1. An introduction to a team.
Most people talk about the Saturday game being the most important on the State football landscape. The VPL, the State League 1’s or even the State Knockout Cup but the real meat of the game is the metropolitan league propping up the canteens expenditure on a sunday.
Over the winter months you’ll see groups of 11 to 16 men aged roughly between 16 to 40 leave the confines of a warm bed and head to meet up with friends to kick a ball of leather filled with air against another team of equally dogged individuals.
And even with pre-season training, we’re not the fittest of blokes. We don’t train entirely regularly or to the same intent as we used to but the usual drills get us onto the park. The end of a training session we’ll head back to the clubrooms with the Seniors’ team and a few of us sit around after training or matches gasping on a cigarette in the freezing Melbourne air.
So why is this asthma prone, injury clad the true heart and soul of football in Victoria you may ask. If the VPL is the cream then these players have become butter. Out from there wonder years of kicking the shins of prospective aleague players, the skills are still on show alongside injury recovering youngsters and inept middle distance players like myself. These players combine the passion of a bar room brawl, the occasional accidental skill of Messi and the partying habit of Ballotelli.
But that’s the league in general, the team I run onto the ground with are a mix of ‘ex-division 1’, some ‘used to play at div 3’ and my own ‘I played reserves in div 6’ effort. We have the slightly unfit central midfielder who has an unerring accuracy when in an impossible position but finds an open goal too scary to toe-poke the ball into. The super sub who’s runs everywhere and puts more pressure on the opposition than a pair of concrete boots for a police informant but has an inconsistent rate of passes on the ball. The back line who can argue and swear fluently in many languages, will pass out well and occasionally decides to attempt to skin the closest striker.
And these are the players who will tug at the shirt just behind the ref’s field of vision. Curl the ball perfectly from a corner kick to the backpost and try a bicycle kick just to be able to say they’ve tried it before pulling a hamstring. They’ll get riled up at the solitary ref and grumble at having to run the line, swear about a yellow card for a good ten minutes then proudly say if they’d really intended to the player wouldn’t have got up.
This is not champagne football, but as it’s Sunday, this is definitely beer football.
Look out for part 2, we’re just in the change rooms getting ready.