WorldNet 2003



Another early start this year and based on past years that meant a struggle to have a full squad available for game 1.
Things were not looking good when we set off late and picked up John the Greek on the way. We were concerned that we wouldn’t make kick-off. We were even more concerned when two ugly blokes drove by in an ugly car and we realised we weren’t the only ones pushed for time.
But as we got closer to Leeds we realised that we’d make it on time and relaxed a bit.
Only to get a phone call from Phil Bray to say that they were seven miles from Leeds and it was only seven minutes to kick-off – still that’s not bad for him.
Seriously the only person to be really late was Stevie Parker. Although scarily we’d been following Paul Smith and Michael Lax and they had taken a turn-off where we had gone through the city centre. They obviously got lost as they arrived about 15 minutes after us. That sounds like them.
So we had expected a squad of 20 players – a good healthy sized squad with one or two players that were half decent. Unfortunately we had one person pull out – the ever reliable Lee Stone. This was not a bad thing really and the teams passing statistics were going to increase substantially.

Game 1 – Vs Southampton
Our esteemed captain had his seven key players and counted them out, he built the squad around these players although in truth he could have picked anybody.
The starting line-up was as follows:

James Augustus in goal,
A defence of Nick Ashman, Phil Bray, Chris Foster and Pat Farragher.
Our midfield which was obviously the strongest part of the team consisted of Bernie Mullo, Paul McCudden, Nick Bray and Jamie Mac.
Our strike force pairing was Jamie J and John the Greek.
Not a bad side to put out when you see that we had players the likes of Stevie P on the side line.

Our captain had informed us that we needed to start well and he expected a goal inside the first seven minutes, so we started the game really quickly and well. It is very unusual for us to listen to him.
And our captain got his wish thanks to a huge slice of luck. One of our players fell over on the right and a free-kick was given. Jamie Mac decided he was going to take the free-kick when there were clearly people on the field who were better at it. Jamie’s cross was pathetic, but the ball got there. Chris Foster leapt like a half dead salmon, the ball accidentally hit him on the head and was going out for a goal kick when a freak gust of wind caught the ball and blew it into the net – 1-0 to us.
All was good, but then disaster happened – having heard of the exploits of all our previous Greek signings, John Makris decided to join the list and injured himself.
I still to this day don’t know what he injured because it appeared to be different each time I spoke with him but I’d say the injury was somewhere in the groin, thigh, hamstring, quad, knee, calf or ankle area.
He battled on for the rest of the tournament but couldn’t play to his best unfortunately.
Anyway, it was proving all a bit easy so we decided to be like Leicester City and make it hard on ourselves. Southampton had a rare attack down the right. Their right winger ran past Pat Farragher and Phil Bray who were both discussing what lovely weather we were having, and crossed the ball. Chris Foster partially cleared it and it fell to Nick Ashman. Now Nick was about 35 – 40 yards out and right on the sideline but he somehow managed to volley the ball perfectly towards our goal. The ball came towards James Augustus in goal and took a really nasty bounce – the type that bounces up and down – and James being a wuss also saw the Southampton striker running at him, so he palmed the ball into the net.
A dual own-goal and it was 1-1. It was that way at half-time.
Time for an important captains team talk but I couldn’t tell you what he said because I wasn’t listening.

