Caps 3 Old Timers 1

The late Bill Shankley, the man who made Liverpool great in the 60's and 70's, once said that "Football is not a matter of life and death; it is far more important than that". He may have been guilty of slight exaggeration, but when you consider the joy, the pure, feckless, unrestrained joy that a hard earned victory over a despised opponent brings then one has to agree that there was more than just a little merit to what the old maestro said. Rarely has this been more blatantly obvious than on Thursday night when a depleted Caps side vanquished the team that gives a whole new meaning to the term "bitter shower of angry bastards", the Palm Coast Old Timers.
Granted this wasn't exactly the Spartans and the Persians going head to head at Thermopylae, but Caps were missing four players, including goalkeeper Meyer, and so the victory was particularly sweet, like the first time the right girl gives you the right look and you know that all will soon be right in your world. Pure magic.
With much of the game being played in the kind of torrential downpour that encouraged Noah to build an ark, Caps went about their work in a business like fashion, showing great discipline and wasting no energy. Hubble was the organizer at the back, moving and positioning his men with the calculated ruthlessness of a Russian chess grand-master smelling check mate. Along side him Coghlan showed that when his job is narrowed down to the single task of kicking lumps out of men not on his team, he can be most effective. Zeits and Shirley dominated the midfield exchanges, with Zeits' beard adding to the overall biblical theme of this fixture. His holy hirsuteness also took his goal in the same way that Paul welcomed the Holy Spirit on the road to Damascus; joyfully. Shirley scored twice, the second a gem of rare proportion; a turn, a flick, a burst of speed and a glorious glancing header that kissed the back of the net and left all who witnessed it awestruck... like the uninvited who watched Noah's Ark glide by, animal packed, dry and destined for religious immortality. Despite having more opportunities to score than a porn star in the middle of a five film contract, Wilson was unable to capitalize but at least he seemed happy and didn't give the impression that he wanted to derail trains by driving the short school buses into them. Baby steps.
DeMartini, fast becoming the league's resident heart-breaker, caused endless problems for the opposing defenders who always seemed to be caught in the dilemma of whether or not to kick her. More often than not the wrong football decision was made, but at least we now know that some of the Old Timers are not the misogynistic pricks we previously took them for. You live and learn. Meyers in the nets took time wasting to a whole new level and will soon be coaching this dying art to young up and coming Italians, for whom this kind of shenanigans is second nature. His performance in the second half and the running monologue he was having suggests that there is more than just a little of the marvellous, psycho bastard about him.
Though this game was not one for the Anson Dorrance coaching clinic it did send the Caps players home with large, shit-eating grins on their faces. What more could you want?

Caps 7 St. Augustine Lions 0

On February 9th, 797 AD, at approximately nine minutes before eleven, King Sigmund IV of Denmark, known to his subjects as The Valiant, to his enemies as the elvish marked, abortive, rooting hog, and to his mother as Lil' Siggy, took a break from his Tuesday morning ritual of frozen troll head bowling, and had an idea; a great idea. Unfortunately while musing on this cerebral bolt from the blue he accidentally wandered into the firing line of his good friend Eric The Flatulent and was instantaneously blasted off his feet by the mighty anal tintinnabulations that gushed forth from this pestilent rear end with all the might and violence of Krakatoa on steroids. The gaseous tsunami launched him across several bowling lanes, finally depositing him on top of a brutally cold and rigid stack of recently harvested troll heads. When King Sigmund regained consciousness half an hour later the idea, alas, was gone. However he did wake up with another idea, and while it certainly lacked the scope and majesty of the one he'd lost it had the advantage of being completely foolproof. "Why not re-invade the peace loving, anti-war, weaponless and rich monks of the isle of Islay? I always beat them," the king thought to himself. And so at first light on the next day off went Sigmund and his merciless horde of war mongering pillagers to kick some monk ass. And so it was last Saturday morning when Caps once again took on and destroyed the St. Augustine Lions in a match that inadvertently paid homage to a Danish king of yore.
No matter the opposition, it is no mean accomplishment to score seven times in a game and Caps did it in style. Wilson, who is scoring like Casanova on Viagra, bagged a hat-trick; Shirley had a couple and Zeits and Meyer rounded out the goals. Howell assisted on all of them and did so with such ruthless elegance and efficiency that if this game was assisted suicide he would be Jack Kevorkian. Even Coghlan was less awful than usual though there needs to be a law banning him from ever removing his shirt at the end of a match. One could get snow blindness and perpetual nausea from looking at his pasty, so white it's blue, Austin Powers chest hair inspired body. It is not good; at all. What if children saw it?
The rest of the Caps team was a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous. Zub's mastery of Mike Reed was sublime; the amount of Corona seeping out of his pores, ridiculous. Hubble's second half performance in goal was sublime; his tolerance for dealing with drunk gob shites on a Friday night, ridiculous. DeMartini's inability to hit the target was tragically sublime; her claims of having difficulty scoring off the field, ridiculous. And last, but by no means least there was Meyers, whose back injury, caused by that always dangerous maneuver, bending over, was sublimely ridiculous.
And so Caps keep marching on, looking every inch the defending seven-a-side summer league champions. Can the Orange Crush be stopped? Only time will tell, but it cannot augur well for all future opponents that fun loving merciless dictator Robert Mugabe's favorite soccer team, the perennial champions of the Zimbabwean league, are also called Caps United! And we all know how in to losing Mr. Mugabe is.

