Wilderspool Causeway

Scorers: Mulvaney (5), Saynor (2).

After a minor crowd disturbance in which the travelling Wokingham and Emmbrook fans were escorted to a caged enclosure with a suspected undercover police to fan ratio of 1:4, Twyford Comets kicked off, attacking the Heineken Music Hall end of Woodley’s Amsterdam Arena. The game started slowly, with several shoelace stoppages disrupting the fluency of the opening exchanges. Wokingham took an early lead, but buoyed by a couple of ladies who managed to infiltrate the Wokingham enclosure in support of ‘Harrison’, Twyford rallied and responded with two goals in quick succession. The Satsumas’ inclusive squad rotation policy meant that star man Connor Mulvaney’s heat map resembled a bowl of spaghetti as he tore around the pitch, covering every artificial globule, looping and coiling to suppress Twyford’s ambition and compensate for the slovenly.

Wokingham went in 2-1 down at half time, emerging for the second half with Saynor occupying the lone striker position in a revitalised line up. Mulvaney took his turn in goal and immediately played a ball which seemed to be drifting just out of Evan’s reach before he wrapped his right foot around it and fired it into the far corner with his first touch of the game. A corner soon followed and Saynor poached from close range, before Mulvaney returned to midfield to elevate the game to an entirely different footballing plane. There followed a further 4 goals from Connor, one of which was a header in a one-on-one contest with the goalie (no mean feat for a 6 year old, and no mean feat in those low goals.)

Meanwhile, in the stands, rattled by Mulvaney’s virtuosity, the Twyford contingent dropped their FA Respect Agenda packet quite spectacularly with a shameful, desperate cry of ‘take him down, Harrison!’ The (frankly South African) Wokingham fans decided to rise above this injunction, responding metaphysically with a rousing version of Spirit in the Sky, quite probably also in contravention of the F.A. Charter:

‘Goin’ up to the spirit in the sky
That’s where I’m gonna go when I die
When I die and they lay me to rest
I’m gonna go on the piss with Georgie Best!’