He did make some subs and Paul Smith came on for Jamie J and Chris Stenson came on John the injured Greek.
This was an inspired move because Phil Bray chucked Bernie Muello up front to use his pace.
It was important to start well in the second half too but unfortunately we weren’t kicking off – and Southampton had realised our weakness. They tried to chip the keeper right from kick-off and almost scored direct with James just managing to control it. (We’ve had a history of our goalies being chipped – Stevie P – Fulham game, Phil Bray – Charlton Tournament, Bernie Mollo – Grimsby game, James Augustus – Sheff Utd game – the list goes on).
We continued to play well and push on. At one stage Bernie Mulolo got a great chance to use his pace and just as it appeared he had a clear run on goal the last defender made a “goal-saving” tackle. Now had this been John the injured Greek (also know as Giannakopoulos) then it would have been a definite penalty.
Bernie Muolla almost scored direct from the corner.
But we continued to push on and Paul McCudden thought he was Lee Stone for a minute and tried to dribble through the entire Southampton defence, he got tackled and the ref gave a free-kick.
Now the referee got the wall back 9.9 yards and Bernie Millo was clear on the left ready to blast the ball wide but Paul McCudden decided to go for goal and he scored. In truth most people would have scored because their keeper was about as good at lining up a wall as Ian Walker is.
There was a big bullseye on the left hand side of the goal saying “Score Here!”.
So 2-1 up and not long to play. We could defend well from here and win the game. Well this is Leicester! So we decided to make it hard on ourselves again. We didn’t clear the ball properly and a Southampton player cut in from the right and had a shot. Now the ball was trickling along the ground and would have easily gone through James’s legs but instead it hit Chris Stenson on his leg and deflected in. Heart-breaking and it was 2-2.
Now had I not been standing on halfway watching, that wouldn’t have happened!
We still had time to nick it though and on our last attack with Bernie Maullo lining up to blast yet another shot wide Paul McCudden got in the way and passed the ball back to their keeper instead. And that was the end of the game – 2-2. A pretty good start but not as good as it could have been.
In fact the Lino in a thick Newcastle / Middlesbrough / Sunderland / Darlington / they’re all the same accent said “You threw that one away lads”.

Oh well – time to relax for the next game. It gave us all an opportunity to catch up with each other as it had been a while since we last played as a squad. After 5 minutes of this I was desperate to start playing again!
Still we had an opportunity to hear that the restaurant we were going to tonight was 0.9 miles from the pub we visit. This was a great relief to us all as none of us were willing to walk anything over 1.09 miles. Phil Bray had brought a supermarket with him.
Someone had brought some Red Bull which had been demolished by Jamie J – no wonder he was warming up for 2 hours and constantly miss-kicking the ball.
Smiffy had brought his deck-chair and got plenty of comments about it when he claimed the beach wasn’t far away someone asked where the donkey was – well you could have looked at about 18 people then to find the answer.

We all got to meet Phil Bray’s family and wonder whether Phil is adopted as he’s far too ugly for them.

I got bored and went off looking for other kiwis and found one who played for Rangers A. He was from Hamilton but he didn’t tell anyone that. He also spent some time in gangland at Wainuiomata but he didn’t tell anyone that either – so instead the idiot said he was from Auckland???? Go figure!

Anyway, after having a discussion with him I had worked out that Rangers B were “rully crap” and that we would “easily stiff them”.

So back to the football pitch where the captain now had his next seven key players for this game and he made sure everyone who hadn’t played before started this one.

The team for this one was Nick Ashman in goal, Stevie P, Kev Batchelor, Chris Foster and Phil Abbott in defence although God knows why, Tom Bonsall, Paul McCudden, Chris Stenson and Michael Lax in midfield with Jamie J and Paul Smith up front.
The game wasn’t that interesting in truth because I wasn’t involved and that was backed up by the captain talking about how much he thought each individual player weighed in the side.
Okay, on to the game, it was another one dominated by Leicester and we should have probably won by more. Fortunately Nick wasn’t tested too much at the back – this was down to a good strong defence with commitment enough to throw their body in the way of the football. Phil Abbott had about 79.9% of the wind taken out of him when he foolishly got in the way of a cross and it hit him in a rather painful region of the body. You can all guess which part of the body that was – yes his foot. Disgracefully the ball hit him in the foot and that is not on in a game of football. Phil Abbott is normally on the park to complain to the captain about his selections and to tell the referee that the wall is only 9.9 metres away from the ball.
Okay, the ball may have hit him somewhere else.
Back to the game, Paul McCudden was having a nightmare. He was supposed to be one of our better players but he was missing every chance that came to him. After blasting the ball over the top from pretty close he blasted the ball over again from an even closer range – this after the keeper had fumbled the ball.
Jamie J was having an uncharacteristically good game and not making any errors – that being a good thing as with the shape of the pitch he could have easily been swallowed up. After putting in the cross that Paul McCudden had fluffed, Jamie J ran into the keeper for a 50/50. He injured himself but clearly wasn’t Greek enough because 1> He didn’t win a penalty and 2> He got up too quickly without rolling around.
It was Jamie J who set up the goal that won us the game although I wasn’t watching as Phil Bray was chasing after me trying to get me to stop writing how he had mentioned one of our players had put a bit of weight on.
I did turn around in time to see Smiffy get his feet all clogged up and as he fell over them he somehow managed to put the ball past the oncoming keeper. 1-0 to the IF’s.
Buoyed by this, Smiffy started to play pretty well and he was away after beating one of their defenders when he was shockingly tackled by the ground. Yes a piece of grass took the big man out and he fell and hurt all that piece of grasses colleagues.
Not to be outdone Jamie J decided to fallover too but he didn’t do quite as much damage to the grass.
So it was 1-0 at halftime.
Another inspired team talk by our captain, another one completely missed by me.

