A Tsunami of AIDS

MAIDSTONE UNITD 2 POOLE TOWN 0

MATCH REPORT by CHLAMYDIA FASSLANE

Christmas in the ‘Stone. We went in to lockdown in Tier 1. When we left it we were in Tier 3. By the time this match had finished they’d invented an entirely new tier for us to fall into, rendering the possibility of playing Frome Town on Tuesday night purely theoretical.

In the context of a tsunami of flying AIDS laying waste to humanity, you’d struggle to argue an FA Trophy game was “necessary” and yet this was at least two hours where we could forget all the bullshit.

And we’re consuming bullshit intravenously. The day began with one of the club’s co-owners tweeting about the “appallingly bad leadership of the top level of non-league” and saying that “Our clubs are serious businesses and should all be demanding better governance.”

Well better governance would be nice, but with the country being run by a man who once said: “fuck business,” ironically one of the few promises he actually lived up to, should he have expected anything else?

The trigger for Oliver’s broadside was the non-publication of the NL’s “Mueller” report into the bail out.

What can we deduce from the fact it still hasn’t appeared? 1) that if the leadership were in any way exonerated they would have been bukakeing the report around social media. 2) That unlike Mueller, the authors didn’t, in fact, bottle out. And that as a result (3) the board are desperately trying to find some way out of a clusterfuck entirely of their own creation.

On a completely unrelated subject, “Dover” was trending this week, as the epicentre of a self-inflicted clusterfuck. And as quotes go, they don’t come any more lucid than this one, from VICE: “‘They chuck two-litre Coke bottles full of piss straight onto the roadside,’ says the 77-year-old retiree living on the outskirts of Dover in Kent, who voted Leave in the 2016 referendum.”’

The hard-remainer publication, the Daily Mail, reported that there were tailbacks stretching back for 20 miles from the port. To help ease congestion Highways England came up with the inspired idea of shutting the coastbound sliproad at junction 9 of the M20, helpfully diverting traffic for 20 miles back up to Woodcut Farm, where they told them to do a U-turn at junction 8 before heading east again, gifting motorists a journey of 40 miles to get back to where they started. This, it’s worth adding, was done before the new super-variant of the Billy Ray was revealed.

If you think this can’t get any worse you haven’t been paying attention. Businesses everywhere are being trolled by an advertising campaign that advises them to Check, Change and Go, when they have no idea what they’re supposed to be checking, what they need to change and where the fuck they’re going.

Anyone running a non-league football club will know how they feel. Even at “elite” level clubs have only a vague idea who they’re next opponents will be. Poole are in Step 3 and Tier 2, have had 10 games called off, and had played once (competitively) since Halloween. They don’t know if or when their league will resume, which we can presume is something they’re fairly fucked off about, given that they’re unbeaten and stand every chance of going up.

We’ve had one unidentified case of COVID in the squad and other unspecified injuries. In this context even getting a game on was an achievement, but we were able to field a strong starting XI and the result was a better game than anyone could reasonably have expected, given that the squad had barely been able to train.

We looked “on it” right from the start. Amo was roasting the left back, Luque was rogering them on the other flank and we were creating and spaffing chances with gay abandon. The game was barely three minutes old when Amo was thwarted by a twinkle-toed defender, just as he was poised to make the net bulge like a liberated Cornish Fisherman protected by a Royal Navy gunship off the Brittany coast.

Porter hit the side netting, Akka drew a save from the range where “he’s got to score for me, Clive” and Joan pinged a free-kick at the top corner that was clawed out by a keeper scrambling so desperately he might have been a haulier trying to complete his paperwork at the entrance to an Ashford lorry park.

They then nearly went ahead with a counter-attack, the wing-back slaloming through the defence and playing a one-two, only to cunt up the finish. From then on they doubled up on Amo and it was a lot more even.

Early in the second half Lewington made a powerfully-wristed save, but just past the hour mark we went ahead with a brilliant team goal, finished by a brilliant team player. Porter found Amo, Amo laid it into space for Hoyte and where he’d normally look to play someone else in, he instead decided to bury it under the keeeepaaaaaahhhh.

Akka then had another chance, again from the kind of range from which you could easily get air-raped by Laurence Fox, but it was stopped on the line. The nagging doubt that this might return to haunt us, like a promise not to cancel Christmas, lingered until the Mystery Man, Ibrahim Olutade came on: the mystery being why he almost never gets a start.

Another expansive move saw Krash get into a similar position to Hoyte’s for the first goal. Instead of shooting he dragged the ball across the box and Olutade did the job for him, stretching to poke the ball inside the far post, the third time this season that he’s scored within a couple of minutes of entering the field.

At this point a certain quantity of sand seemed to enter Poole’s collective vagina. It all went a bit Steve King and Sam Corne’s response of “it’s all fucking bollocks ref,” echoed round the almost empty stadium.

Our mole at the ground reports that by the final whistle almost everyone had heard “the news” and the celebrations seemed subdued, as if this welcome two-hour diversion from reality was well and truly over.

The anecdotal evidence we’ve heard is grim. Well over 90 percent of people seem to be wearing masks in ‘Stone Central, but did this lockdown do anything other than kick the shit out of the hospitality sector? Every single school day is a super-spreading event. Children have been converted into biological weapons. Gavin Williamson’s credentials as an imbecile were already well established, but who’d have guessed he’d graduate to mass murder? (Well ok, he did leave the odd clue).

We’ll meet again, but we literally don’t know where and don’t know when. The next round is supposed to be on Tuesday night but there’s been nothing from either club to confirm this and Frome (Tier 2) haven’t played since November 3rd. Non-elite football is now banned in Tier 4 areas. Frome aren’t elite, but we are, so can we play them or not? They’re in Tier 2 and they shouldn’t travel “unless necessary.”

Frankly it’s difficult to process all this. Krash was part of the Concord team that reached the final after knocking us out of last year’s competition, yet we’re already into the third round and that final still hasn’t been played: when it does, what resemblance will their team have to the one that got them to the final?

If you believe that some football is better than no football, then the show has to go on, even if the integrity of the competition is taking a bit of a kicking.

Sunday brought a fresh broadside, with Oliver saying the NL should publish or be damned. He, like everyone else by now, obviously realises this is a case of publish and be damned.

In another era what’s happened here would be a resignation matter, but here’s a prediction: the damned will in fact turn this round, Rees-Mogg style and shame the robbed instead of the robbers.

“Ooooooh, well it’s easy to criticise isn’t it, but don’t you have any constructive suggestions to make?”

Well as a matter of fact, we do. To everyone responsible for this we offer the following solution: do the decent thing and donate your organs to UNICEF. They can use them to prepare a nutritious broth which can be seasoned and fed as gruel to the wretches sweeping Jacob Rees-Mogg’s chimneys.

Cheers.

Merry Christmas.