The Target Man

In my weekly Huddersfield Town column for the Reporter series I argued that the Terriers need a new striker. My rationale could be distilled into one sentence: we need a like-for-like replacement for James Vaughan.

The only problem about the column is only having a couple of hundred words with which to explain my position. I want to go into detail, explain not only how a change can effect something, but why. I want to talk about the games I've seen and seasons I've experienced which have informed my opinions. Up to now, it hasn't been necessary to go any further and write a supplementary blog, but I feel I should explain my opinion in this week's Reporter. I doubt everyone will agree with it.

James Vaughan is Huddersfield Town's talisman. He's a powerful striker with a physical approach to the game. He gets in defenders' faces and unsettles them. He gets involved in battles to win the ball. He chases lost causes. He holds the ball up for team-mates. His power and pace allied with his team ethic and eye for goal make him a nightmare for defenders.

He's also injured for a significant period every season. One of his biggest failings is his fitness record - or lack of it. I doubt you'd find many people who would disagree with the statement that he's a Premier League quality striker playing in the Championship. Ultimately, he's playing at this level not because he isn't good enough, but because no one in the top flight is prepared to take a gamble on his fitness when they can sign a player of similar quality with a much better record of actually getting onto the pitch.

The Premier League's loss is someone in the Championship's gain, so long as that side in the Championship is equipped to handle the inevitable long absences. And this is where Huddersfield Town have problems. With Vaughan in the side, the side are play-off contenders. Without him, it's a struggle to maintain an overall record of earning an average of a point a game.

Vaughan's attributes make him the ideal modern target man. This is where I may need to explain what I mean. The phrase 'target man' conjures images of the old-fashioned English number 9, a burly front man knocking central defenders out of the way as he bullies his way past the opposition. And that still holds true to a certain extent, but the modern target man has a little more to his game than his less refined forerunners.

James Vaughan isn't 6'3". He's good in the air, but he's not got the ability to hang there like an Andy Booth, the archetypal target man of the last century. But he is direct, quick, and intelligent. He alone of all Town's strikers can pull the defence this way and that with his movement and win a physical battle. Defenders are scared of him because he has all the above attributes, and it means someone will go with him at all times, creating space elsewhere.

This is the true role of the target man: to create space. Often it will be for his strike partner. Alan Lee fulfilled this role superbly when playing alongside Jordan Rhodes. Wayne Allison's introduction to the team in the Great Escape of 1998 gave Marcus Stewart the space he needed to destroy Division One defences almost at will. Andy Booth was first allowed to flourish when Ronnie Jepson arrived in 1993, and ten years later Booth provided the foil for a young Jon Stead.

But it's a necessity in English football that the target man be a physically strong player. Pavel Pogrebnyak at Reading has little to his game other than strength, but he's a player defences struggle with because of that attribute. Even Atdhe Nuhiu - an absolute clogger of a footballer by any standard - managed to play the role on Saturday, holding the ball up tirelessly for his Sheffield Wednesday team-mates. And it seems to be a necessity for the weaker sides in any given division to have a target man who can pull defences one way and another - even if he isn't a prolofic goalscorer - to cover for the technical shortcomings in the team.

Having said that, most of the top teams in the Championship do have a target man of some description in their side. The exception to that rule are table-topping Leicester, although you'd still argue that between them David Nugent and Jamie Vardy have the qualities of the modern target man.

Without James Vaughan Huddersfield Town do not have a target man. The players available currently are Nahki Wells, Martin Paterson, Danny Ward, Sean Scannell, and Cristian Lopez. Two are goalscorers, another two are primarily wingers, and the one left over is unlikely to ever be good enough for Championship football. Elsewhere, Jon Stead - perhaps the only player in the squad who can play the role of the target man other then Vaughan - has endured a torrid season and has been loaned out to Oldham after scoring just once and making a handful of starts.

Against those strikers and without the sheer presence of Vaughan, Championship defences can maintain their shape. Defenders who would find themselves drawn out of the back line or leaving gaps between themselves for strikers to exploit have a comfortable time. Sheffield Wednesday - organised, well-drilled, solid, call them what you will - and their two deep lines of four were never likely to be troubled overly by a Vaughan-less front-line.

So what are the options? The loan market could yield a striker who can play the target man role. Or another change could be made, in the system Town are playing. Maybe the response should be to encourage more runners from deep - even if the best man to do that has been loaned to Yeovil - who can break beyond the front man who, as a part of the defence dropping deep to combat those runners would have more room.