On to the second half and no changes were made at half time. I assume the message was something like – keep it the same lads – but you never could tell.
We had a few more chances to score with Jamie J soon starting to realise that he was never going to score a goal this weekend and we didn’t have a great deal to do at the back.
Kev Batchelor did as I expected and added to the injury list when he foolishly dived in for a challenge. He won the ball but jarred his ankle again and that was it for the tournament. The Rangers players thought he had broken his ankle by the look of agony he was in, the rest of us knew he’d be up in 15 minutes claiming he was alright to play on.
So Phil Bray had to come on and replace him. Phil Bray handed the selection process over to Bernie Mulelo but failed to mention it to him and Bernie was none the less wiser. It wasn’t till some of the subs yelled at Phil Bray from the sideline that he mentioned Bernie Moello was supposed to be organising that.

Paul Smith made way for James Augustus.
Soon after, on came Nick Bray for Paul McCudden and the very unfit Michael Lax came off with Jamie Mac replacing him. Getting the referee to understand that Bernie Milleo wanted to make a sub proved very difficult. Perhaps it was his accent although the ref appeared to understand the Scots after they had helped yell for the sub after a while. Whatever the case he didn’t make any more subs as he couldn’t be arsed yelling any more.
So we battled on and the referee blew the final whistle. Great stuff and we were top of the group for one game at least. The win we needed but after calculations we soon worked out that we would still need at least a draw from the final game. Still more to play for.

More time for people to relax. Jamie Mac to catch up on some sleep, everyone have turns on Smiffy’s chair, people to make their way to the burger place and have a nice healthy meal and so on.
The only one not relaxing was Jamie J as the Red Bull was still working!

On to the all important game – Game 3 Vs Ayr United. They were on 4 points like us but had a better goal difference so a draw probably wouldn’t be enough and we needed to win.

Once again our captain had his key seven players. Once again I wasn’t one of them. Due to performances in game two selections were now very difficult to make and certain players had to only get half a game each. Fortunately I wasn’t one of them.

Our captain in fact had written down players names next to those that they were going to come on for at half time. Phil Abbott saw something next to his name and accused our captain of being not very nice. It turned out that next to Phil Abbott’s name was “Pat” and Phil had guiltily thought it in fact said “fat”.

Now going by what I said in the first part you could be mistaken for thinking that Phil Bray had in fact written that, as it was, Phil Bray thought that the other Phil has lost some weight.

Anyways, due to other results this was now a must win game. Ayr looked like a very good side and had beaten Rangers B 2-0 so it was going to be a tough game.

Once again our captain was expecting the first and the last seven minutes of the first half to be very difficult. The fact that there was only 15 minutes appeared to pass him by.

Special congrats must go to him this year because he did get all the Scottish team names right and he didn’t call Ayr Hearts or something like that. Well done.

This was it – the game that decided if we started at 8am or if we started at 10am on Sunday morning. We know what we all wanted (although I would have found an 8am start amusing to see them all roll up hungover).

