Tonight was the first match for our new 5-a-side football team named as per the title of this blog
For the past 6 months we’ve been trying to recruit a team of some sort spurred on by my mates Ravi and Sham
We started off playing at our local park on Queen’s Road after advertising on gumtree.com. Back in March when we first started having a kick around on sunday afternoon we were initially looking at 11 a side. We nearly had enough at the beginning, but over the weeks numbers dropped. I lost interest for a long while. We all kept in touch using a mailing list from coollist.com

Then, interest was kickstarted when Ravi decided a 5-a-side league team was the way forward. We joined topcorner’s Thursday night league. We play every thursday for the next 6 weeks, have a month off, then play the final 4 matches in Jan & Feb.

For the moment, I’m going to be playing in goal, though that isn’t necessarily going to continue for the whole tournament. It’s the first time i’ve played 5-a-side and the first time i’ve played in goal. So, while we lost our first match there were a lot of positives to come out.
We had a horrible start, 2-0 down within the first few minutes (partly my fault for giving away a penalty for leaving the area), but we did get back to 2-1, and then come half time it was 4-2 to our opposition. We ended the game losing 8-2 – but when you consider this was our first match with a cobbled together team that hadn’t been playing together very long (some of the players hadn’t joined us for practice in months), I think we won’t be out of our league.

I made some good saves, though also made some howlers (there has to be some given the score). I particularly liked the one I caught between my knees when I was indecisive whether to catch or stop with my feet and ended up doing neither (but still managed to keep it out!). Am definitely looking forward to the match next week. It’s fun, a good workout, and if we put in some effort we could still do reasonably well in the league.

On the downside, I think we’ve conceded the biggest loss so far and look likely to go bottom of the table following today’s match

Onto our team name though – it has a rather amusing story. At the time of filling out the form, Ravi wrote the first thing that came into his head:
Sham’s Terrorists
This apparently didn’t go down very well with the league operators, and when it came to finding out some more details they told us we’d have to change it. So, we duly did. Ravi is a Queen’s Park Rangers fan, and the park we practice at is on Queen’s Road. So we were going to be Queen’s Road Rangers. But, we decided to have a bit of a joke at the league. Jonathan, who’s in the squad works for the ALG (though it’s just been renamed the London Council) so we got that in there. Then we decided to do a bit of a twist and changed it from Association of Local Government (ALG) to ALM. It was agreed down the pub and it stuck.

The league were happy with the new name, and we get to have a bit of a laugh at their political correctness.