Men's 3rd XI: Complete Control? That's A Laugh

Unlike The Clash, no-one told us to release Remote Control or to fly to Amsterdam this week. Equally, I am pretty confident that the people didn't laugh and that the press did not go mad. But we did spend an inordinate amount of time on Saturday afternoon seeking Complete Control, or indeed any measure of control.

When we beat Ely 2 up at their place we had simply been the better side, and their skipper did remark to me after the game that he had been missing some key players. He was never going to get a lot of sympathy for that from the captain of a club's lowest team, but it did look to me during most of the second half that he had a point. This was a significantly stronger Ely side which traveled down to Fortress Coldhams, and even with 3 subs to their none we spent most of the second half on the back foot. It was a magnificent defensive effort from us in the end to come away with a clean sheet and a point, but we could have got away with a less magnificent effort had we occasionally managed to hold on to the ball for, let's say, a couple of seconds or so. Every time we gained possession we would either put the ball out, or frantically try to play a pass that wasn't there, and just get the ball coming back at us once more. I was doing my level best to calm things down and to get us to just concentrate on keeping possession for a while, but my increasingly frantic urgings to the team to do that were probably, in retrospect, simply communicating loud and clear to the visitors that the Nomads psychological dial was pretty firmly set to "Total Panic Stations".

But we got there somehow, and it's the mark of a good side that we pick up a point when we've been second best on the balance of play. That said, it wasn't so much like that in the first half. A much more even 35 minutes with chances at both ends, and by half-time we could have been a goal to the good had we been awarded a penalty stroke for a possible foot on the line. Or more likely, one of us could have completely humiliated himself with a pathetic attempt at converting it. I well remember my effort against St Neots a few seasons back, inside the left hand post about halfway up, giving a stand-in keeper a very nice comfortable save with his right hand. A young Tom was kind enough to ask me after that game if that was why I had told him it was about the worst possible place to put a stroke. But thankfully, on this occasion, it either didn't actually hit a foot or else Rick realised it was likely to be me taking it and decided to spare a fellow committee member the humiliation. That's why I love this club, thanks mate!

So, reasons to be cheerful and positive at half-time, especially with 6 extra legs which we had good reason to hope might prove decisive in the final quarter. It didn't of course turn out that way, and we had 35 minutes of very frantic defending ahead of us. Through a combination of last-ditch tackles, goal-line clearances and good solid saves, the Nomads goal somehow remained intact through it all. Blocks were being celebrated like goals at the other end, and it was starting to feel like one of those days where if we shipped one we might have shipped three or four. But we held firm, and in the end actually came close to doing unto Ely what South had done unto us by sneaking a late winner. Chances were relatively few, but I do recall one for Garth and another from Hoddo at a short corner (he was supposed to be trapping rather than striking of course, this is Nomads 3) which was steered wide by a defender. But it would have been unjust (though enjoyable) had we scored, and by the end I was more than happy to take the point we had started with.

Before we could do that though, we did have to negotiate the obligatory late drama. Another Ely attack broke down, and I swept the ball rather impressively clear of danger on my reverse stick, but inadvertently (yeah, right) over the back line. Thus setting up "one of those" decisions for the umpire. It would be churlish of me to deny that I was fairly happy to see the ball roll out of play to safety, but in my head at least, I would maintain that I did not put it out deliberately. Or not completely deliberately anyway. Look, I tried to get it to the sideline, but I failed miserably, OK? It was all a tragic accident, a big misunderstanding, I apologise for any inconvenience caused, all right? Unfortunately other opinions were also available, and unfortunately for me one such alternative view belonged to a man equipped with a whistle. And Matt agreed with him, so I guess that is pretty definitive. Short corner, full time, and the game rests on a 10 v 5 overload.

It would be lovely to be able to describe how we rounded off our afternoon with one more act of defensive heroism, but the truth is that Ely made a bit of a mess of it with only minimal intervention from us, and the ball rolled a couple of feet wide of our right hand post to seal a draw that I would have happily taken at pretty much any point since half-time. Hurrah!

And so we finished up with one of our harder-earned points from this season, despite our high degree of panic in the second half. Big lesson: next time we find ourselves in that situation, we need to just calm it down, concentrate on keeping possession for a few passes, get fouled, whatever, just slow the game down. We're controlled in the body, we're controlled in the mind. Total C-O-N control. That means you. C-O-N control. It's the way forward, people.