Football is, of course, a game of opinions. My opinion might be misguided, incomplete, or just plain wrong when put into practice. What is for certain is that Huddersfield Town with James Vaughan are a much more complete side than the team without him.

The Best of 2013

It's been something of an interesting year. I wish I could say it's been interesting for the right reasons, but, quite frankly, the year has been total rubbish on a personal level as I've lunged from crisis to crisis with barely a chance to draw breath.

However, I've kept up with my reading and, at times, my writing. Writing has proven difficult this year as my commute to work changed in April and now takes two hours longer than it did prior to my job change. With time at a premium, I've lacked the energy and drive at times to crack open Pages and get to work on some fiction. I've even struggled to keep up with my blogs.

On the other hand, I have started writing a column for my local newspaper. 300 words a week may not sound like very much, and it isn't, but it has kept me ticking over for the past 4 months as well as familiarising me with a style of writing I haven't needed to use much in the past.

I have, however, managed first drafts of a couple of hefty novellas, each clocking in at more than 20,000 words. In addition to those, I've created a handful of short stories and made in-roads on starting a novel shortly. My word count may not have hit my usual target of 100,000 for the year, but I've not done too badly, all things considered.

But what were the best things I came across this year? I haven't been to the cinema all that often (last going to see Kick Ass 2 a few months back), but I have read more than I have at any point in my life. Over the last 12 months I've read around 200 short stories, half-a-dozen graphic novels, 5 history books, a handful of books about football, and roughly 60 unread novels as well at 20-some re-reads.

So, my personal year's best is as follows:

Best Film

Star Trek Into Darkness was a thrilling film. Granted, I haven't seen too much this year (as explained), but of those I did see this was comfortably the best. It built on the good work of Star Trek XI and, despite something of a cop-out conclusion, provided a nice set-up to future Star Trek adventures following Spock and the gang.

Best Short Story Collection

I may be a couple of years behind, but Paolo Bacigalupi's collection Pump Six and other stories was magnificent. I don't often devour short story collections and prefer to make my way through them slowly, but I went through the eleven offered in this collection in a matter of three or four days. Bacigalupi will, in my view, be one of the defining writers of this generation with his dark and unsettling stories with a bleak outlook on the world. He's also undeniably brilliant.

Best Work of Non-Fiction

Annoyingly, I read the old edition of Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson about a week after the updated edition came out. I only found this out yesterday. 'Annoyed' doesn't quite cut the mustard. I loved Wilson's take on the tactical history of football. His hatred of the Charles Reep school of footballing thought also helped to win me over. It hasn't quite changed my views on how football should be played, but it's difficult to argue with his insightful analysis of how football has changed down the years. Writing about how football is played on the pitch is difficult, but Wilson manages it superbly. Now for the updated edition...

Honourable mention to Rubicon by Tom Holland, which is as good a piece of narrative history I've ever read. Holland charts the rise and fall of the Roman Republic with élan, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Best Horror Novel

I only read three horror novels this year, but all three were good ones. Both The Shining by Stephen King and The Ravenglass Eye by Tom Fletcher impressed me, but without doubt the best horror novel I read this year was Song of Kali by Dan Simmons. It was brilliant. The Indian underworld was grotesque and horrifying and, above all, believable, and I found myself sucked in. Simmons did more than just create a book of scares and thrills, though; he got under my skin and had me haunted for weeks after I finished the book.

Best Fantasy Novel

I've only just finished it, it's true, but The Lies of Locke Lamora knocked my socks off. Not since The Name of the Wind have I been sucked into a fantasy novel and found myself so utterly immersed. That it managed to impress me despite me having very high expectations of it it all the more impressive. I'm already looking forward to getting cracking on the sequel Red Seas Under Red Skies.

Best SF Novel

This was a toss-up between three. And in the end, The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes wins out simply because I loved the characters more than those in Moxyland (also by Lauren Beukes) and Osama (by Lavie Tidhar). All three were brilliant reads. But The Shining Girls made me sympathise with the protagonist more than the others. That said, Osama's concept alone runs The Shining Girls very close for the title.

The Shining Girls

At the start of the year, I promised to make a concerted effort to read more stories and books by lady writers. Over the years, I've neglected them. Yes, I've read Ursula LeGuin, and gone through the annual anthologies from Gardner Dozois and Hartwell and Kramer, but my reading has always been dominated by the products of male imagination. I'd say women contributed 10% of my reading material. This wasn't a situation I liked.

