“All your teams are sh1t Soph.”
That was Ray’s cheerful assessment of TLF’s footballing fortunes prior to The Mighty Saints home game against Bath (that’s Bath without an ‘r’ remember). I didn’t have the heart to correct the “all” and point out that technically it’s ‘both your teams are sh1t Soph”, because however much I come over all TLF Pedant, the fact remains that both of them currently are…..very, very, very sh1t.
Fortunately there is with football at Clarence Park always a silver lining to the results-shaped cloud and on that particular day it came in the form of the pre-match entertainment, with 90 minutes of sweeping generalisations, putting the world to rights and some high class end to end ranting. TLF mistakenly had a little dalliance with some trivia in the pre-rant warm up. And can I say that just because I remembered the name of the previous Barton that played in the Premier League (Warren) it does not mean my head is full of the aforementioned waste product (see paras 1 and 2 above). But I guess that’s the kind of abuse you get for showboating.
After that no subject was off limits and while there is a temptation to pick a weakened side when no points are at stake there was no second string team in the club house on this occasion; the usual Saintettes line up boosted by the addition of Lisa. There did come a point when we worried we might be turning into our mums or possibly our grans, but we agreed that the musical backdrop to this would be more Prodigy than Max Bygraves and no one was in danger of ordering a house coat just yet…..In short:
The younger generation don’t know they are born.
They are also not always that canny – pleading poverty to your mum about having no money for food doesn’t work when your drink fuelled nights out are posted all over Instagram.
And we’re not surprised you can’t cook if cookery lessons aren’t like they were in our day – we didn’t get where we are today rolling out frozen pastry. We learned the rubbing in method and we were grateful!
And teachers! Well they are far too young these days. They were OLD when we were at school.
It’s a shame we had to stop and watch the game really…we were just warming up – education policy in general was just about to get a good kicking..but no we had to go and watch St Albans get a good kicking.
There was some momentary respite at half time when TLF was put in charge of the shop while our erstwhile multi-tasking shopkeeper and programme editor took a comfort break. I get the impression that TLF was not first choice in the deputy shopkeeper stakes; the look he gave me kind of said, “stand there and don’t touch anything.”
Mind you I was more solid behind that counter than City’s defence. I’d ask for my money back, but ranting of that quality was cheap at half the price.
“It didn’t happen in my day” Fox
Match stats:
St Albans 1 Bath City 4
Attendance:839
Re-fuelling:pre-match sausage roll from Hatch, 1 pkt bacon fries, 3 pints Stella, 1 Carlsberg.
Wasted raffle and goalden goal opportunities: 12
Items sold while on shop duty: Nil
Would you buy a used scarf from this TLF?