The History of Fitbaw
Hard as it is to believe, there was once an age where fives was not a regular Wednesday occurance.
Looking back through the mists of time, into the dark and mirky past, the first game was our equivalent of the big bang: before it, time had no meaning and nothing interesting ever happened; ever since our universe has been expanding at an ever increasing rate.
It was Iain who started it. One bleak winters day in IDOX towers we all sat innocently at our desks when an email popped up. At that stage Iain was a faceless, unknown person enquiring to see if anyone would be interested in playing five a side football. The huge volume of responses he received prompted him to quickly organize a game and, within a week, we were all meeting downstairs in anticipation of the inaugral encounter.
And so, on February 11th 2004 at 1800 hours, the two teams took the park for the historic opening. Typically, being a bunch of IT specialists, mathematicians and generally well educated guys, we had we had eleven players instead of ten and Iain had to constantly switch between teams for the whole hour.
Indeed the first game consisted mostly of polite comments such as "good pass young chap" or "excellent attempt at a save my friend" owing to the fact that many of us were complete strangers. The score was not kept and we all came away with a sense of relief that no-one was outstandingly good. Most of us are at a similar level and, as a result, the majority of matches have been relatively close affairs.
Controversy followed that first match, with the introduction of a 9pm kick off time. This led to people not turning up, and we managed to get even teams from then on. A special mention should go to Alan, who travelled all the way from John o'Groats to be with us. It was worth it for him, as he embarked on a remarkable unbeaten run that would stretch until the final day of March.
The first really close match took place on one of those cold winter nights. With the clock ticking past 10 o'clock Christian scored a dramatic late equaliser to force a golden goal period. As the astroturf froze between our feet, and our arms numbed beyond all healing, we played on through the night until we got a winner.
Eventually we managed to settle on a 6:30pm kick off time, and began to wear light and dark strips to differentiate the team. Martie, in a move Arthur Daley would be proud of, even rustled up five strips for one team which led to the current stripes v blues situation. Or Mince v Tatties, as the teams have came to be known.
An interesting feature of the matches has been the increase in violence as the weeks have gone by. It took until the second week before Christian crocked Alan, and even then it was discrete so that no-one noticed. Nowadays if you finish a match with all your limbs intact you count yourself lucky - last time out we had an injured toe, a twisted knee and three scraped knees. Only eight players were playing.
The website began as a simple spreadsheet, developed by Iain and hosted on Luke's site. Around the same time, a spoof match report was developed for one of the more dramatic encounters. This then became a weekly occurence and Iain set about developing a site to incorporate the statistics, reports and all the info we need each week.
The future of the matches looks bright. Following on from the selling of photographic rights to the Daily Record, the BBC have made a bid for TV rights. With no SPL football being shown on our screens next season, it looks as if the idox 5-a-sides may be the premier football show on the beeb. Also, hopefully in the next few weeks, subscribers will be able to watch matches live on the internet - meaning that our supporters across the globe don't miss any of the action!