Bowdon Vets 2 - Bowdon Killer Bees 4


The principal attraction of this eagerly awaited grudge match was to test the axiom: "Youth & Agility are no match for Old Age & Treachery".

D-day was 30th October, H-hour was 1400, tickets sold out (within minutes of the raffle being announced), the contest was deemed so worthy that the greater game received an honourable position on Devisdale astro.

With tensions high and nerves at red-line the Killer Bees "heartbreakers" came onto the pitch and immediately started intimidating the opposition with a wide variety of pointless and never-used-in-any-game aerial ball manoeuvres, short-corner routines, staccato passes, wild swipes and side-splitting miss-hits.

The whistle blew or rather didnt, instead Yokker opened his "meek and mild and you couldnt hear him through a megaphone over a profoundly dumb and untalkative mouse" mouth to shout commands clearly and loudly to the two teams in such a way that couldnt be heard more than 5 yards away.

This paved the way for some highly amusing continuations of play after the umpire had signalled (in his own special way) for play to stop. Whilst it generally and slowly dawned on the players that “walk about, chunter and kick stuff” mode had been called there would always be one conscientious chap who was ‘just preparing’ to look up for that magic “early ball” or “easy pass” and for a good 5 minutes continued to run around the oppositions defenders apoplectic at his own grace, skill and ability.

After allowing the Bees to score some excellent early goals from what appeared to be mighty hockey (using some bloke who isn’t officially a ‘Ringer’ but I’ve never seen him before) the Bees learned the hard way that the Veterans do not attain to such and are not called by such a title because of their use of conventional fighting techniques. We were faced with a hardy enemy - the survivors of many a conflict, bloody and bitter, generally Robinsons, had learned to use guerrilla style hockey methodology, the Wierding Way and the Force - this fight would quickly descend into a war of attrition and then the unconventional techniques would throw the Bees into disarray and confusion (thus resembling any game against Runcorn).

One such psychological campaign saw a young and impressionable Cooper turning to the dark side and using powerful mind tricks (“I’m not the attacker you’re looking for”, “look, join me and together we will rule the league” and “Dad that was crap”) against our defenders whilst his associate “The Judge Wont Budge” evaded detection and stole away early to expose the tender underside of the Bees infrastructure (fortunately my tender infrastructure is now fully operational after near disaster at Urmston) and put in a well earned goal to bring the vets back into it.

At half time while Lord Grant sauntered to his around-town jalopy to fetch a much needed whistle, Captain Mannering Hawkinsworth gave his men a desperately needed pep talk. The whistle solved problems, the men took to the field with renewed vigour and into a brief arctic hurricane which made it feel like any forward movement was a climb up Ben Nevis.

In the final few minutes of the match the Veterans employed forces in their arsenal that had never been seen before, strange and terrifying (a bit like the deadly creature in the Quest for the Holy Grail). Baxter lunged for a relatively easy ball, stumbled and as he regained his footing a hand came from the edge of the picture and assisted him to his doom! Similarly as the defence picked up easy interceptions sand came from afar to temporarily blind them.

After a review of the teamsheets it became clear, in true Hitch-Hikers Galactic Guide sense, that having the answer to the question asked earlier, we did not fully understand what we had asked. Extra testing is now required in order to determine just exactly which team represented "Old Age & Treachery" and which represented "Youth & Agility".

Final Score: 42

Pritch