The Brawl

Hull City 1 Charlton 2



If I am to keep my promise to David, what ought to come first, as it did chronologically, is to point out that David, Luis and co. had a splendid win at last Monday's quiz, scoring 133 points and thus knocking us well into second place by a margin of 14. We had no excuses, really; we were missing Mush and Lesley, so we were not at full strength, but we still should have operated with more caution. Where we made our mistake was to jump at a round offered by Antony called Words & Language. When this was announced, we all looked at one another and said things to the effect that this was our trade, and therefore an ideal subject to choose as the Joker round, for which, let me remind you, you get double the points for every right answer, though of course the round has to be publicly specified before it starts as being your Joker.

But sadly, in our job we are not required to know what the third, fourth and fifth most common languages in the world are, and we only managed to get 5½ questions right out of 10 in this one, while in the next round, Geography, our rivals, who are excellent at this, and thus chose it as their Joker, did not miss a trick, and that, really, was that.

And of course the brawl in the title of the piece does not refer to Quiz Night at all; we are always courteous in defeat.

The brawl came on Tuesday night. I was quite tired, for as I reported yesterday afternoon, the new academic year started last week, and indeed had done so that morning with speeches and sessions and meetings, when we are accustomed to working in the evenings. So I got in, worn out, but remembered there was football, and tuned in to Livescore somewhere in the second half to find Charlton 1-0 up. On Livescore, you can get more detail by clicking on the match, and thus I discovered that Luke Varney had got the goal in the 41st minute, but then my eye was drawn to a couple of red symbols, and this conveyed the information that Charlton's Lloyd Sam and the Hull captain Ian Ashbee, had both been given red cards in the 44th minute.

My only reaction to this at the time was to think that the side numbers would thus be even and to start imagining a new rule which said that in the interests of paying spectators, once teams are both reduced to 10 men, then they can each add a sub to make it 11-11 again.

And then came deja vu; the final ten minutes of the game arrived, and Charlton were 1-0 up, as they had been at Coventry, and once again it was nail-biting time, but this time there was relief as in the 89th, a second goal was added to the total by Chris Iwelumo, so it was just a question of sitting back and waiting for FT to appear next to the scoreline and replace the figure 90 which was already in evidence. But in fact this did not happen for a further 11 minutes, by which time Hull had pulled back to 1-2.

The brawl aspects of all this remained unknown to me till later in the week, when I got round to reading the reports. The Kent Messenger is as succinct as anyone. And suddenly everyone was talking about the brawl, involving the two players who were sent off, and Pards apparently came on to the pitch, saying afterwards that this was to stop Jonathan Fortune and Dean Windass from squaring up to each other, and then the FA said they were going to investigate the whole thing, which they did, and now Lloyd Sam has started a 3-match suspension and Pards does not know why.

I must say, not having been there, that my instincts are to side with our own players and blame the Hull players, and Lloyd Sam (pictured above) looks as though butter wouldn't melt and so on, and just when he was enjoying his first decent run in the team, too.

But what struck me most, when I had time to think about things after the dust settled a bit on Friday night, was the use of the word 'brawl', which I don't think I'd seen in football match reports for a long time; it was quite nostalgic, really, seeing it again, like reading reports in the 'sixties.

In fact I always thought that after the famous Evening Standard (was it?) headline in the late seventies which ran: QUEEN IN BRAWL AT PALACE, referring not to HM and Buck House, but to Gerry Queen and Selhurst Park, the word had gently slipped into disuse. Well well.

I'll try and deal with other matters outstanding some time on Tuesday, by which time there will have been another quiz. Talk about an incident-packed existence!