Derby Day

When I was a little kid, I was a bit football obsessed. I blame my dad - he loved United and made sure I did too. We used to do crazy things like go to Glasgow on a Wednesday night for a friendly. If there was a team playing in a red shirt we'd be there. Sometimes we'd do three games in a day - A Team at The Cliff then on to Littleton Road for the B Team before heading to Old Trafford for the main event. We'd watch the Youth Team and Reserves as well and used to clock up crazy amounts of games in a season.

So looking back on how I used to be, I'm not that football obsessed anymore. Still love it though and can still be found travelling to crazy places on cold winters nights to cheer on my team. Since I've been watching FC though, I haven't clocked up quite so many games. I've only really watched the first team. They've also got a youth team and a womens team so I thought it was time to go back to the old days with a challenge of watching all levels of FC United home and away at least once in a season.

The first team wasn't a problem. That's just one of those things that will happen without any effort. Watching FC is just what I do on a Saturday. Really I have no excuse for not getting to home Youth and Womens games as they both play about ten minutes walk away from my house, although I suppose I do need to do the housework at some point, I can't spend all my time watching football.

So today was my first FC Women's game. It was also Dexter dogs first ever football game. How cute does he look in his scarf?

Dexter ready to cheer on the girls!!

It was all a bit much for Dexter. The combination of footballs (his second favourite thing after sausages), other dogs to play with and lots of people who might think he was cute sent his giddyometer off the scale. We had to go right down to the far end of the pich and stand on our own and he was still a giddy mess. He only calmed down a bit when he finally got hold of a football.

Anyway, the match....We were playing City. And I don't care what level it's at, derby day is derby day and I always want to see the bitters get beat. And today I got what I wanted. We were 2-0 up at halftime after goals from Olivia Greenhalgh and Amy Vyas. There might have been a handball in there but ssssh I didn't see anything.

After hot vimto at half time (love the stuff!!!) there were another three goals in the second half. Unfortunately only one of them was for FC but hey, it's still a win - always nice but even nicer against City. They scored first, then Claire O'Reilly scored our third with City getting a goal with more or less the final kick of the game. 3-2 to FC :-)

I can't really tell you much about the game. Not because nothing happened, I'm just useless at remembering it after the match. The referee was pretty funny, he insisted on counting out the ten yards every time he gave a free kick even though we were always in the right place and at one point he actually told us to move forward!!!!

It was a great turn out for a Greater Manchester Women's Football League match. There were 290 there (wonder if that's just people or if they counted the dogs too - there were a lot of dogs!), thats more four of the games in the Evo-Stik Premier League yesterday and all but one of the games in the First Division! Pretty impressive. Oh and talking of impressive, did I mention we're top of the league? Check out that goal difference!!

So I enjoyed my first Women's game. Need to do an away one now and also fit in the Youth team. I'd forgotten the leagues are shorter though so not quite sure when I'm gonna fit them in. I'll work it out though.