Thursday 11 January 2007

you haven't found it baby, that's for sure....

Let's talk about football.

Nah - not that preening clown, his grasping wife and their stupid Hollywood pretensions. This is proper football. Serious football. And it's called 'football', not 'soccer', alright?

As I mentioned the other day, I play 5-a-side football a couple of times a week. There's a Powerleague with about 16 astroturf pitches conveniently located just outside the main gates at work, so it's pretty painless to slip out of the office at around 5pm and head off for a 5.30pm kick off.

How hard do you think it can it be to administer bookings of an hour each for 16 pitches? Apparently it's too hard. Our game is supposed to finish at 6.30pm, but just recently barely a week seems to go by without someone trying to chuck us off the pitch 15 minutes early for a 6.15pm game. It's bloody infuriating. The noggins behind the desk have a computer booking system and everything!

To be fair, Darren has been pretty good to us over the years, and he always tries to put us on a pitch with no one booked on straight afterwards, so we'll have a free run for a couple of hours to play until we get bored (usually meaning we play for 90 minutes). He used to be a right surly git, but C. started playing for a ladies team down there about 5 years ago, and she charmed him (steady on, he's gay... they just bonded or something). As soon as he connected her with me, he was nice as pie, and we always have a little chat as I fork out the extortionate £45 fee for a sixty minute game. He does his best for us every week, but he knocks off shortly after our kick off, and the guy who takes over seems to be a lot more slapdash in his pitch assignments.

This week, we had some bloke leading a pack of seven year old kids try to walk onto the pitch when we still had a good 20 minutes to go. He was adamant that he had the pitch booked for quarter-past, but we sent him packing back to the desk to go and check and carried on with our game (it was 6.10 anyway). 2 minutes later he was back, and he stood at the back of the pitch with the kids and waited for us to finish. I just knew he was going to try and throw us off early, and sure enough, with a good 5 minutes of our game still to play, he brought all the kids onto the pitch. We played on for a bit, but who wants to take responsibility for belting a ball into a seven year old's head? This guy clearly didn't give a monkeys, so we had a bit of a slanging match with him, occupied the pitch for a couple of minutes and then stalked off.

We're getting money off next week's game for the inconvenience, but the whole thing has left me feeling mildly pissed off. It's bad enough that Powerleague are incapable of sorting out their pitch bookings so that this sort of thing doesn't happen. What makes the whole thing worse is that this twat thought he had some kind of right to chuck us off the pitch 5 minutes early and was prepared to put a team of kids at risk to prove his point.

And it was cold, windy and raining.

And I was tired and not really feeling up for the game.

And we got thumped.

Grr!

Two posts on football in one week? It's all incisive comment around here, innit?

1 comment:

  1. Glad to see we are back to dealing with the hard hitting issues of the day. :)

    Ridiculous, though, how inept some businesses are at their business.

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