That time back in the first week or two that I got sick for a few days, Dave had went down to the Rec Centre to play Drop-in football on a Wednesday. Basically, every Wednesday anybody who had a student card could go down to the courts and enter into a draw to see if they could play 5-aside football for free. We literally ended up doing this every Wednesday for the rest of the term. But Dave impressed anyway at his first time going and some random lad called Matt Owen asked him if he wanted to join his team and enter a league with him. Dave took him up on the offer and told Matt about his unbelievably gifted left mid friend Dill, so Matt told him to bring me up. Our first match came on Monday Jan 14th. I had just met the team for the first time 5 minutes before kick-off and I managed to sneak into the starting line-up. Matt seemed nice, from England and doing a PhD, even though he didn’t look over 21. Nick also was on the team coincidently enough; maybe that’s how Dave got on it in the first place, he never really said too much about it. So we played the match, and immediately I realised that the standard in Canada was nowhere near how it is back home. We had so much time and space and 40 minutes later we had the game wrapped up at 14-11; I bagged myself a nice 5 goals too. I also found out that Dave has a bit of a thunderous left foot on him, which ended up playing a huge role in a lot of our victories. The match was fun so we decided to go for a pint or two in the pit afterwards, to get to know each other better. The team was called Breast Homage Albion (BHA) and consisted of me, Dave, Matt, Rowan (also from England), Mamoud (a black guy from the Ivory Coast), Neumann (a typical Canasian; we coined this name early on when we realised that about 95% of UBC were like half Asian half Canadian), Ross, Matt Hosford, Nick, Arni and eventually we brought Juan along. So we played weekly on a Monday night from here on and were doing ridiculously well, with Dave and myself leading the lines. Most matches me and Dave would rack up about 80% of our goals between us. Our first 6 matches we absolutely walked with results like 15-3 and 20-4. We finally lost one match to Psi U owls which was Niko and Fabien’s team (a French and Swiss guy from Fairview), but we went on to beat them again the following week 12-4. By the end of the season we had won 7 and lost 1, scoring 101 goals. 24 of the goals were mine, and an impressive 33 of the goals were Dave’s (together that’s 56% of the teams goals for the season), so it’s safe to say that the team might have a struggled a bit without us; but to be fair the likes of Matt, Nick and Juan were all the backbone of the team. We finished top of the league unsurprisingly and were brought straight into the semi-final of the playoffs; I forgot to mention that in my last match of the season I got a straight red for a slide tackle, albeit a fair challenge. But slide tackles are just banned in general in the rec leagues so I had no comeback against the decision. Unfortunately this kept me from playing the semi-finals so I had to just hope we could win so I could make an appearance for the finale. And quite rightly we did. 7-6, close match and a few dodgy decisions but we weren’t complaining. The final was on straight after the semi which was a bit unfortunate for Dave and Matt and the boys because they were shattered, but I was rearing to go. Matt (captain) told me to go out and lead the lines because I was freshest so I did and I pinged in the first goal. But the other team were pretty good, and all the boys were tired. We went into half time 6-2 down and it wasn’t looking great for us. But then we made a few changes. We fielded me, Dave, Mamoud and Juan and literally played the best football we have all season, pulling the game back to 6-6 within about 10 minutes; it was such a good comeback and we had all the momentum. But then came the worst call of the semester. I was a bit tired and I called for Ross (who wasn’t the best oul player) to come on for me for a while. Within about 30 seconds he had missed an open goal and I knew if I was in that position we would have been up 7-6. This caused us to lose all of our momentum and they scored from the break. Only 2 minutes later Dave slid in to tackle someone who was through on goal, and of course faced the penalty; red card. It was a disaster. I called Ross for me to come back on, but it was too late. They knocked in another one so it was now 6-8 and we were a man down. It was all but over and then the whistle finally sounded. I was so annoyed that I didn’t stay on the pitch but sure that’s the way it goes sometimes, and at the end of the day it was only a 5-aside rec league. Overall, the 5-asde football played a huge part of my time in UBC and it’s something I’ll look back on when I think of UBC. I met some good friends and had a great laugh; we had a couple of nights out too which went down well. So that’s that for the football. Halfway through the original league we played there was a break for study week (or spring break) which is what I want to talk about next.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:22:59 +0000
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