A game best forgotten (and easily done so) saw a makeshift Logica side grind out a tedious 0-0 draw with fellow strugglers Cultural. A hard, bumpy pitch; a light bouncy ball; and a strong, swirling wind did not aid the level of skill on display.

Logica will be well satisfied with a point however. They were missing the injured Wildsmith, the legendary Sidaway, as well as Toman, Lambert and Masting for various reasons. On top of this, Captain Clarke, that inspirational leader of men, was also absent, hot-footing it down to the West Country for a Room-101 style weekend in which football was not to be mentioned once (part of the therapy?). Further handicaps arrived in the form a one-eyed midfielder (Johnson playing with his only remaining contact lens), Abbott (‘retarded’ again) and two old blokes complaining of bad backs (Spence and Woolhouse).

It is perhaps no surprise with such a rag-tag line-up that Logica did not create a single chance of note during the entire ninety minutes. Evans, continuing his good form from the previous week’s debut, had a half-chance that he snapped wide, and Abbott, sent clear by Johnson, sadly didn’t have the stamina to make it all the way to the goal (a massive thirty yards away). And that was it.

Cultural did not produce much more, only provoking stand-in keeper Spence into saves on a couple of occasions. The Logica central defence had a superb collective game. Cultured libero Dick was back orchestrating a finely tuned offside trap that must have caught Cultural out at least thirty times in the second half. Millar and Hatton played like mammoths. That is to say, they had mammoth games.

The only other points of interest concerned the days officials. The referee was outstanding, enjoyed himself immensely, and won the respect of most of the players. As Logica only had eleven, it was two Cultural ‘officials’ who ran the line. And they were appalling.. One lineman failed to give any offside decisions at all against his own team, whilst the other pretended the ball had gone out of play every time Logica got into a threatening position. Abbott was lucky to stay on the field when, unable to maintain his calm any longer, he rushed fully thirty yards to inform the linesman that he was perhaps not being as fair as maybe he could be. But the referee opted for a quiet word instead.

Fortunately help was at hand in the form of Lambert, who had turned up to watch the second half. Immediately sensing the bias excerpted by the linesmen, he took it upon himself to act as a second opinion in all controversial decisions. In this way he proved a more than able stand-in for the absent Mrs Spence (apparently kicked out of the car by her husband half way down the A3 and told to walk home?!?). Every time Cultural played the ball forward, Lambert started bawling out the referee: "Oi ref, he’s offside, miles offside!", before directing his wrath at the linesman on the other side of the pitch: "Oi, get your flag up, you cheating bastard." Whilst Lambert received two stern lectures from the man in black, he did have the effect of evening up the outcome of the decisions given, as well as immensely livening up an extremely tedious game of football.