… to watch a 3rd Division football match in the Allier, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall.
This is the lowest tier in football in the Allier (the Puy-de-Dôme has four) but having seen matches higher up the pyramid and not been impressed at all, I wondered how bad an Allier 3rd Division match would be.
As luck would have it, with the Puy-de-Dome still being on the trève, or “winter break”, this afternoon Terjat (about 8 miles from here) were entertaining (if that is the right word to use) their near-neighbours Sainte Thérence in a cut-throat local derby down in the basement of the 3rd Division.
Obviously, with nothing better to do (there was no paint drying and no grass growing anywhere in the vicinity) a visit to Terjat was called for.
And I wasn’t disappointed either, for it was predictably awful.
There was only one player on the field who looked reasonably competent (I’m excluding the Sainte Thérence goalkeeper – what on earth was someone like him doing playing in a team as awful as his?) and that was the Terjat centre-half.
It was clear after the first five minutes that nothing was ever going to get past him as long as he was on the pitch, and it didn’t either.
The trainer of Sainte Thérence clearly had the same opinion as me, and the talk that he gave to his team at half-time was just so predictable.
30 seconds after the restart, with the Terjat centre-half taking off after a loose ball down the right flank, two Ste Thérence players came after him and put him firmly, fairly (well, the referee thought that it was fair – others might not) and squarely into the advertising hoardings with a thump that was heard all over the Allier.
That was his match over.
And so was AS Terjat’s, because the result was predictable after that.
Next stop was to Liz and Terry’s to rehearse our radio programmes for the next month and Liz very kindly cooked tea and made cake, some of which found its way in a doggy-bag back to my house, for which I am extremely grateful
So we are recording tomorrow morning, and then I have to crack on with the next outstanding task – my presentation on the Trans-Labrador Highway for the village discussion group.
It’s all go here.
