It was an exhilarating evening of football action on Wednesday.

The games began with adversity, and injury. Our Argentinian maestro, Richard, unfortunately suffered a knee injury after just 7 minutes. After the first aider reluctantly tore himself away from his tea break, ice was applied and a wheelchair arranged. Fortunately, the ball was fine and we could just carry on without him. A goal was even scored by Citadel!

Roopio arrived in the nick of time for the second match, bringing his customary finesse and elegant touch to proceedings. Although, Chalky (otherwise known as ‘Dan White’) also demonstrated his incredible talents, with a sublime goalkeeping save from a point-blank penalty kick!

We definitely could have won the third game against Weightmans LLP. Sadly, Jamie decided to leave us for his tennis match, leaving us with just 4 players. Although the Scotts did make up for it with a lovely appearance from Mrs Scott and even baby Scott! The game was lost but another goal was scored! This time it came from an exquisite ‘top bins’ strike by our electric number 7, Curtis Myrie. By now we had doubled last year’s tally of goals scored!

The final game saw Citadel take on the reigning champions, Access Group. Alura Batherdona made it in time to bring us back up to 5 players. Batherdona was in fine fettle and displayed typical Citadel tenacity, skill and enthusiasm. We lost the game, but put up a very decent fight given we were absolutely knackered by this point.

All in all, a good evening was had. There will be sore muscles for many days, but there was great camaraderie and laughter throughout. Members raised around £400 for the Child Brain Injury Trust (CBIT) and the Midlands Air Ambulance Charity (MAAC). In total, across all 12 teams, around £3,500 was raised.