 |
|||
|
HOME
GO TO PAGE
1
2
3
|
|||
|
| |||
|
Now being forty seventh reserve in the firemans reserve football team means one does not have to dedicate ones entire life to playing or practising football. My involvement was mainly confined to telling people the score of the last match.
I never got involved with the little details, it turns out one of the little details was the fact that the team was actually a rugby football team.
I have just about managed to figure what football is about. You have eleven men who kick the ball around and try to get it in one of the nets at the end of the field. Somewhere in the middle of all this is a spare man who keeps blowing a whistle at you.
Rugby on the other hand is was another matter, here fifty oversized beings run about a muddy field beating each other up for a couple of hours, then get drunk for the rest of the evening. I suspect like football there is perhaps slightly more to it than I have discovered.
The sudden realisation that I was actually playing this suicidal game plus my encounter with the twenty five ton member of the opposing team, left me in a condition that any where else in the world would have had me strapped onto a life support machine.
I lay in the mud, still apparently breathing. I thought the best course of action was to stay on the ground, with football I learnt that if you stay on the ground two nice men rush on with a stretcher and carry you off.
It appears that in rugby if you stay on the ground all the rest of the players run all over you, not only the opposing players. I decided to get up before it happened again.
If laying down had been a mistake getting up was a bigger one, as I staggered to my feet I heard that dreaded shout; " Here it's yours.! " I looked round only to see someone idot throwing that ruddy ball at me again.
I should have run in the opposite direction and accept the abuse the team would hurl at me. Still half dazed from my first encounter with the opposition however I caught the ball. I must have been holding it for all of one millionth of a second when my stomach was hit by a steam roller travelling at a hundred miles an hour.
By the time the game ended, I had figured out this rugby game.
The object was to inflict as much injury as possible on the opposing side, you score two points for a bleeding nose, three points for a sprained ankle or wrist, four for a sprained shoulder and eight for a damaged knee. They scored about seventy six off me. Those they don't kill on the field of play they try to drown in the bath or drink to death in the bar afterward.
To say I did not feel too good that following morning is a gross understatement.
I opened an eye and looked at the dawn spreading across my bedroom ceiling.
When, after a long slow breakfast, I eventually found out that it was not the following day at all, it was the day after the following day, I had slept through a whole day.
I decided it was time to resign from the firemans reserve football team. |
|||
|
HOME
TOP OF PAGE
|
|||
Short Story Series - Abridged from the book - The Tatty Nickers | |||
|
|
|
|
|