Being forty seventh reserve in the Firemans Reserve Football Team has one big advantage over being in the first eleven, you never actually have to play the game.

I didn't have to play Leeds when we lost forty seven to three. I didn't play Chester when Charley, Arthur, Frank and Martin all ended up in hospital. I didn't play Doncaster when Godfery the goal keeper disappeared, never to be seen again.

Having said all that Murphys law combined with the enormously high number of injuries our side always seemed to get, it had to happen sooner or later and it happened.

Me and Joe were sitting on the lower deck of a number forty seven bus each clutching a pair of football boots and a faded yellow jumper. The last time I had actually played football was at school when the boots were made of buffalo hide and they had six inch nails hammered into the soles.

Joe ask why I was not speaking, I told him that until I got positive evidence otherwise I was blaming him for getting us into playing this football match. Unfair perhaps but you have got to blame someone.

The journey continued in silence, or would have done if William had not had an argument with their Doris. Well the wedding was off and all the presents had to go back and everything, what with their Jim and his family come all the way from Huddersfield......

I don't know if the rest of the bus were meant to know all this, but the lady saying it must have thought her friend was on the upper deck rather than in the seat next to her.

Enid and their uncle Anther had bought them that dining table they they had wanted and it was in their front room, well she didn't know how she was going to face Enid now not with this then that business of not inviting their Ern......

By the end of the journey I was definitely on the side of William, our Doris sounded like a right pain and if her voice was as loud as her spokesman, all I can say is that our William had had a very narrow escape.

The pitch where we were playing football, sorry the field, when we finally found it, was behind some derelict induartial buildings and no matter where you stood there was a nasty smell of burning rubber. All lower league matches are played within the in sight delerlict buildings, it must be in a rule book somewhere. The club house or to give it its proper name, that place over there, was an old nissan hut that had once been used to keep pigs in. At some point the pigs must have complained about it so the local football club got it.

If I had thought that the changing rooms were cold when I put my kit on I had not anticipated running out onto the pitch, it was like running headlong into a refrigerator. It's far too cold to play I protested to the team captain. He could not hear however as he did not put his deaf aid in while playing. " We're glad to have you too." he said. His lip reading was obviously not very good.

The captain pointed to a place on the field and told me that was my spot. It seemed to me much like any other part of the field. I assumed that the rest of the team knew what they were doing and had a quick look round at the other yellow jumpers, I began to wonder how true this assumption was. There did seem to be alot of us for a game of football.

I was jumping up and down waving my arms in a vain attempt to try to get a bit warmer. I decided to count the crowd, there were seven and one dog. Suddenly someone shouted at me, Its yours ! What is I thought, looking round to see if the ball was rolling along the ground towards me. With a thwack the ball it came out of the sky and hit me hard in the chest, without thinking I just grabbed hold of it.

It is one of those strange oddities of life is that in moments of impending disaster time seems to slow down to a crawl, you have extremely complicated thoughts in what is only a few seconds. Somewhere deep in the back of my mind I could see images from my memory, from the depths of my mind a message was trying to get through.

The memory was as clear as day, I was a small, cold, wet, muddy boy standing in the middle of the school playing field, the teacher was blowing his whistle, pointing at me shouting ' Handball ', the humilation, the free kick to the opposing side, the loss of the match and all my fault. Unhappy school memories however was not the message I was trying to recall, it all had to do with !!!

Before my thoughts had chance to wander any further down memory lane, a large shoulder with a twenty five stone man attached to it crashed into my stomach. I lay on the ground completely winded, perhaps a better description of way I felt just then was totally dead. I was just about to take in a life giving breath of air when another twenty five stone slab of meat landed on top of me. Just as life was ebbing away the message that my brain had been looking for finally came through, Message read, ' Footballs aren't that shape!'

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 I eventually found out after a long slow breakfast 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.