Wilderspool Causeway

If you were born in Liberia and grew up in the Netherlands, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to play for Pittsburgh Riverhounds, Fulham and Barnet, interspersed with spells in the Persian Pro League, Azerbaijan Premier League and the Polish second division.

Similarly, if you grew up firing on all cylinders for Manchester United Academy, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be farmed out to Inverness Caledonian Thistle before finding yourself appearing for Weston Super Mare against Portishead Town on a rainy night in February, competing for a place in the next round of the Somerset Premier Cup. It does make you wonder: why are we here? Why?

Woodley United Spitfires are sponsored by KJ Smith, a local firm of solicitors who factor the rights of grandparents into traditional divorce proceedings. In keeping with their sponsors, they played in a style which thrived on conflict. It would be tedious to itemise all the fouls and consequent free-kicks, but there were so many that we actually found them strangely disarming. There were no strategic fouls, committed at just the right moment to thwart our progress. This was foul play as a way of life. It was a high studded mode of being, and as such it was a catalyst to us rather than them; their play was too transgressive for its own good.

Evan was felled three times, but with a gradual element as if he was an aged Sequoia in a storm. Had Wokingham worked them out? Some of the plunges were at least anticipated, if not theatrical. When Woodley won a free-kick of their own, it was enough to catapult us into new dimensions of cluelessness, to the extent that we made a defensive wall in their half of the pitch. Coach Peter – in perpetual defence of creativity – just rolled with it, with no more than a wry smile by way of reaction.

In between the violence, some goals were scored. The first, reassuringly, was made up of Wokingham’s chief footballing alloy: incompetence and cluelessness. The ball rolled and ricocheted at about 2mph, with no one disrupting its passage into the net. Our two goals in the first half were fantastic, fired into the top of the net by Xanthoulis and Mulvaney respectively. In the second half, when we weren’t rolling about on the deck, the attacking momentum persisted with Evan delivering the ball excellently into the path of Jack Parry for a simple finish and Josh Dance completing a typically winding run by despatching the ball home in style.

‘I haven’t laughed as much as that in a long time’ said Josh’s dad. But why? All the little Chopper Harrises and Vinnie Joneses flying about, I guess – the sheer pointlessness of it all.