Caps 4 St. Augustine Lions 1

In terms of mis-matches, this was the soccer equivalent of the U.S. invading Grenada. This was late 1980's Mike Tyson fighting a crippled nun. This was the first scene in any bad science fiction movie where Caps are the ravenous creepy swamp creature and the Lions the almost pretty teenage girl who should have listened closer to her parents when they warned her of the dangers of taking the Old Mill road shortcut after dark. Were it not for an inspired performance by Rixom in the St. Augustine goal this one could quite easily have been a double digit margin of victory for the men (and woman) in orange. As it was, Caps had to settle for a brace from Wilson and one each from Hubble and Tennyson whose acrobatic bicycle kick left Coghlan and Meyers shaking their heads and ruefully acknowledging that a similar attempt on their behalf would have landed them both in a wheelchair and communicating by means of blowing into a straw for the remainder of their lives.
The game began at a pace that suggested both teams had been visited by the lobotomy fairy whilst they slept. But in reality, nothing so sinister contrived to give this game the waltzing at geriatric, drug induced speed. Father time, Father beer and humidity that made it seem as if one was running inside a large vat of over moist cotton candy were the reasons for this somnolent tempo. That is not to say that Caps didn't move swiftly through the gears when opportunities presented themselves, but it was the gentle, careful acceleration of an antique pickup truck rather than the feral voom of a Maserati, that led to shots on target.
As a contest the game was all but over within the first ten minutes. Caps scored twice and then settled into a rhythm of lazily knocking the ball around the pitch and squadering chance after chance when one on one with Rixom. Still there were moments of splendid lunacy that enlivened the proceedings. With Meyer a no show the goal-keeping duties fell to a rotation system that worked well until Coghlan took his turn. Showing all the grace of a retarded wolverine addicted to crystal meth, he allowed the Lions their only goal of the game and provided much unintentional comic relief. Shirley did a lot of running which made his team-mates nervous, DeMartini gave a clinic on how not to head a ball and Braun added absolutely nothing to the game, but did it in a manner that suggested there was less to come in the future. No mean accomplishment. With Zub attending a "How to play extreme sports and still look good" lecture in a hot tub in the mountains of Costa Rica, Zeits a wedding in Maine where no shoes was a requirement for admittance and Howell stuck on his commute somewhere between Jax Beach and Tampa, (Dante's 9th circle of Hell?), it was left to Hubble, Tennyson and Wilson to inject some class and skill to the contest. They failed.
Still a win is a win and Caps can be comforted by the fact that at least they are not the St. Augustine Lions seven a side team. Oceans of beer would have to be consumed to live with that fact. Oceans.

Caps 1 Old Timers 1

Summer time conjures images of long walks on the beach, deep honey tans on scantily clad ladies, fruity cocktails on a porch, lounging in a hammock with a pulp fiction novel and lazy idle days with nothing to do and all day long to do it. One does not picture out of shape old men, has beens that never were, sweating like paedophiles in a playground, kicking a ball up and down a field in a slow motion travesty of what the world knows as "The Beautiful Game". And yet that is exactly what was on display last Thursday night in St. Augustine when the dangerously sexy Caps team took on the poster children for angry miserable bastards, the Palm Coast Old Timers.
For the nine spectators (one dog) in attendance, this game must have made watching paint dry seem an exciting proposition. Thankfully there was no admission fee. If there had been, full refunds and possibly even bribes would have been necessary to assuage the pain and suffering that was surely felt by the fans. There was nothing even remotely interesting or exciting about this fixture, unless one considers the hideous off-orange, sleeveless t-shirts that Caps were sporting to be worth a comment. Fashion week in Milan it was not. Soccer as it is supposed to be played it was not. Evidence that man is the greatest of all god's creations, it was not. It was wrong, on lots of levels.
However, despite the complete and utter lack of any aesthethic beauty about this sporting fixture there were some almost bright spots. Meyers received his first death threat of the campaign, something that usually takes at least until mid-season to happen. DeMartini, second only to Hubble in the best looking legs on the team category, showed that hard work and skill still have a place in the game. Meyer, in goal, shouted in a manner that hinted he at least knows how he should sound when organizing a defence. Zub's hair was immaculate, Wilson seemed less angry than usual and Coghlan managed to look only marginally retarded for most of the game. Zeits' performance, as ever, was overshadowed by the sheer magnificence of his facial hair and Hubble took his goal with all the style and aplomb of a freshman coed draining her fifteenth shot as she coyly makes her way to the business end of the president of the number one fraternity on campus. A thing of beauty it was not, but it, like the coed (a former president of the young Christians who Care at her high school and girl voted most likely to love Jesus forever), got the job done.
The last few minutes of the game brought the most entertainment as the large angry Argentine playing for the Old Timers got sent off for threatening to go medieval on Meyers' ass. Toys were unceremoniously dumped out of the pram and bitter, angry curses turned the air of R.B. Hunt Elementary school a deep shade of blue. The situation was not helped by Coghlan reminding everyone of the winners and losers of the Falklands War. Apparently this is still not seen as funny in Buenas Aries.
This was not exactly one for the ages but it was better than shoveling shit in an Afghan prison... though not by much.