I'm pleased to announce we finally have a theme for Charity Football 3, which will hopefully be the most fun to watch and play in so far. This year, it's going to be inflatable Ballerinas versus inflatable Sumos! I'm a little nervous about this one as I'm a bit concerned the whole experience might kill us, but I was encouraged to read somewhere that someone managed to run the Great North Run wearing an inflatable Sumo suit, so if that's possible, I'm sure staggering round a football pitch for 90 minutes wearing one will be a doddle. Dave and I tested the suits out yesterday and managed to run around fine. Seeing the ball down by your feet could be a problem, but I'm sure that will just add to the fun.

The pitch for the game is now all booked up, with kick-off scheduled for 2pm on Sunday 14th October at Woodford Park in Woodley, the same venue we used last year. I've also managed to set up a fund raising page, which can be found here. This year, I've set us a rather ambitious target of £5,000, which sounds a lot, but we managed £3k last year, so who knows. The most important thing is just to raise as much as possible.

Dave came up with the great suggestion of going up to Woodley Precinct the Saturday before the game in our full outfits to try and raise some extra cash, which sounds brilliant. I'm sure we'll attract quite a bit of attention and if we have some official collection buckets etc, hopefully that will give people confidence that they are actually donating their money to a good cause, rather than the beer fund of some nutters dressed in inflatable outfits. I'll try and speak directly to Cancer Research UK this week to find out the best way to approach this. It could also be a way of attracting people down to actually watch the game on Sunday. It would be good if we could get more random people watching as well as family and friends.

It feels good to be organising this again, particularly this year, with Dad having stomach cancer. As supportive as I'm trying to be, I also feel a sense of helplessness at not being able to do anything to help him get better. That lies in the hands and brilliance of all of the medical staff at the Royal Berks, who have all treated Dad really well; he has nothing but praise for them. He and Mum are dealing with this all so bravely and sometimes when Becky and I are round there, it's hard to think that Dad has cancer, as we're all laughing and joking as normal. They're a real inspiration.

Dad's situation has really brought into focus how important it is to raise money for good causes and by putting on this event again, it feels like I'm doing something positive to help him get better. I'm really excited about this game. I can't wait to see what everyone looks like out on the pitch and I'm especially looking forward to the first corner of the game, watching 22 inflatable bodies jostling for position in the box. It should be a lot of fun.

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Regular readers of this website (if there are any) will no doubt have been left dismayed at the lack of updates on our progress over the past couple of months, for it was all the way back on the 27th June that I posted my last entry. Well, dear reader, put away your tear stained handkerchief, pull up a comfy chair, hold aloft your empty glass and I shall happily quench your thirst for knowledge on what is happening with our third annual charity football match. There's quite a bit to tell.

Firstly, I should probably explain why I haven't posted anything to this website for so long. I wish it was just down to pure laziness, but unfortunately this is not the case. On 3rd July 2007, my Dad was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Hearing the news from my parents was one of the most difficult and bewildering experiences I've ever had. My Dad is an incredibly fit, strong and healthy man (as demonstrated by his cat like performance in goal for the Smurfs in our first charity match in 2005!) and the idea he could have an illness, let alone one that could take his life,  just left me stunned. I guess it's just one of those things you always think happens to other families, rather than your own, but here we were having to deal with it ourselves.

The hardest thing to contend with at this stage was our lack of knowledge of how bad the situation actually was. Though Dad's cancer had been diagnosed, after doctors had examined the results of his CT scan, they couldn't yet tell us how advanced the cancer was and, therefore, what his prospects for survival would be. They still needed the results of a PET scan, Laparoscopy and then finally an Endescopic Ultrasound before they'd be in a position to let us know what, if anything, they'd be able to do for Dad. I'm not even going to begin to try and explain what these tests are, as I'd do a terrible job, so you're probably best to Google them! Provided Dad's cancer had not spread beyond his stomach, we would still be in with a fighting chance, but if it had spread, the outlook would not be very good at all.

Waiting for the results of these tests was just awful and I can't remember a worse time of my life. Time just seemed to stand still and it was almost like our lives were completely on hold until we knew what was happening. Becky and I talked about the situation so much that it got to the stage where there was nothing really left to say. As a result, we just ended up sitting together, enveloped by a strange silence as we didn't feel like we could talk about anything else because, well, what would be the point? Nothing else mattered except what was going to happen to Dad.

Finally, after the longest few days I've ever experienced, we received the best news we could have possibly imagined. Dad's cancer was completely contained within his stomach and hadn't even spread to any lymph nodes. I had no idea what lymph nodes were and still don't now, but what I do know is that it's good Dad's cancer hasn't spread to them, which is all I really need to know. The reaction I had on hearing this news was very similar to how I expect a person would react if someone told them they'd won the lottery. I was delirious. Having spent the previous few days fearing my Dad could be dead in six months, all of a sudden we'd been told he still had a chance. The sense of relief was unbelievable.

