Excerpt from a pink and sparkly diary:

Saturday, 13 October 2018

10.00am – Avocado prices are EXTORTIONATE now - never buy from the Co-op. WTF. Who do they think they are? I’ll just grow my own. Seriously. I liked avocados before this stupid hipster trend.

11.00am – Remind Pash that a toilet seat was invented for a reason.

1.45pm - I arrive at the pitch, dragged by my unloving boyfriend. Northern blood runs through him just like his dad… On a side note, it’s actually a funny story about how we met and quite relevant to hockey. More than you know: he used to be a Jaegerboy. What this essentially meant is that he went round clubs fluttering his eyelashes and persuading drunk girls to buy Jaeger shots. He had me at Jaeger shots. He almost lost me with his accent; he sealed the deal with his story about his hockey prowess and a little trophy he carried in his pocket. Well, that’s what he called it anyway.
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Note to Alex - Based on today’s performance it was a lie. A big FAT lie. Eight-nil. I’ve had to put him in the dog house. We don’t even own a dog.

2pm - Whilst I stand around waiting for my boyfriend to do his stretches I can’t help but notice a man in the corner of my eye, a strange looking man but nevertheless his alpha-maleness attracts me to him. I’ve never experienced it before: how can this Gollum-looking man secrete what I can only assume are pheromones of the Greek gods? He kneels down and unzips his sac, pausing, like how a gazelle knows it’s in the eyes of the predator. He pulls something out of his sac, slowly. It’s long, girthy and…oh my. It looks hard. How can he handle it, I wonder? The length dwarfs my boyfriend’s equipment, but I must be loyal, I must… My thoughts drift again a little later in the match. More on that later.

3pm – The game starts and it’s poor. Five-nil at half time. The CSHC striker seems to have overdosed on Lemsip prior to the match and looks back at the onslaught against his defenders with a glint of PTSD. The defenders appear to try their best. All is lost…all is lost. Oh my God, someone please save them and blow the full-time whistle. Their tiny (?) corners are woeful too, with nine chances going unconverted.

4pm - The game ends. Thankfully the whistle blows at eight-nil as 10½ men grudgingly walk off the pitch (one had only one leg working at the end, his teammates called him, ‘Neil’). And quickly my thoughts drift back to golem-boy. It turns out the man with the large girthy length stick and Greek-god pheromones is called ‘George’ by his teammates. They seem to take pity on him for letting in eight goals, as was confirmed later at teas by ‘Man of the Match’: 2 votes. He’s a keeper, ladies. Ah, that explains his long hockey stick. I make a mental note, keepers are…well, keepers!

I reflect on my day. Four hours in the car and seventy minutes of hockey contributing to nothing but a miserable boyfriend. Oh well. There’s always next week, they all say. They’re obviously delusional. Apparently their captain ‘Matt’ had a brain injury last week from a ball to the face. Figures, because there’s no chance they can win a match with a performance like that. Except from that golem guy. He could do anyone…I mean *anything* He could do anything.
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Note to future self - DO NOT EVER AGAIN attend to support Pash. I hear afterwards they even voted me ‘Lemon’. The cheek. A#$£holes.

Signed,
Pash’s girlfriend

Photos from the day from the actual M3s:

Joe’s pre-match cocktail.

George’s post-match meal.

Harry Potter’s post-match sorrow. Photo courtesy of Sev