Match Report, Sunday 15th November 2015

On what was a windy and blustery day, 10 of us gathered on Parkers Piece for our weekly game of three-sided football. The teams that we decided on were: team 1 (Rosa, Asim and Zevi), team 2 (Joe, Fiona, Caleb and Thomas), and team 3 (Ernest, Evelyn and Guy). We didn’t decide on any team names at the time, probably because we were eager to get going. We played 15-minute halves for the first two, then we decided on a 10-minute half for the third half, as it was getting a bit chilly. All of these halves were interspersed with welcome helpings of the leftovers of Rumi’s birthday cake and Thomas’ killer whale and turtle-shaped biscuits.

Again, we played with mixed teams, mixed gender as well as mixed ages, which works well. All in all, it was quite a well-balanced game with some tenacious individual performances, such as: Thomas and Caleb’s goal-saving, Rumi and Asim’s teamwork, Rosa and Fiona’s box-to-box running, Ernest’s tackling and shooting, Joe’s lobs (one of which nearly took out Asim), … I could go on. Anyway, team 2 just pipped teams 1 and 3 to it with virtually the last kick of the match when Joe broke forward, exploiting the tired legs of the rest of us, to slot the ball past Evelyn, who bravely tried to narrow the angle by coming off her line.

Observations: we were a bit more consistent at re-starting from goals and new halves by throwing the ball in the air in the middle of the field; and we also started introducing corners. We thought that next time, maybe, we could introduce a smaller football to make it easier for the children and a bit harder for the adults. Another idea was to re-introduce a higher value for children’s goals, which would encourage a different approach to team positional play, communication, movement and distribution.


<Thanks to Guy for this weeks match report, Cheers Guy!>

This week we also had copies of the latest DAMTP newspaper with a couple of articles on 3SF. See digital copy here: http://antisystemic.org/SW/DAMTP12.pdf

non-cantorian sets!

The last few weeks have been a bit erratic in terms of games, due to family events and also since I have been quite ill and therefore unable to organise or attend games. However here are some thoughts from the last few weeks.

Since we started our games by allowing people to join the teams during a match, we have also allowed team members to defect, change teams and even for teams to be totally rearranged mid game. This has always happened during one of the 3 halves (sic!)

During the third time breaks, it is usually (but not always) the children who instigate a team change, usually because they feel their current team is not the strongest! But team changes have also taken place because new people are joining the match or the teams seem to be unfairly matched.

The way of organising and splitting into teams is therefore one of the most important factors in starting a game, especially since we have such a range of abilities and experience. That said, we do not take long over deciding. In the last blog I mentioned that we ended up with a team of children, a team with only women and a third team of mixed genders and ages. 

The next game saw some defecting going on and we ended up with one team which was only male (on the right) - and one which was all white but mixed in terms of gender/sex (on the left). I was in the middle team so that was mixed in terms of both ethnicity and gender but not in terms of age - it was all adults!

The next game we played we had more players but we were unsure of how to split the teams and so we all lined up in age order to try and systemise the selection in some way. The picture at the top of this post is all in age order except for two people (and one of them is very obvious!)

In order to make a "level playing field" (a field in terms of time and class, rather than space) - we discussed changing the scoring method again - one idea was that if a goal was scored by an adult, it would be scored as normal - but a goal scored by a child would be worth 3 normal goals. We didn't adopt this method though.

But it does highlight that so far there has been a very clear distinction between adults and children. There was one week when this was more blurred and that was when two teenagers joined the game!

I am afraid I cannot remember the final scores or the teams for the last game but I do remember I laughed alot and had alot of fun - so thanks to all involved!