It's a game of three halves

Things were a bit different yesterday. Of the 15 persons who where scheduled to take part in the soccer match, only 7 turned up. We were also surprised to find something had been built slap bang in the middle of the football field. Fortunately it turned out to be an all weather astro turf 5-a-side pitch.
It dawned on us that 7 was never going to be enough for a good game of footy, but luckily a group of local lads turned up who fancied a game. During the warm up one of our players injured his leg and had to go to hospital, so we were down to 6 players. The young lads we were playing were in their teens and were fit, it looked like we were going to be slaughtered.
Then fate struck another fatal blow, another of our players got injured. He had to go to hospital as well. He has severely damaged an ankle and is signed off from work for 6 weeks (lucky bugger!). The heat took it's toll on us elder gentleman (some of us we more than twice the age of our opponents) and we had to change strategy. This involved not running too much, but letting the other team do so. It worked, we started scoring and the young lads got tired.

Juniorette and I celebrate another Haddock wonder goal

When both teams were really tired we had a half time. So it ended up a game of three halves (over 3 hours). During the latter end of the game we let the smaller kids play as well. The juniorette really enjoyed playing and she actually got to see her Papa score some goals.
Overall I think we won. Nobody remembered to keep score. But the main thing was that we had a lot of fun, and most of us survived without serious injury.
Today I have difficulty walking, but I guess that's the price I pay for putting a whole years quota of physical exercise into one afternoon. I guess I will have to spend today with my feet up recovering, safe in the knowledge that when the phone rings it wont be the call up to play for the English national team.