The Sports Buff ⚽️ ⚾️ 🏈

Hello, and good afternoon, sports fans it’s me The Sports Buff. Hope you’re well and looking after yourselves. Ladies and gents, I want to talk about an issue that’s relevant in the world of sports, today’s issue is the topic of five-a-side football.

Ahh, five-a-side, the format where everyone is a striker and everyone is a defender. 4-3-2-1, 4-4-2? No, no the athletic ones go up front and the unfit ones (err herm, me) tend to stay back in defence.

Football in the modern form, relies on the high press, over lapping full backs-etc. But five a side, you run forward and pray to God someone is defending! Running up the field, no problem! Tracking back? Sorry, can you speak English? No idea what you’re talking about! Even Ronaldinho doesn’t do that.

I could only track back in three working days. I don’t do an Amazon Prime service sorry. N’Golo Kante I am not. I can defend and tackle and convert some tap-ins.

Yours truly would be good at staying forward and getting through balls from the younger, the fitter ones who would run around the pitch. Thankfully, I would bury some of the chances that were given to me.

I won’t get too excited, it’s five-a-side, with the greatest respect it’s not Jan Oblak I am facing as a goal-keeper . Most of the time, the guy in goal doesn’t even want to be there and woops, he ‘slipped’.

Simply put, amazingly in three shots, the keeper has conceded two goals, the two goals that means he has been liberated from the goal-keeper dungeon. But in their defence (some of the goal-keepers) don’t have gloves, just like the 60’s and 70’s.

Maybe our generation are soft. Some Sunday League football rules is what is needed. Some of the tackles in that format, is the quality of tackling of Joey Barton or Lee Catermole, but the referee? He looks like he has clearly left his cards at home.

Back to five-a-side though, to organise the thing … mini nightmare! I feel sorry for the person who is in charge of booking the pitch and getting the money for the session. Book keeping skills is needed, has he paid, or hasn’t he ?

Then you have the issue of having 12 people ready to play when it’s only 10 that can play (five-a-side). The next week, true to form, you can only get seven players who are free to play, there’s never a middle ground!

Finally, one of the best things about five-a-side is the great goals you score! Yes, the sessions maybe an hour, more than an hour if you can get some minutes before the staff turn the pitch lights off.

In that hour, you live the dream, the net bulge and seeing the goal-keeper despairingly trying to save one of the shots. To keep it fair for goalies, the feeling of seeing the penalty saved, a one-step penalty – which I think is a brilliant rule.

So there you have it, those are the pros and cons of five-a-side. Is there is any, I might have missed?

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