The Magnificent Sevens

Somewhere, deep within the heart of London, there is a hockey team that is made up of the players rejected by the other teams in the club. This team, the sevens - as opposed to the other six ladies teams - sits somewhere in the bottom half of the league table, and are destined to remain there. This team is not what you'd call skillful. There are plenty of players who hadn't played until the start of this season. Others hadn't played for years. A few are juniors, considered too young by the other teams. Then there are the ones who are neither fit enough or skilled enough to make the grade for the higher teams. There's one who enters the beauty pagents around her home area, and missed a match one week to compete in the Miss Mid Cheshire contest. Others are students with free time to spare - and energy to burn. Then there are the professionals, women in their mid- to late twenties who join the club for the social side of it. One is a teacher, another working towards becoming one. They come from all over, not just England, but the world. Apart from my little branch of the antipodes, there's a Kiwi, an American and a German-born Belgian. There isn't one who is actually born and bred in London. But for all the differences and the fact that, until a couple of months ago most of us didn't know each other, probably wouldn't have wanted to, somehow, out of the trainwreck of our playing ability, a team spirit has been created.

On the field, we are generally a disaster zone. We've won 3 matches this season, much to the surprise of many people who witnessed the early attempts of the team, in the days when they were struggling to pull together enough players for a team and managed to set a new club record for the greatest losing margin. Given the long history of the club, it would surprise a few to know that never before had there been a 20-0 loss. There has been a marked improvement in the playing ability of the team, but the tendancy to collapse in the face of a slight challenge from the opponent means we tend to lose matches by fair margins. Like last Saturday, where the final score was 5-1.

For all that now, we've become a tight unit, defensive and agreeably turn up at the clubhouse week after week to commiserate over our latest loss or, on the rare occasion, to celebrate with the other victorious teams the club is more famous for. And at last we've discovered what it is that the team is good at. We can't dribble the ball, most of us can't hit further than we could run in about 2 seconds, a couple have glory written all over them, but haven't discovered how to pass to a team mate. We can't tackle, we barely manage to score. We scrap, we struggle, we follow the ball like 10 year olds, crowding each other and on the odd occasion even tackling each other. But we become a tight fighting machine in the pub that doubles as a clubhouse. We can outlast, out party, and out talk any other team. We can get to the bar with more ease than any other, and we're generally among the last ones there. We're very proud of the fact that, when we lost 15-0 to the team above us at the club - the sixes - who are also in our league, we managed not to deck any of the nasty pieces of work who celebrated each goal with such harshness during the match. Instead, we merely stole the dice that provide the entertainment at the after-match gatherings, and proceeded to sit around with 2 of the guys teams who were also there. We kept it nice, being more honourable in defeat than some of them had been in victory. And here's why.

Sure, we all have a bit of a competitive streak in us. We like to win as much as the next person. But we're about more than that as a team. We're there for the fun. A game is no longer fun when it turns nasty. When our opponents on the weekend turned nasty and tried to take down our 15 year old juniors, we rose above it. We might have been outclassed in the stick work, but we were determined to enjoy ourselves in spite of them. It might have been nasty to laugh when one of their players got a bloodied nose in a collision - OK, it was - but the accusations being flung at our captain that she's done it deliberately, and had elbowed the girl (who'd already pushed over the two smallest and youngest players in our team) were laughable. Captain courageous was nursing a bruised bum from her part in the collision, and still has no idea how the other girl's nose ended up hitting her with that much force. After all, she was clearly not looking to see who was running up behind her when she had the ball and was headed up the wing. So laugh we did, and then promptly named the bum in question as man-of-the-match afterwards. We could see the funny side, even if our overly aggressive opposition couldn't. We giggled all night about it, to tell the truth, and we weren't the only ones. And, with six of us still in the clubhouse and gearing up for Karaoke after 11 that night, in the long run, we were the winners. Arms around each other, collapsing in giggling heaps, we all looked after each other, we planned excursions outside of the hockey world, and we supported and encouraged each other. So, regardless of the result on the pitch, the sevens are, unarguably, magnificent.