that the players did the same when we started with our Wednesday night games in April. But it wasn’t like that. There was no tradition being laid down (or held up), no codes, no institutional mythology, no veneration of symbols, no ritual. Très anarchist. Let your institutions rise and fall according to how they serve your present needs and desires. This would be it: one season. Football for shits and giggles – no more, no less. How we would treat Kipling’s “twin imposters”, Messrs Triumph and Disaster, was at this stage moot, although we were far from demoralised. That said, if Mr Triumph ever did happen to show his face, I don’t think we’d have stiff-upper-lipped it.  

 

Our home pitch for these late-season frolics looked a picture. Landscaped with loving attention and civic altruism by Joseph Paxton in the early Victorian era, the Forest Recreation Ground – the Rec’, short for Wreckhead – was, appositely, the current residence of that emblem of Nottingham revelry, the Goose Fair. It was also the original home of Nottingham Forest (whence the name, see?) and once housed the Nottingham race track. Indeed, there’s a house in the Arboretum topped by a rather incongruous crenellated turret, built so some industrialist bigwig could keep an eye on the gee-gees. Nowadays, however, there are considerably fewer industrialists than prostitutes on that side of the Rec’ (unless, of course, the industrialists are kerb crawling).   

 

With the addition of these schoolnight games, our usual post-match habit of pint, roast and miscellaneous bonce-modifiers while watching the live match and melting into sleep at the Albion (subsequently the much-loved, sadly lamented Moog bar) was supplemented by midweek win-or-lose boozy-dos at the Vernon Arms, now a Sainsbury’s Local, where we watched the latter stages of Manchester United’s treble-securing European Cup run in. And our upturn in form and United’s surge for glory ran step by step. Indeed, the night for which Roy Keane had once painted his teenage Forest digs black – the night he reached into the dark bowels of his misanthropy and dragged United to a 2-3 win at Juventus despite knowing that his early booking would keep him from the final (perhaps he should have given the ref a false name: Colin, say) – was doubtless inspired by news of FC Inter Avinit’s first point of the season, a goalless draw against … well, against Another Team. A point! We had an effin’ point! This was cause for celebration. Kosher celebration.

 

Success, as any football club knows, brings in punters, and by the time we’d accrued our point, our small but noticeable crowd – it really stood out from the crowd, our crowd – of dread heads, wreckheads and other folk you’d not normally expect watching the South Notts Football League had started to swell. It swelled still further when people who ordinarily wouldn’t have been massively arsed about going too far from their after-party comforts and into the icy Sunday morning suddenly thought the prospect of a midweek spring evening a whole lot more congenial. Even folk indifferent toward football would pop down for the crack craic. (One less than football-adoring supporter – a fella whose motto may as well have been let’s kick sport out of drugs – wandered down and, no doubt noticing there was no Bovril or meat-and-potato pies on sale, thought he’d, y’know, snort mescaline. Snort. Mescaline. As you do. It’s like fucking glaaaarse, he complained, before inter-dimensionalling off somewhere less sporty.)

 

As a result, the visiting teams of bemused and amused office workers and pub haunters would be greeted by a merry touchline of combat trousers, hobnail boots, ponchos, fluorescent vests, dreads of various hues, dogs on string, a fairly take-it-or-leave-it relationship with bathing – the Inter Avinit tifosi, juggling and rolling joints rather than, say, screwing up their faces and bellowing for us to GET IT IN THE FUCKING MIXER! Or making puffa-jacketed fascist salutes, before stealing into the night via a stabbing or two. Or taking out all their bollock-crushing domestic and/or (un)employment frustrations on the OI-REF!! A happy crowd. And amidst all this frivolity, it happened: we won. We won! Our very last match of the season, and we effin’ won. Hasta la victoria siempre.

 

Building on our one-match unbeaten home run, we approached this final match with something approaching confidence – parts of Forest Fields were becoming a bit of a fortress, true enough, but not the Rec’, not yet. There’s probably little point giving you a detailed, chalkboard-based tactical account of the game, although the following has been glued together from the frazzled memories of its participants with all the artisanal skill of an 11-Rizla spliff.

 

We opened the scoring around the hour mark – that is, about half an hour after we’d started to flag – Alex K reacting to a loose ball that had dropped invitingly in a goalmouth scramble by lashing home with his swinger. We more than held our own thereafter, fashioning only occasional chances yet not looking unduly troubled, despite the distinct lack of performance-detractors in the bloodstream. We held out until around the 85th minute when Oi-Ref! awarded a penalty to our opponents, West Bridgford Albion, after Rolf decided he’d go and handball their corner: a ‘Hand of Oh My Fucking God’ moment. The very last game and a first victory denied us. A few youvgoddabefuckinkiddings later, their man stepped up. “He’s shitting himself” commentated one of the Avinitistas, helpfully. With a local variation on the Bruce Grobbelaar ‘jelly legs’ from the 1984 European Cup final (famously reprised by Jerzy Dudek in Istanbul in 2005), Wal decided to pull faces at the penalty taker. Whether or not these impromptu gurns directly caused the spotkick to be shanked wide, no-one really knows, but Wal was certainly claiming it as a save. Long into the night, in fact.

 

A couple of minutes later, our opponents still pressing hard to ruin our entire lives, the ball fell at my feet just inside our half with only one defender between me and the goal and Allan peeling away in the inside-left channel. Rather stupidly, the defender tried to press the ball, giving me an easy volleyed sidefoot pass into Al’s path. Naturally, it landed on a fucking sixpence. One-on-one with the keeper, Allan’s decision was made for him by another act of headless charging: he calmly lifted the ball over him and, with one bounce, two, three, into the empty net. Like a fucken kangaroo. Cue mayhem.

 

Allan wheeled away in a Careca-style aeroplane celebration as his ten teammates, about 40 crusties and one or two dogs chased him across the Rec’ and eventually to the bottom of a joyous, writhing and slightly stinky pile-on.

 

The football league

The foot-ball league!

Is upside down

Is up-side down!

The football league is upside down…

 

What a way to finish the season, the only season in the life of the club! As with the original football teams of this fair land, clubs forged in the shadows of industrial Britain’s terraced streets, we had brought a sense of pride to our community – slapped a big happy smiley-face on it, in fact. Top one, nice one, sorted.

 

One or two of the names have been changed to protect the perhaps not so innocent. Well, what did you expect, Ref?

 

An earlier, abridged version of this article first appeared on VICE.