Venue: Boothferry Park
Nationwide Football League Division 3
Attendance: 5,344
Sometimes a day really comes together. Good ale and good chat in the pre-match pub with Sky thoughtfully putting a game of football on the telly nice and early for us. An ultimately deserved win in which we scored a fine team goal superbly executed. A splendid evening with friends, food and drink, despite it all, I went home sober.
Actually the last bit is made up. About the sobriety, I mean. But rich as the day was, its fulcrum was another Tappa moment.We are 1-0 up, we have played pretty well, but we've started to be pegged back just a little. Darlo striker Scott Naylor has put a free header wide from 5 yards out to our collective relief. But the ball is loose just outside our area, a Darling bears down on it and it is 60-40 in his favour as Whitmore, who has just astoundingly been labelled a 'Prima donna' by some git in the South Stand, moves up to challenge. Tappa spurts forward, teasingly flicks the ball beyond the reach of his suddenly flailing opponent and is away, skimming across the emerald turf towards Bunkers. Like soon-to-be-flooded homesteaders surveying a storm-swollen river, Darlington understand the threat all too well but are powerless to prevent it. Theo bears down on panicking back-tracking defenders and shreds the back line completely by picking out Marcelle, admirably up in support on his left. Clint scoots towards the goal and we briefly panic, thinking that he might do something bizarre like trying to score, but he remembers his lines and squares for Whitmore is was loping majestically into the area.
He meets the ball 8 yards out and we are already celebratingas the ball seems to melt into his boot, so assured is his touch before he guides it into its pre-selected billet.So the day is bathed in the ghostly pearl glow of fantasy, like the nearby houses which the floodlights seem to have moonlit. And of course it made the game safe. In a team of honest spear carriers such as ours, if we are to win matches this sort of royal ability is a necessity, not a luxury item.
We lined up for the game thus: