10 men and a Van

By Toulose Le Plot
August 16 2005

Arsenal 2 Newcastle United robbed should be the headline. A lot has been written about the sending off that should never have been, so I have nothing new to add, except perhaps I am a great believer in castration for match officials.

Anyway to the point, the away day to London, takes planning, for me it’s a round trip of 700 miles, leaving my nearest and dearest, just at the height of the summer holidays, when we are both almost driven up the wall, with children’s ability to find absolutely tons to fight about.

So with this in mind I would have to start planning weeks ahead, which of course is exactly what happened. The day before the match I went out to watch the Man Utd game and have a small glass of port and a cigar, in one of old Newcastle towns fine drinking establishments, had about a glass and a half of port, woke up about three hours later with a ticket for the game and an arranged lift.

The Van: we bought this monstrosity about 4 years ago, a few of us chipped in and bought an old Ford Transit for no other reason, than, well it seemed a good idea at the time, its seen better days to be honest, hell its pretty difficult to imagine it seeing worse days, but it keeps going, admittedly with the same timing and consistency of a particularly lazy sloth, but it keeps going.

We were leaving at 3 in the morning, and we were lucky to have John on board, because John, though a wonderful bloke, is most popular on these sorts of days out, as he doesn’t drink. Never has, never will, doesn’t like it, damn handy he can drive as well.

The rest of the motley bunch were picked up in various forms of undress and in one case, what looked like a fairly advanced coma, lager and crates of this white stuff that tasted like alcoholic yoghurt, lined the floor of the van, and a smell of stale farts prevailed without as we made out way south.

Note to people attempting this 5 crates of lager amongst nine people is not enough to last a journey to London, and the white stuff didn’t work; we took to seeing how far we could throw it on comfort brakes. (Leaving enough of course to cover the idiot that brought it.)

So shaking yoghurty alcohol (it wasn’t my fault I didn’t even know I was coming remember? I just raided the fridge and half inched wor lasses drink) off my shoulder we reached London.

Parked quite close to Highbury, it was only a short flight and a 3 hour train ride now to the stadium (all right I exaggerate but really we did park bloody miles away.)

I used to live in London and pride myself on knowing my way around it, so after a mere hour of being lost we found where we needed to be and decamped into a pub, where we found a goodly number of black and white shirts, and proceeded to toast each other, with a small glass of sherry and after eight mints, until it was time to go to the game.

I will be honest here, my expectations of the game had not been great, I worried about or lack of firepower, but the lads did us proud, battled every step of the way and if it wasn’t for the referee (remember people castration it makes sense) we would have got a draw, which we deserved.

After the match we retired to a pub to watch the Wigan Chelsea game and let some of the traffic clear before heading back to the civilised lands of the North.

Stocked up and alcohol (Note 7 trays amongst 6 already half cut people is enough, but if you don’t want to stop every 10 minutes it’s probably not a good idea).

We arrived back on Tyneside, John earned my ever lasting gratitude, by stopping my keyhole moving about while I was trying to put my key in it and that was it, first game of the season over.

I felt disappointed not to have gotten anything from it, I felt tired from the journey, I felt fairly pissed, I went upstairs and tried to feel wor lass, I then felt wor lasses elbow in my crotch, but mainly I felt proud of the team today, they had battled and they were better than I gave them credit for. Now bring on West Ham.