At the end of the day, Becky and I rushed home from work, picked up a bottle of champagne and went over to Mum and Dad's to celebrate. It might seem a bit bizarre to be celebrating the fact my Dad had cancer, but that's how we all felt. Although I'd never want to go through those few days of waiting for the results again, in a strange way, I think it was good for us. As a family, we'd been as low as it's possible to get, but when we got the news that Dad's cancer was operable, we were euphoric. Looking back, if we'd been told Dad's cancer was operable the same day it was diagnosed, I'm not sure we would have appreciated that it was operable quite so much, as we inevitably would have focused on the fact that Dad had cancer.  However, because we'd been staring death in the face, the knowledge that Dad's cancer was operable was just incredible.

It was only after we'd received this good news that Becky told me quite how good the news was. After Dad's initial diagnosis, she'd been onto the Cancer Research UK website and read something that she successfully managed to keep from me until this point. In 80% of cases, when stomach cancer is first diagnosed, it's already too late as the cancer is too advanced to be treatable. Every time I think about that statistic, I can't believe how lucky we are. As a family, we're going through something we'd much rather wasn't happening, but at the same time, we're so grateful to be in this lucky 20%. For 80% of families, nothing can be done, which is just awful.

If we fast forward a few months now to the present day, Dad's currently going through the second of his three cycles of chemotherapy, designed to shrink his tumour as much as possible ahead of his operation. At the end of his chemotherapy, he'll have a month off to recover and build up his strength again before having an operation to remove his stomach in its entirety. Apparently, you can lead an almost normal life without a stomach, which is something I didn't know, but am very thankful for, until a couple of months ago. The wonders of modern science. We've still got a long way to go, but we're hopeful Dad will be able to make a full recovery and eventually get back to leading a full and active life. He'll need to make adjustments, but at least he has the opportunity to make adjustments. Other families aren't so lucky and my heart goes out to them.

So, now you know why this website has been dormant for the past few months, as I've had rather a lot on my plate! However, I'm now more determined than ever to make this year's charity football match the most successful yet. It was always nice to know we were doing something good, but the experience of the past few months has really reinforced to me just how important raising money for good causes is. If the money we raise can make a difference to just one family, then it will have been worthwhile.

Unsurprisingly, this year's game will again be held in support of Cancer Research UK. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my friend Phil for being cool with this, as I'd previously suggested we could play this game in support of a charity that's really important to him. But that's the kind of guy he is - a very good friend.

As to the date and theme of this year's match, well I think I've rambled on for long enough now, so I'll make that the topic of my next update. Stay tuned though, as it will all get announced next week.

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...well, on second thoughts, perhaps not my kingdom, but certainly my heartfelt thanks and appreciation. And probably a pint.

Unbelievably, nearly a year has passed since 20 intrepid souls donned spandex tights, flowing capes, straight jackets, floppy ears and assorted masks, hats and wigs to help raise money for Cancer Research UK (and that was just the people who came to watch). As a result, the time has now come to venture out onto the football pitch once more to raise funds for another worthy cause (more on that later).

However, before we can go any further, we need a theme for our next game, something as ridiculous as Smurfs, Garden Gnomes, Super Heroes and Super Villains, only more so, to make this third game the biggest and best so far. 

At the moment, a few suggestions have come forward which may well fit the bill, but at this stage I'd like to throw down the gauntlet to the world of the interweb for someone to come up with a theme for our next game. We're looking for as many ideas as possible, the more outrageous the better, which we can then throw into the melting pot*.

When Dave and I first came up with the idea for our first game, we tried to think about what would be the most ridiculous spectacle for people to watch. Grown men dressed as Smurfs and Garden Gnomes was pretty much spot on in this regard and we're looking for something similar now. Something that will make the onlooking crowds say, "Am I really watching 22 men run around a football pitch dressed as...(enter your great idea here)...or have I been taking too many mind expanding drugs?!"

Over the next few weeks, I'll write about the best ideas we've received and then we can have a public vote on which is the best one, with the winner becoming the chosen theme for our third game. Blimey, this is beginning to sound a bit like Pop Idol, only with slightly less squeaky clean looking teenagers and a few more men with paunches. Maybe we can get Simon Cowell involved somehow? Anyone got his number?

*Please be assured I'm talking about a metaphorical, rather than literal, melting pot here. I wouldn't want you to think your great idea would simply get melted down, after you'd gone to all that trouble of thinking of it in the first place.  

