After a month long absence from our weekly 5-a-side footy match I was finally given an opportunity to take one of the newly available spots. I responded to the email announcing a place in matter of seconds, and only had to wait five more minutes to be told that I was going to be one of the ten players that make up the game. When you have to drop out of the weekly game it can take months to get back in, and when you’re in, no-one wants to drop out. We have around twenty five people, all trying to get one of the ten available spots, which keeps everything very competitive.
The one worry I had however, was that over the last month my exercising habit has fallen apart. It was due to a combination of illness, the dramatically colder weather, and the fact that I’ve just been a little lazy. I’ve been out for the odd run, but not enough to counter the evenings in the pub, or the lack of a decent diet. I realised over the weekend exactly how lazy I’d been and forced myself out for a five mile run, which I’ve just realised I still haven’t uploaded to Nike+. It wasn’t the easiest of runs but it wasn’t terrible either, which simply meant I had caught my laziness before it had gotten too far. I had planned on going for another run tonight until I received the option to play footy, which more than covers what I would have done due to the intense hour long game, in a very hot gym hall.
After being out for a month or so I wasn’t expecting to be able to play to anything like the standard I would like, but I was surprised with how well I managed. My finishing was pretty decent once I got going, there were a few bad misses, but I scored enough to make up for them. My passing was sharp and I setup a decent portion of my teams goals. When I had to take my turn in goal I played… well actually lets not talk about that too much. Let’s just say I was a disaster in goal, and that may have contributed to the fact that we lost the game. By a single goal. In the last minute. When I was outfield though we dominated long stretches of the game. So I’ll take the positives from tonight and try and forget about the goalkeeping.
It felt good to get a run out again, and I didn’t realise how much I’d missed playing over the last month until we actually started the game. I setup our first goal with a nice little flick with the outside of my right foot, and it got me excited for the rest of the hour. With the exception of the two terrible spells in goals, I thoroughly enjoyed myself tonight
It wasn’t my best performance by a long way. My touch was a little dodgy at points, and it took me a while to get my scoring boots on, but it was a satisfying performance that had a lot of positives, plus I wasn’t as rusty as I expected to be. Now I’m really looking forward to next Tuesday and you can bet I’m going to be going all out to win after losing the way we did tonight.