In 2013 to date, I've completed 88 books. Of these 88 books, women have at the very least contributed to 29. And I've made some discoveries in that time. I've returned to the disturbing imagination of Shirley Jackson. I've found the genesis of Connie Willis's time-travel books. I've visited the patriarchal totalitarianism/feminist utopia of Sheri Tepper's mind (from that, you'll be able to work out that I couldn't work out what The Gate to Women's Country was). And I've just started revealing the Aztec world of Aliette De Bodard's creation.

But none have entertained me as richly as Lauren Beukes, the South African author of The Shining Girls.

She's not a new discovery, but is a somewhat new talent. I read Zoo City last year, and Moxyland earlier this. The former - an urban fantasy with a South African twist - wasn't really my thing; I've never particularly enjoyed urban fantasy. But the latter was an acutely observed SF tale of the (very) near future which resonated with me. Then there was something about the South African setting, characters and sensibilities which was so fresh when compared to the clichéd Western European/US settings of far too many works. I loved Moxyland, and plan to re-read it before too long.

The Shining Girls, released earlier this year, is Beukes's third novel, and represents a major change in her setting. Gone are the run-down ghettos of Cape Town and Johannesburg, with the skyscrapers and downtown dumpsters of Chicago taking their place. But the writing remains the same; Beukes's style remains brisk but rich, packed with character.

The plot sounds simple, but its execution renders it complex and multi-faceted. A man - Harper Curtis - from the Great Depression stumbles into a time-travelling House, where he feels he is given his mission: kill the shining girls, girls with the potential to make a massive difference in Chicago. The girls are spread across several decades, from the 1930s to the 1990s. One - Kirby - escapes and tries to track him down in 1992-1993.

Simple enough, but the execution of the time-travelling makes events more complex and the story more compelling. Events are set in stone before they occur. There's a sense of inevitability to each of the murders, and trying to plot events in your own mind - trying to make sense of it all - is a reward all of its own. To follow each twist requires concentration. To make the connections and work out events produces a miraculous clarity from what might seem at first to be something of a mess. Beukes is an expert at producing complex, apparently jumbled plotlines that do, in fact, make perfect sense.

The main viewpoint characters are both intriguing. What drives Kirby is plain - she survived what should have been a brutal murder by Harper - but Harper's motivations always seem slightly clouded. Beukes states in the interview at the back that she wanted to debunk the Hannibal Lecter  myth of all serial killers being sophisticated and having a mystique, when in fact they are normally sad, pathetic men with sexual hangups, and she manages this by and large. But I still have a very faint problem with the way he goes from Depression-era loser to time-travelling serial killer on the say-so of the House. I suppose she'd say that he gets the sense of power from the House and that allows him to go on and become the monster he undoubtedly is. But if one thing could be improved in the characterisation, it is that.

However, that's only a very small quibble with an excellent book. Of all the books I've read this year, it's perhaps the first to leave me wanting more and being disappointed when it came to an end. I loved The Shining Girls. I'd recommend it to all and sundry. And it's probably my book of 2013.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

I'm not really sure what to make of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, but then, I've not been sure of what to make of a lot of my reading of late.

I've been going through something of a fantasy period in anticipation of writing that flipping fantasy novel which has been kicking around in the back of my mind for the better part of the last decade. This has proven problematic; fantasy isn't my favourite genre. In fact, I'd say it's been relegated out of the top flight of my preferred reading material, replaced by factual history. Although the occasional novel or series - The Kingkiller Chronicles, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Liveship Traders - transcends my expectations of fantasy, the genre still feels too safe, too conservative, too rooted in looking back at what made it great in the first place and failing, therefore, to push on with fresh ideas and innovations.

In the past week I also completed Kraken by perennial favourite China Miéville. By his usual standards I found it to be below par. His ideas were, as ever, boundary-pushing and packed with life, but they found themselves struggling to stay afloat in the book's uneven flow of pacing. It was doubly disappointing because the opening hundred pages or so set up the book so well.

So it was against a disappointed background and limited expectations that I came to The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, the first book in N.K. Jemisin's Inheritance Trilogy.