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Looking back on our two games now, the thing that strikes me most is how much bigger an event the Super Heroes vs Super Villains match was compared to the Smurfs versus Garden Gnomes game. In this second match, we had more players, more supporters (including a few strangers who hadn't been press-ganged into watching by someone who was playing and instead, had attended of their own free will and everything) and raised considerably more money than our first time out.

We even managed to achieve more column inches in the Reading Evening Post this time, which I'm hoping was because our game was an interesting story, rather than because it was a slow news day. However, given that this is the paper that once ran a half page news story on how my cat had gone missing, after my Nan had phoned up the paper to put a notice in the lost pets section, I can't be sure about this.

To a certain extent, I guess the improvements from last time were inevitable, as we now had some momentum behind us. When Dave and I organised the first game, we hadn't done anything like this before and were asking people to do something pretty stupid with no real idea of whether it would work out or end in humiliation. If people were questioning what the hell they were doing in playing in the first game, it must have been pretty hard for them to convince their friends and relatives to sponsor them and for said friends and relatives to be willing to part with their hard earned readies.

However, despite this, we accomplished precisely what we set out to do when we arranged the first game, which was to play a football match in ridiculous outfits and raise money for charity. Okay, we didn't raise a huge amount, but we had certainly laid the foundations for future success this time. This wasn't just some stupid, one-off piece of whimsy. By playing a second game, we'd turned our drunken idea into an annual event, which I think gave us a certain amount of credibility (provided your definition of credibility is that people no longer think you're a complete idiot, but only a partial one instead, which is an improvement...I think).

Setting up a fundraising page on Justgiving.com certainly helped in this regard and if you're reading this thinking of organising your own charity event, I can't recommend the service they provide enough. Basically, it enables you to accept donations online, which can then be paid directly to your charity of choice, and have Gift Aid added automatically to donations made by UK tax payers. So, not only does this save you from having to chase people around for months on end with crumpled up sponsorship forms, it also gives the people making donations the piece of mind that their money really is going to charity and not to your beer fund, which is good all round really.

Having said all that, Batman and Robin, together with Batman's wife, managed to raise about £400 between them using crumpled up sponsorship forms, which was an absolutely amazing effort and says a lot for their ability to hound people to pay up after the event.

So, in all, with Gift Aid thrown in, we'd raised about £3,500 for Cancer Research UK, which was a huge compliment to everyone who played and the efforts they made in raising sponsorship. Raising such a big sum really was beyond my wildest dreams and made all the effort everyone had put in seem worthwhile. Our fundraising efforts were certainly helped by Harris Interactive, my employers at the time, who agreed to double whatever we raised, as there were 4 or 5 of us from work playing in the game. Whether my departure means we won't be able to get this corporate sponsorship next time, I don't know, but I'm sure Harris will still be well represented amongst the two teams when we play our next game this coming September, so hopefully my former colleagues will be able to arrange something.

A couple of months after our game, I had a very nice surprise when I received a letter from Jacqui Harrington, the Community Fundraiser for Berkshire of Cancer Research UK, thanking us for our efforts, which you can read here. I hadn't really expected any kind of formal acknowledgement from Cancer Research, as I'm sure there must be loads of people raising money for them, so it was a very pleasant surprise to see they'd heard about our game and appreciated what we'd been doing. Having read her letter, I only wish I'd got in touch with her beforehand as it sounds like she could have supported us in all manner of ways, through which we might have been able to raise even more money. Oh well, hindsight is a wonderful thing; we'll just have to bear this in mind for next time.

So as we move on from our second game and start looking for a theme for the next one, the thing that really stands out for me now is that, if you say you're doing something for charity, you pretty much have a free reign to do the most bonkers thing you can possibly think of without anyone questioning your sanity, which is great. If I'm being completely honest, the initial idea of holding these games for charity was mainly to justify the lunacy of playing football dressed as Smurfs, Garden Gnomes, Super Heroes and Super Villains, otherwise we couldn't get away with it.

Seriously, what would you think if a grown man told you they'd played football dressed as Superman for no other reason than because they wanted to? The strange thing is though, even if we weren't playing these games for charity, I think most of us would still want to play anyway, just because it's been such a bizarre and fun experience (that's right isn't it guys?!....guys....err...where's everyone gone?!!).

It's a fantastic feeling to know we've had this much fun at the same time as raising money for good causes though. I just hope we can keep going and raise even more money this year. It's going to take quite a wacky idea to out-wack what we've done so far though, so if you have any ideas, please contact us.

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And so, back to our game...

Shortly after the Heroes had taken the lead, the Villains equalised in slightly controversial fashion when a shot which the Heroes’ keeper probably had covered hit my arm and deflected past him into the net. This might sound like I was cheating, but the ball did genuinely hit my arm, rather than the other way round, so it wasn't at all intentional. Plus, I felt there was a certain amount of justice in this goal being allowed to stand seeing that, just a few moments before, the ref had outrageously disallowed my 20-yard screamer for an alleged foul on Hong Kong Phooey, which was a complete load of, well, phooey, if you ask me.

