Mid-week evening game? Yes, please!
Yuv and Oliviero deliver a masterclass in a (rare?) sunset game
Sometimes, three words (and two emojis) are enough to make great things happen.
When Yuv wrote “Weekend evening game👀?” at 8.02am on Tuesday, he was expressing a feeling often felt by Football Dads and Kids, the desire to play more often than just on Saturdays. Little did he know that he was about to unleash a tsunami of positive reactions, leading to an exceptional sunset match.
To put things in perspective, in the history of FDs a mid-week evening game had been played only once, on Monday 29 March 2021.
At the time we were coming out of a stressful three-months Covid ban on sports activities. The PM of the time (a blonde guy with long hair and a questionable sense of humour) had announced that organised sport could restart that Monday.
Considering how hard it would have been for everyone to wait six more days to play, the Club decided that a special match would take place that very afternoon, with 18 players enthusiastically answering the roll call.
Luckily, Covid is now a distant memory, but Yuv’s invitation still resonated highly with everyone, not surprising when you factor in all the World Cup stimuli, the more inviting evening weather and the long days of summer light.
Every player did their best to be at the pitch for a 7pm start. Among all, Al (pictured below) deserves credits for sneaking out of his job to come and play, dressing up in style afterwards to return to his workplace, hoping that no one would have noticed his absence in the meantime.
The match was a joyful and intense one, with two of our brightest stars rising to the occasion to delivered a masterclass.
Knowing this would have been his last match for a few months, Aurian played with unseen intensity and flair, scoring a few and even trying to do it with his bottom in one bizarre occasion. Yuv scored an avalanche of goals for both teams, having changed shirt at half time to compensate an evident disparity.
Everyone deserves accolades but special kudos should go to Bijan, the true engine of his team; JoJo, for capturing a million balls and distributing them with precision, and Federico, simply a rock in defence.
The match remained quite balanced until the end, with the score set at 8-8 or something like that, until Aurian’s inevitable golden goal.
Yuv received the Man of the Match Award in recognition not just of his incredible performance, but also his intuition and leadership in suggesting to play mid-week.
Will the evening match become a regular staple of FDs, at least in the summer time? It’s too early to tell, but in the meantime keeping yourself free for next Wednesday at 7pm…