F.C. SE7EN 16-9 WHITE CITY - 10.12.20

Re-match, we played this mob before and drew. This game was a watershed moment for us, an epiphany of sorts (check out the Xmas link there, I'm good, I know), as a few things began to become clear to us on the pitch.

At the beginning, for us it was about organisation off the field, get that sorted as a club and numbers and regularity just fall into place. Getting the numbers are slowly but surely becoming a secondary issue, most importantly we're getting 5 minimum as standard, weekly, which gives us some more time to give thought to on the field woes. Anyone who has been watching our results, well, it's more akin to a horror movie. Any good work from a victory, sure enough gets wiped away like pebble dash by a following week poo-pooing.

Pre-game, we spoke a lot about trying to implement just a few things each week into our game. Not to overwhelm all of our players with too much to think about, I mean Frodo is still traumatised from his mission to destroy the ring, the last thing he needs to be doing is wetting the bed with nightmares of man-marking the "Puffyfish".

THE PUFFY FISH; so football weekly is great, with FootyAddicts, we don't need to worry about the opposition, they take care of it. But the random nature of the website means you do get some characters signing up. The Puffy Fish is one of said characters. His love for football is so pure, his love for time-keeping, not so much.

Once he waddled into the cage, several minutes late for the game, but unlike most folk, who do a quick warmup and dutifully strip off ready to play, Puffy was a 110 percenter, no-nonsense kinda baller. His waddle broke into...er...another waddle and he took to the game like a duck to water....except he was wearing his coat. Fair enough, he was in a rush, we thought, that'll come off soon though...

.....Well no. The puffer jacket stayed on, and by the end of the game, twinned with his well oiled sweaty round head, he had started to resemble a Puffer Fish. What a character though! Technically very good, but align this with a slowness which is hard to put into words and you have the Paradox of the Puffy Fish. He's become a cult classic. This is football, legendary status achieved.

I lose my train of thought when putting down our match reports to paper, my thoughts just pouring down straight to paper, if you're seasoned FC7 follower, you'll be used to the random meanderings from a footy lover!

Anyways, we wanted to add a few basics to our game, we decided for this week to try our hardest to:-

- Pick a man, and mark him all game

- Only kick into man-marking when the ball came into our own half

- Keep an arm's length distance when marking the man on the ball, get tighter to your men off the ball

After beginning the game, the 1st point was as non-existent as Billybob's calves. It was a nice idea but I think you would have to be fitter than Mo Farah to be able to pull that off during a 60 minute game. It just wasn't viable and I think it would of forced us to run around like headless chickens during the game. We do enough of that at work, so no thanks Bob.

The second 2 points were easier to stick to. There were a few times that we pressed or committed a bit too much in their half. I understand, if you can grab possession in those areas, you can grab goals but if you don't and get beaten, immediately as a team, our formation gets stretched as far as a pair of my pre-lockdown underwear, and a goal is almost a dead cert because of it. As the game progressed, we started to get a bit more disciplined and waited for the ball to get into our half before kicking into action like a brand new ED-209.

We man-marked well too. I said pre-game, it would be difficult in terms of fitness, but for now, it was about being turned on (easy Frodo) to the mentality of it. Getting the idea ingrained into our collective minds to mark someone, not leaving the runners, keeping tuned into the thinking throughout the game. No one is naïve, we're not gonna start keeping clean sheet from day 1, doubt we ever will. But as I've said before, a 5-a-side game is like a baseball season. You'll score 10, concede 10, then its the next 10 goals that define the result.

And tonight, the jigsaw clicked into place.

Because we are starting to implement these ideas in a general manner, it was good to see Jan and BillyBob implementing them on the our opponent's side this week too. We're getting some good weekly attendance figures, so we have ample players that sometimes have to go on our opposition's outfit. The ultimate goal for us is to get league ready, and our fitness will naturally increase, so its good to challenge ourselves and get some of the basics ready in terms of tactics.

With our new found knowledge, the game itself was hard. I personally think it was the hardest game in terms of intensity we have played. Everyone one of us pushed ourselves to their limits as we tried to stick to our defensive principles. We generally had the game in control.

We had one random called Mike, we call him Baggy Trousers, as he had the peculiar thought that it was acceptable to wear baggy tracksuit bottoms during a game. Annoyingly he was one of those players who thinks that talking a lot makes him better. In a true game of footy, no one begrudges someone barking out instructions, its useful, in fact communication is key. But some of his words were nonsense. Shouting at players to mark up he should of taken, instructions that he probably didn't understand. Then the worst part, was he would berate you afterwards for not comprehending his bullsh*t.

He did annoy all of us, even the opponents. If talking was a footballing skill then this doofus would be Messi. But it's not. So SHUT UP MIKE and just play FOOTBALL. What a TOOL. As you may have seen, we use this blog to call out the losers in our sport, and Mike certainly was one of them. Don't be a "Mike".

The game was hard fought, we were up by 10 early doors, silly goalie mistakes, piss poor passing, nice skills followed up by giving the ball away. But you're always gonna have those in a game, we do need to up our concentration to minimise them. Apart from Baggy Trousers' dumbness, the game was enjoyable and we all had a great time.

We're living in a strange and worrying time. Covid 19 has written off the year and working from home 24/7 is now the norm. So playing footy helps hugely with fitness and probably most importantly it gives us all the opportunity to have a chat pre and post match. With a vaccine being rolled out in the UK, hopefully we can have a beer post-match so we can analyse our game, chew the fat and press Jumbo's buttons (it's too easy).

Camaraderie is such a key part of humanity and what we're doing, while others sit at home, offer suggestions and no solutions to the pandemic, they bemoan how life sucks. We are doing more, we're living our lives to the fullest, just differently. It represents our mindsets, how we have, as a club, made the most of our time. If we can achieve what we have so far, all during a global pandemic, then we can achieve anything.

Bring on the next game!