I'll confess to knowing nothing of Jemisin's work before picking up The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and until I looked the book up I hadn't even been aware it had been shortlisted for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2011 (a fact I really should have been aware of, given my habitual reading of the shortlists on a year-on-year basis). All I knew of her came from my peripheral awareness of a controversy with the SFWA over the summer. In some ways, going into something without expectations is the best way to approach a new writer and a new series.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms sees the first-person narrator, Yeine, summoned to the city of Sky following the mysterious death of her mother. Once there, she finds herself named as a potential heir to the throne. So far, so clichéd, and nothing to shake me from my usual fantasy 'seen it all before' attitude.

But after a while, I started to pick up on a few things. Sky is an interesting place in and of itself - 'a palace above the clouds where the lives of gods and mortals intertwine', according to the blurb, an assessment which is difficult to disagree with on a purely factual level - but Jemisin's treatment of it renders it an excellent setting. It takes a page or two, but a sense of wonder feel starts to set in in relation to Sky, all down to Jemisin's subtle handling of the place.

More interesting, though, is her treatment of characters. Yeine is no damsel in distress, and nor is she a classic Amazon. She's vulnerable, but strong. She has her failings, gives in to temptations she shouldn't allow to overcome her, makes reckless decisions, makes mistakes. In short, she's beautifully human, as are the surrounding cast of characters. The interactions are fascinating and compelling.

And really, that's what lies at the heart of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms: the characters and their interactions. They form the driving force behind everything that goes on. The pseudo-realpolitik which underpins the mortal element of the plot pales in comparison. Far too many other writers get so caught up in events that they forget about the characters. In keeping the scale relatively small - there's no grand cast of characters, no sub-plots to get distracted by - Jemisin succeeds where so many others fail. I'll confess to being in love with how she treated this side of the book.

I'm much less in love with another side of the novel, though: the writing itself.

This is where my confusion comes in, and why I'm not sure how I feel about the book as a whole. Although Jemisin has created a superb, believable world full of incredibly human characters, she doesn't seem to have quite worked out where she's pitching the writing. For much of the book it feels like a young adult novel, albeit one that's well written. In a book so full of complex adult storylines, the writing feels almost at odds with the story. Then there are the occasional moments where the writing does get adult, and these feel out of place whilst being completely fitting. To top it all off, the language of the book is almost virtually clean and then out of nowhere someone says 'c**t'. It's jarring and offputting - I can deal with strong language (goodness knows my own writing's hardly clean) but it has its place and this wasn't it, not in an otherwise clean context.

So there we have it. I'm not sure what to make of a book packed with brilliance because it feels like its writing lets it down. Whether I'll pick up the second in the series - bearing in mind how complete volume one feels - is touch and go. If I do, it'll be for the ideas that subvert so many fantasy clichés and do just what other pieces of work determinedly won't.

Kick Ass 2

Guilty pleasure time: I loved Kick Ass. In this era of underwhelming, special effects laden and character-light superhero movies, it was a breath of fresh air. It was both tremendous (and spectacularly violent) fun and emotionally satisfying. Actions had consequences, and we saw a cast of characters grow over the course of the two hours.

Fine, it wasn't the most mature of films, with a fine line in crass teenage humour and exceptionally bad language to go with the gore-saturated action sequences. But it was tremendous entertainment, and there was a number of scenes which took the film to the next level. As cinema experiences go, it was one of my most enjoyable.

Roll on three years and we come to the sequel. Which is good. Very good. It's still got the mix of violence, bad language, and tasteless humour combined with real consequences for real characters that made the first work almost as an anti-superhero film.

Time has moved on. Hit Girl/Mindy McCready (Chloe Moretz), the potty-mouthed teenage superhero is trying to accustom herself to regular teenage life. Kick Ass/Dave (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) gets involved with a clique of wannabe-superheroes led by Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey). Meanwhile, rich kid Chris D'amico, defeated in the first film, becomes the world's first supervillain, calling himself... erm... The Motherf**ker, after managing to accidentally kill his mother in a sunbed incident and discovering a collection of her whips and chains.

What impressed me was how the characters were handled. Hit Girl in particular was developed into a much more rounded character. It would have been easy to make her a 'normal' teenage girl and reduce her character to a cardboard cut-out, but this wasn't allowed to happen, not least because of the excellent performance of Moretz. Indeed, all the characters were more human than in the first outing, although the film lacked a brooding presence - Jim Carrey was excellent as Colonel Stars and Stripes, but Big Daddy (Nicholas Cage) was sorely missed by more than just the grieving Hit Girl.

