The Campbell Academy Blog (82)

A little bit of nihilism

Five minutes to go in the game on Saturday with the West Bridgford Colts Rebels (the Saturday team that I now coach that Callum plays for and the Sunday team), and we're 3-1 down.

Callum asks me, "Why didn't I just take up golf?".

We're playing Sunnyhill. Never was there a team more badly named than that.

We had a heads-up before they arrived because they're part of the Spondon ecosystem of football in our world, and those guys are generally vile, and Sunnyhill were no disappointment in that regard.

The game started fine.

We were on top in the 1st 10 minutes, and they were pretty quiet, and then they got back into it, and they scored against the run of play to go 1-0 up and just progressively became more and more horrible.

Their coaches shouted at the referee every single time there was a decision, their boys repeatedly and repeatedly fouled but not booked by the referee, multiple warnings for their boys about repeated fouling but never a booking from the referee because they never did enough to go over the line.

Every time a decision went against them, they swore and pretty bad swearing (and I'm from Scotland) and then they decided to become more and more nasty.

We scored again before the half and it was one each, and we explained to the boys that they would have to stand toe to toe against these guys to win in the second half (we really believed we were better at football, but we were getting almost no protection).

In the second half, due to a keeper error, they went 2-1 up, and that was really the end of the game, but if you listen to what they were saying to our guys in the middle of it, it was vile and terrible.

Callum got called a c*nt several times; boys were being picked on for their looks and offered out fights in the car park after the game.

At one point, it just broke out of hand, and somebody was shouting at Callum, so the game stopped. I approached the referee and said, "If they don't stop this, I'm going to take my players off the pitch".

This is a classic middle-class tactic against underdeveloped pond scum like the guys we were playing against were.

It is really like dealing with seven-year-olds because if you threaten to take away their football, everything goes mental.