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Match of the Day
Tuesday, October 16, 2001 06:42 p.m.

I spent Saturday afternoon watching Aylesbury United play Atherstone in the F.A. Cup Third Qualifying Round. I can't have been to a game for at least two years, but nothing significant seemed to have changed. The crowd was smaller [500 or so, on a pleasant, warmish autumn afternoon], the price of admission had gone up [7 pounds], and there were none of the players I remembered from my previous visits, but the experience was essentially the same as before, with all the familiar rituals involved in watching football at this level: standing not much more than a metre from the pitch, half of the crowd changing ends at half-time, and occasionally witty dialogue between the players and the crowd...

The last of these rituals reminds of a game I saw at home to Hendon nearly ten years ago, when Peter Taylor, until a week ago the Leicester City boss, was the away side's player-manager. He must have been in his forties then, and so, when there was a break in play for another player to receive attention from the physio, I joined in the usual banter by shouting [reasonably politely] the suggestion that he ought to take a rest while he had the opportunity.

To my surprise, Taylor not only heard this but took exception to it, coming over to the side of the pitch to ask who'd made the comment. When I admitted responsibility, he challenged me to demonstrate which one of us was fitter, him or me.

I could perhaps have pointed out that I'd been working in a factory since eight that morning, so I might be a little tired, but it didn't occur to me and, anyway, I couldn't realistically have pretended that it would have made any difference. Instead, I apologised, and Taylor returned to the pitch to resume the game. He had the last laugh there, as well, as Hendon scored a last-minute winner to win the game 3-2.

In Saturday's game, Atherstone took the lead early in the first half after Aylesbury had briefly seemed to be on top. Shortly afterwards, though, they had a man sent off for what turned out to be the first in a series of excessively dirty challenges. Despite their numerical advantage, however, Aylesbury didn't equalise until the second half, but then swept forward and scored two more in the final ten minutes as the away side rather fell apart. 3-1, then, to United, and an away tie at Yeading in the final qualifying round in two weeks' time.

(I don't remember ever having written a report on a football match before, outside of the [wish-fulfillment] sports stories I wrote when I was a schoolboy. Doing so now reminds me alarmingly of an episode in Martin Amis's London Fields, when Keith Talent [a darts-obsessed wide-boy who I identified, when reading the novel, with the Happy Mondays' Shaun Ryder] describes a game to an acquaintance in a perfect copy of the vocabulary and idiom used in such reports, the most striking feature of which is the desperate use of synonyms to avoid repeating teams' and players' names. [I've just been looking in my copy of the book for the relevant passage, but I can't find it at the moment, so I'll have to post it later.] I often find myself doing the same thing when writing e-mails, articles or even weblog entries: just a moment ago I even made a tine change to the report above, describing Peter Taylor above as the Leicester 'boss' in order to avoid repeating 'manager' twice in a sentence.)

Enough. All I should add is that you can find a much more complete report of the game on the Ducks on the Web website, run by fans of the club, and a resource I've relied on a lot over the last three years in Japan. Ignore the fact that the report is headlined "Aylesbury 2 Wealdstone 2": it is in fact a report of the same game I attended...

[Oh, and I've posted a photo from the game here. So aren't you lucky people...]