In real life, HKP is a policeman, a man who spends his days wrestling bad guys to the ground. I'm a market researcher and spend my days sat on my backside wrestling with numbers. In a physical encounter, which of the two of us would you expect to come off worse? The man with the nightstick, or the man with the clipboard? And yet, would you believe, I supposedly barged this hulking policeman off the ball. What a load of cobblers!

In any case, the goal scored with my arm was allowed to stand and, by half time, the Heroes found themselves 5-1 down. Unsurprisingly, they seemed quite deflated by this, which was not what we wanted at all. This was supposed to be fun! So, in order to even things up a bit for the second half, Darth Vadar, one of our two best players, moved from the Dark to the Light side of the force and joined up with the Heroes, with Obi Wan Kenobi moving in the opposite direction in order to keep the force in balance.

For me, the second half was memorable for a few different things. Firstly, the whole ridiculousness of what we were doing was emphasised during a corner for the Heroes, where a shout of ‘Who’s marking Batman?’ could be heard from Cruella de Vil, marshalling the defence of the Villains. For some reason, this really tickled me and has remained at the forefront of my memories of this game ever since. I can’t imagine those words have ever been uttered on a football pitch before and probably never will be again, least of all by someone dressed as Cruella de Vil!

With Darth Vadar moving up front for the Heroes, an interesting contest now developed, as his brother Captain Hook (bet you never knew they were related!) was in goal for the Villains. Being an only child, I don’t quite understand the rivalry that exists between brothers, particularly where any kind of sporting prowess is concerned, but it was clearly demonstrable on the pitch this sunny afternoon.

3 or 4 times, Darth Vadar found himself in great scoring positions only to be thwarted by Captain Hook in goal, leaping like a salmon all over the place and pulling off one save in particular that was akin to Gordon Banks's save against Brazil in 1970. Okay, I may be exaggerating here slightly, but I’m just trying to convey the considerable resolve Captain Hook demonstrated in his attempts to prevent his younger brother from getting the better of him. And he nearly succeeded, but finally conceded a goal shortly before the end of the game. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone celebrate a goal quite so much.

A special mention should also be given to Freddy Kruger, possibly the best player on the pitch, who was responsible for two of the more notable moments of the second half. The first came immediately after the heroes had scored when, in a move reminiscent of Maradona scoring his second goal against England in the World Cup quarter-final in 1986, he danced his way through the entire Heroes defence before calmly slotting home.

I’m not normally one to blow my own trumpet, but I’d like to think I deserve a little praise here for my part in this goal, as it was my pass to Freddy from the kick-off that set him on his path to glory. If it wasn’t for my vision and the deftness of my one yard pass to him, it’s likely that Mr Kruger would have had a little too much work to do on his own, as I’m sure he’d be the first to agree. Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

As for the second incident, this was a little more controversial and involved leaving Batman in a crumpled heap on the floor following a crunching challenge that seemed to come from out of nowhere and resulted in a collective “oooooooooooooh” kind of noise from both crowd and players alike. Just to clarify, in case it's not clear, we're talking here about “oooooooooooooh” in the sense of conveying shock and alarm, rather than the reaction of a game show audience upon hearing about what prizes the winning contestant was likely to win, which is more of a "woooooooooooh" sound, with an all important 'w' at the start. Anyway...

In his post-match interview, Freddy was adamant he won the ball, but unfortunately, in the absence of action replays, I’m not sure that will ever be proven either way. However, there can be no doubt that the challenge was a little out of keeping with the spirit of the day and rather unnecessary given that the Villains were 9-2 up at this stage and cruising. Still, what do you expect from a man who kills people in their dreams?

Indeed, you could perhaps argue that Batman got off rather lightly and should be thankful he suffered no worse a fate than clattering into a child's tricycle before hitting the deck (which, incidentally, was a fantastic advert for the tricycle's robustness, for which the manufacturers should be commended).

Fortunately, Robin managed to diffuse the situation by rushing over and telling everyone to calm down before things boiled over. I knew there must have been a reason why he was wearing that scouse wig! The game was soon restarted, but not before Mr Kruger was issued with a yellow card. I wonder how well the ref slept that night?

With the score standing at 10-3 to the Villains, the referee finally brought proceedings to an end. Whilst the game had not been the end-to-end encounter we’d hoped for, it had been a lot of fun and, moreover, a great success. We’d raised more than £3,000 for charity, which was beyond my wildest expectations and a fantastic achievement for an afternoon of silliness. Everyone who participated, from the players themselves to the people who came along to support us or made donations, should be rightly proud of what we all achieved together. Without that team effort, this just wouldn't have worked. 

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