Monday, September 29, 2008

An eventful day…

Yesterday was an eventful day. It started at 8am when I crawled out of bed and pulled on my sporting gear, ready to head down to Peckam to face Dulwich Knights and Ashcombe in a volleyball triangular.

I was due to be picked up by one of the three cars of volleyballers making its way south from Leicester so was a tad confused when all three pulled up. Apparently "we travel as a team" and so everyone had come down in convoy and taken the 15 minute detour to my place on the way down. I felt a bit guilty that they'd all come via chez Robyn but a little bit special at the same time.

Our head coach seemed a bit stressed that the detour may have made us a bit behind schedule and in his haste to get going reversed into a lampost on my estate, making a huge cracking noise which may well have woken up the neighbours. There's a big dent and crack in the lampost and Mr Coach has got a bit of a scrape on his shiny black car and left behind some broken glass. But at least he didn't run over a player!

I did think I may have got myself automatically benched seeing as is it was the detour to my place that put in the path of the lampost. Eek.

Anyway, we arrived safe and sound (with only a bit of earache as the club captain did not stop talking the whole journey, despite needing to concentrate on the London traffic she was driving through. She barely drew breath) and started our warm up.

Only problem was, we had no refs. We're supposed to have two supplied by the EVA and I don't think it's strictly legal to play National League games without them. The EVA promised one ref, who never turned up, but had the cheek to ask if Leicester Volleyball Club could provide someone from our men's team to be second ref. The bravado! As if one of our chaps would travel for two and a half hours just for that. It's the EVA's responsibility, certainly not the away team's. In the end one of our coaches was second ref and the home team, Dulwich, provided the other one. Not ideal.

We kicked some Dulwich butt winning relatively easily 3-0 with no injuries, no tears and no shouting from the coaches. Well, not much. Then we tackled Ashcombe, a team of giants. We really could have taken them and it was such a close match but Ashcombe managed to pull it out of the bag. One of our best hitters did knacker her knee half way through the game and was practically carried off and I did a kinda dive thing (if you knew me you would know that this NEVER happens and that my knee pads are little more than an accessory) and took the scab off my knee. Will my pavement wound ever heel? One player had a bleeding toe and another broke two nails through her excellent blocking efforts.

Once the games were over we headed to the showers, somewhat pleased with our performances. If we were feeling jaded from our on-court efforts that soon changed when we turned the freezing cold showers on. Brrr. And they smelled kinda funny too. We were then somewhat stunned when one of our coaches (it was his birthday so we couldn't shout at him too much) poked his head into the changing rooms (half of us were naked!) with his eyes tightly closed to tell us that Ashcombe were scoffing all the sandwiches and we'd better get a wriggle on.

As volleyball rules go, the home team provides food and drink for the other teams and the team that plays the first two games (us!) gets to tuck in first. Ashcombe were supposed to be warming up to play Dulwich but instead chose to wolf down all the fodder, greedy buggers.

Anyhoo, we headed home after a long day and I was able to capture a couple of piccies of my sick lampost so Mr Coach can use them as part of his insurance claim, should he need to. I can see it now: "The lampost just crept up on me and is definitely at fault here. I didn't see it coming!"