The action - oh, the action. Gratuitous violence on gratuitous violence. Thinking back to Kick Ass, the action there was more finessed and imaginative than in its sequel (Hit Girl skewering a minion's hand on a grappling line, then using that to make the minion shoot himself is never repeated, with the violence being of a more conventional variety). As ever, the violence is played for laughs rather than seriously. Unfortunately this leads to one scenario where an event isn't treated with the appropriate gravity, sucking much of the fun out of the film for a few moments.

But is it worth seeing? If you're not averse to extreme (comic) violence and tasteless language and humour, I can recommend it. But be warned: Kick Ass 2 is not for the faint-hearted or easily offended.

Stonemouth

Iain (M.) Banks. The most talented British writer of the last two generations. Discuss.

It's certainly a discussion point. Others might point out the literary qualities of an Amis or a McEwan. But I personally doubt that they have the range Iain (M.) Banks had in a literary career spanning 30 years and almost 30 novels until his death earlier this year. Throughout that career Banks combined the oft-sneered-at popular with the literary. He even had the snobbish critics falling over to praise his magnificent science fiction work.

And it was this range which truly marked him out from the pack. He was equally comfortable writing a Scottish family drama (The Steep Approach to Garbadale, for example) as a 10-volume space opera about his idea of the ultimate utopia (the Culture novels). In between times there was dimension-hopping 'literary' SF (Transition), the discomfiting horror novel that sparked it all off (The Wasp Factory) and Scottish gangsters.

Stonemouth, his penultimate non-genre/literary novel, falls into the Scottish gangsters category. Stewart Gilmour returns to his hometown of Stonemouth, a Scottish estuary town somewhere north of Aberdeen, for the first time in five years. The last time he was there he was running for his life from the town's drug-lords-in-chief, the Murstons. But Joe Murston, family patriarch, is dead, and Stewart returns to pay his respects with the ostensible permission of the Murston clan - knowing that the girl who haunts his past is still in the town.

Banks always had the knack of combining character, plot and setting to beautiful effect. And so he proved yet again in Stonemouth. Right from the off it's easy to relate to Stewart, the first-person, present-tense point of view protagonist. He's the high-flier returning to the dead-end town of his past in trepidation. His doubts and worries are clear from the first scene, with him stood on the nearby suspension bridge contemplating the suicides who meet their ends leaping over the barriers, and the deaths of his past.

From there the plot unfolds in classic Banks fashion, like an ever-widening lens in a camera slowly revealing the whole vista from the original pinpoint view. The main focus is on events of the long weekend Stewart spends in Stonemouth, but flashbacks reveal Stewart's past in Stonemouth, including the reasons for his flight from the town in fear for his life. Stewart's overall life story is hardly a Greek tragedy, but it has all the hallmarks of Banksonian sadism and cruel humour stamped over it. Bizarre deaths, even more bizarre golf course incidents and a star-crossed relationship all provide cornerstones in understanding the protagonist.

Even without the twist Banks put on all his work the book would have been a satisfying read. But Banks, as ever, raised it above the level of being merely satisfying with his keen observations on the minutiae of modern life which serve to enhance the experience. And then there's Banks' usual undercurrent of violence just beneath the already-tumultuous surface. One or two incidents explode off the page in heart-stopping fashion. Multi-faceted and much more than skin-deep in each of those aspects, Stonemouth is a surprisingly complex piece of work for a relatively simple premise.

I would be lying if I said that I enjoyed Stonemouth more than The Wasp Factory or Use of Weapons. But enjoy it I most certainly did. It was a pleasure to slip back into a Banksonian mindset for a few days and experience the inimitable talent of Banks yet again.

Christ The King 1-10 Trinity Boys

It's thirteen years since I signed up for my first season playing for Trinity Boys, following the resignation of St Andrews from the Mirfield and District Church Football League. After a year of character-building defeats and more than occasional humiliations, the start of the season came as a surprise to me - we drew 3-3 with Hopton URC, and swiftly established ourselves as one of the best sides in the league. By the midway point of the campaign, the whole team was studying the week-by-week league table before the start of games, working out if we could go top that day. The whole thing was a novel experience.

Aside from my debut, one game stands out above all others from the first half of that memorable season. My first return to John Cotton's playing fields to play Christ The King had been in my mind for some time. The previous year, my debut season in the Church League, had seen a St Andrews side with yours truly up front crash to a 26-0 defeat. Losing was difficult; the manner of the defeat and the conduct of our opponents made it even tougher. It's difficult to lose with dignity when your opponents are going out of the way to humiliate you. I still remember one goal they scored where their player rounded the keeper, rolled the ball onto the line, and then got down on hands and knees to head it the final three inches. I'd been both anticipating and dreading the game against Kings since the draw for the first round of the Sonder Heating Cup had sent my Trinity team there in December 2000.