This game was particularly competitive and there were a lot of strong but fair tackles going in. A few strong and unfair tackles too but what the heck.
There weren’t too many chances as both teams held each other out and defended well. It was going to be down to a mistake. Nick Ashman or their keeper? I know who my money was on to make a mistake and it wasn’t the Ayr keeper!
Well now you know why I’m not rich because we won a free-kick and when the ball was crossed in the Ayr keeper and defender collided and the keeper dropped the ball. By some bleedin miracle Smiffy was there to be a rather large Tony Cottee and he bundled the ball into the open net – 1-0 to City and Smiffy celebrated like he’d just won the Man of the Match award! He punched the air with delight and fortunately the clumsy oaf wasn’t anywhere near any of our players at the time as he would have knocked one of them out!

There weren’t a lot more chances to either side although Nick actually caught a couple of Ayr’s crosses without dropping the ball once which was amazing.
Half-time and I heard Phil’s team talk this time. It was complete crap and I wished I hadn’t listened.

Into the second half and we made a few subs, Fat on for Phil Abbott, Stevie P off and Tom Bonsall on and Michael Lax made way for Chris Stenson (or vice versa because I can’t remember – I didn’t write everything down you know).
All we needed to do was hold on to this lead and we were group winners. That would be incredible!

The game was going pretty well, Ayr were getting more desperate and pushing on, we were defending well and then complete travesty! Our captain decided to sub Jamie J off and replace him with James Augustus. Absolutely not on this and the toys flew out of the pram and the dummy went flying, spat at a great rate of knots. This just can not happen, it is not allowed. Subbing someone off to give someone else a go!
Actually I’d rather he spat the dummy for being subbed off than spat the dummy because he’s just missed a chance and the ground was about to swallow him.
As it was the dummy was only on the ground for a short time and needed cleaning quickly because due to injury he was back on in no time.

And that injury was to Tom Bonsall. But he showed his inexperience much to his team-mates displeasure! Tom also hurt his ankle I think but then the silly sod dragged himself off the pitch!!! What is it with that? He certainly can’t be Greek.
Chris Foster was not impressed and Ayr were going to play on against 10 men (it was a throw in) but Chris managed to stall them by dragging Tom back on to the pitch so the ref could stop the game.
Very rudely after we made the sub Chris didn’t drag Tom off the pitch again. He left him to it. And no one went to Tom’s aid because frankly we were more interested in the game. Kev Batchelor limped over to give Tom advice about ankle injuries but by the time he got there the full-time whistle had been blown and we were ignoring both of them.
Anyway back to the game. We were defending so well that the ref decided to give them a helping hand – well Chris Foster did actually. Yes Chris disgracefully got his shoulder in front of a cross from an Ayr player.
The ref who was miles away and not on a good angle at all gave a penalty. Never in a million years was it a penalty and Chris Foster has the mark on his hand to prove it.
Penalty against Nick Ashman? Unless it was smacked straight at him I knew what my money was on and unfortunately is wasn’t smacked straight at him!
1-1 and a little unfair really.

Game on and it was our turn to push forward, we threw caution to the wind and had about 4 – 5 players up front as we knew we had to win. Credit to our defence and midfield cover defence who held Ayr out and we kept pushing on.

If our defence wasn’t going to tackle them by legal means they could always try the Chris Foster tackle technique. Chris models that on Frank Sinclair’s technique – i.e if I ain’t getting the ball then you’re trying out for the gymnastics team. One of these tackles and the whole Ayr team were up in arms!
One of the Ayr players was so incensed he yelled “cheating English Bastards!” I was very unhappy about this because I’m bloody well not English. I will correct him next time I see him and say “can you add cheating Kiwi bastard please”.

Personally sitting back and watching that tackle was great because it’s normally me that is sent flying in the air.
Nothing came of the free-kick but time was ticking away. Then with a few minutes to go we broke away. Jamie J (with dummy now washed and still in his mouth) got away only for the not so cheating Scottish not bastards to absolutely chop him down, (well kind of), the referee blew the whistle for a free kick and Jamie somehow managed to stay on his feet (see – not Greek!) then shot from a wide angle and it went in. Amazingly bad luck because Jamie J normally misses them 9.9 times out of 10 and by now Jamie was starting to wonder even more whether he’d ever score in this tournament.

