M4: Season Review

Men’s 4th XI
London League Division Five
Season 2006/07

Well where to begin. Yet again Laz took on the captaincy of the 4th XI despite having ‘retired’ several years ago. And it was looking like a pretty good line up to start the year despite the obvious problem in goal – lots of old faces mixed with a couple of new players and some of the youngsters coming through.

Ahmet “Tino” Tuney and Roger Webster were two new recruits to the club, and Sam Howells, Rob Farrow and Gareth Barker made the giant step up from the Rascals. And with the old faces came the welcome return of the old ‘tin’ game. For those of you not familiar with this, at the end of every match each player votes for the idiot of the game. The winner (read loser) of this vote then has to choose a tin from a selection with labels removed, and eat the entire contents including whatever sauce/juice/brine that might be in there. As could have been expected Laz earned his fair share of these little beauties and only 1 or 2 votes were rigged despite what he says!

With a team on paper looking pretty solid, but aging a bit we started off the season not quite knowing what to expect. With the youngsters and newcomers to the club to help things along we were hopeful – despite Ahmet’s ridiculous hair. A great victory in the first match soon indicated we could do well in this league and there was every expectation that we would finish at the top, despite a few draws against mediocre opposition we had 4 wins out of 6 and were the only undefeated team.

But things then took a turn for the worse. Spag and Laz had a lover’s tiff and refused to play in the same team anymore, Roger Webster broke his hand taking him out for months and the aging team’s injury list started to mount up. True to form we soon found that big red self-destruct button and it wasn’t long before we suffered the first defeat – to the second bottom team no less! That brief blip indicated not everything was right and in the next 6 games we only managed a single win and that included a 3-9 thrashing at the hands of the league leaders who we had beaten earlier in the season. Things started to look ok again after a must-win 7-1 demolishing of the bottom side and then an 8-0 victory against the team second from bottom, but it was too late to redeem the early failures.

With two games left, both ‘easy’ on paper, we could claim at least 4th spot and make it into the playoffs, which we did, however, a pulsating semi-final ended in us loosing on flicks.

Still, not bad to finish 4th after being promoted last season.

Written by Chris Clack (Kiff)
Vice Captain