Even now I feel nervous before a game. It doesn't matter if it's a kickabout with mates or a cup final; I still experience the butterflies in the stomach. Back then, it was worse. Immediately before kick-off I'd feel sick with anticipation. And I remember the nerves striking me worse than ever walking out onto the pitch wearing Trinity's all-blue strip and seeing the hated Kings in formation in their black and white stripes. Somehow they always seemed bigger and stronger than they were. Of course, there's always been a sure-fire way to get rid of early nerves: get a tackle in.

I managed to concede the first free-kick of the game after barely three seconds.

It set the tone for our early performance. Kings were good. They were our title rivals. They could brush teams away almost on a whim, when they turned it on. But we were dogged, committed, determined to disrupt their flow and rhythm by getting amongst them and breaking up the play. And, as we started to see more and more of the ball, we started to turn on the style.

I remember playing my part in the first goal. Playing on the left-hand side of a front three meant I was involved in an interchange of passes with our marauding midfielder, who surged into the box and pulled it back for our big centre-forward to fire home. And it wasn't too long before we'd added twice to the scoreline, ripping Kings apart at will in what was becoming a masterful performance. Kings pulled one back, but that was their sole attack after the first few minutes of a game we were dominating.

Playing just behind me, on the left of a midfield four, was Kyle Douglas. As wing-wizards went, he was probably the best in the league. His footwork had left Kings defenders baffled on more than one occasion, and so it was when he picked up the ball on the halfway like just before half-time. He left one on his backside and set off towards the dead ball line. In close attendance was the Kings defender, who proceeded to spend the entire run kicking out at Dougie's ankles. When Dougie got the final cross in and overbalanced, the defender all-too-willingly decided to stamp down hard on Dougie's crotch. A second later, the defender found himself being dumped on the deck by our giant midfielder, David Boothroyd. What followed was the only proper mass bust-up I was ever part of in the Church League.

The mass confrontation ended with a yellow card for Boothy's reaction, and a straight red for the Kings defender. In disgust at the decision to send their player off, eight Kings players walked off, leaving the goalkeeper, a defender, and a lone striker to keep on playing. Those of us in blue looked amongst ourselves in confusion as to what was going on. The half-time whistle went. Gordon and Steven, our joint managers, ran on to take us off and get us away from what was becoming an ugly situation while the referee went to remonstrate with the Kings bench, who were giving him vile abuse.

Somehow the ref managed to persuade the Kings players back out for the second half. Once the whistle had gone for kick-off, we proceeded slaughter them. From 3-1 at half-time, the scoreline increased every few minutes. Kings heads dropped. There was no fight, no pride, no passion in their performance. It was one of those rare days when I could get the ball and race past my man, knowing I would only attract a half-hearted kick at my ankles rather than a proper tackle. The Kings defenders descended into arguing amongst themselves. The midfield didn't do its job. The forwards didn't chase and harry. By contrast, we were ruthless. Mistakes got punished. Forwards brushed defenders off the ball with ease. We were quicker to every loose ball and worked in units to win it back. The performance was utterly professional and probably the best I've ever played a part in.

At full-time Christ The King were out of the Sonder Heating Cup after suffering a 10-1 hammering on their home ground to their biggest rivals. Kings slouched off to their bench without shaking hands. We didn't particularly care; we'd delivered a footballing lesson, and we knew Kings couldn't handle us at our best. From a personal perspective, I'd paid back a debt of humiliation without stooping to their level.

Probably the best part of the day was yet to come, however. Sat in the car with my dad, a group of the players who had stormed off after the red card went to talk to my dad, who was league president. They tried to make out that they had suffered racial abuse, assuming my father hadn't been present for the whole game. They were told in no uncertain terms that they were embarrassing themselves. Knowing just how low they would stoop and how badly they took defeat was ever so satisfying.

Even more satisfying was that we went on to win the Cup, beating Hopton 4-3 in a classic final. Kings tailed off in the league, leaving that as a two-horse race between us and Hopton. After a long, exciting run-in, we walked away from the season as double winners. I still have the trophy and medal I got for playing my part in that team. Some riposte to a team that had humiliated me less than 2 years previously.