Paul McCudden was on the pitch by now. He’d come on for someone. So he lined up the free-kick, having scored 2 out of 2 in WorldNet tournaments. This time he even waited after the ref had blown his whistle, went and had a chat with the keeper and the keeper said “tell you what mate, I’ll leave that corner there for you to pass the ball into the net”. Paul thought this was very generous and duly obliged! 2-1 and we all celebrated. There is absolutely no truth to the rumour that myself and Nick Bray celebrated a little too much around one of the Ayr players. I can’t remember that at all.
1.9 minutes to go and all we needed to do was hold on. Our formation had gone from 3-2-5 to 8-1-1. We did hold on for a great (and deserved) victory and we were group winners!
Great stuff.
As we were shaking hands with the opposition one of their players told our captain to “f%^k off you cheating bastard”. I was more pleased with this as he didn’t tar us all with the same brush of being English. This was the same player that myself and Nick Bray was supposed to have celebrated the goal in front of. Still can’t remember it.
To be fair to Ayr, the rest of the players were very apologetic and were gracious losers.

So GROUP WINNERS!!! First time ever and I’m afraid our captain got a little excited because he was quoted as saying “If Paul McCudden weren’t a bloke, weren’t married, weren’t a WBA fan and didn’t have a dodgy accent, I’d have his baby”

Well done to everyone. Even Kev and Tom managed to make it over and join the celebrations!

We didn’t have time to relax however as we had a friendly arranged for practically straight after and it was on another pitch 0.9 miles away so we had to get moving.
This friendly was against one of the Brentford teams and they’d lost every game they’d played. So easy victory for us.
Except I was selecting the side and as I was more interested in going and watching the All Black’s thrash Suff Afreeca I didn’t care what happened. In fact we started with 12 players, one of our guys as ref and myself all still on the pitch.
I don’t know where anyone was playing but I can remember being told off by Phil Abbott because this pitch was only 0.8 miles from the other pitch and not 0.9 as I had stated. (and he’s the expert) He also told me off for asking him to play in defence because he always plays there so I put him in the midfield instead. He was determined to show me.
I can remember the formation was supposed to be 4-3-1-2 but I’m sure that all went out the window.
I can also remember that Paul Smith was in goal.
I then shot off to find a big screen that was showing the rugby.
Unfortunately it was showing the bleedin golf so that meant I had to go back and watch this lot play.

Instead of that, I now knew the score in the rugby and we stiffed them so I went and found my kiwi mate from Auckland but not from Auckland and told him the score. He told me he was “rully rapt” and that it was an “excullent result”. I could only agree with him.

Anyway back to our friendly and it was now into the second half. No idea what the score was but didn’t care. Subs had been made I think and everyone was playing way out of position.
Jamie Mac walked off the field and wanted to catch up on some more sleep so I went on and replaced him. I decided to play sweeper because we had a defence of 1 at that time.
I was told by Chris Foster (who was referee) that Phil Abbott had scored an absolute stormer of a goal. I had to ask twice – “what the human odometer?”. Apparently he had gone past the right back like he wasn’t there (he wasn’t!) and powered a left foot shot in the top corner. Phil ain’t left footed!
Well as Chris Foster was referee and they’re all blind I don’t believe him. But that is why God knows why Phil Abbott should be in defence. All I can now remember of the game is we scored a goal but who it was I don’t know. Then they scored a couple, one of which Smiffy covered his near post so well that you could fit a truck through the gap he left. I can also remember an attack by them where they had 6 on 1 but I still kept them out. What a legend.
Anyways I am told that one of their players scored a hat-trick. He was normally a defender and he had never scored before. So all in all a pretty piss poor effort by the lads.
I think it was 6-2 or 6-3 in the end but with Smiffy in goal, they’d only had 6 shots on target.

That was a bit of fun to end the day and now we were all off to fawlty towers and to go to the pub and as the human odometer had said 0.9 miles to the restaurant.
A good days work finished and a celebratory night to remember (or forgotten by some people) to come.