Sitting at the old PC on a Sunday night, it can be easy to lose touch with reality. The job at hand is to write a report on yesterdays Turtle game - an easy enough task you may say. But did it really happen, and more to the point, did it really happen in the way those present thought it did?

On the desk directly in front of this week’s match report writer sits a framed photo of a smartly dressed couple holding hands on a lawn, and behind them a old stately Roman house glows in the warmth of the gentle winter sun. Did that wedding really take place? The photo tends to prove so, but as time goes by and the memory fades with the onset of Alzheimers, can any of us really be sure of what is real? Pictures, documents, first hand accounts from eye witnesses, none are proof in this day and age when fabrication is a way of life.

Some of the Turtles match reports of this now complete 2001 season have met with the occasional doubter. As a factual documenter of events, these weekly columns have had their integrity brought into question on a number of points, mostly to do with the peripheral events of Turtle life. Overseas readers have asked “Is Dodger really such a prick?”, “Does Spratty really drink that much?”, “Is Terry really a buck-toothed 4 foot 3 hunch-back?”. Well, dear reader, you can now head into that timeless void that is the off-season secure in the knowledge that what you read here is the absolute truth, and to prove it, we quote verbatim a statement from Her Majesty the Queen - “I hereby declare the contents of the Fabulous Turtles FC Website to be the whole truth and nothing but, so there. God save me”.

More hurtful than those questioners though, has been the constant inference from certain followers that sometimes the writers of these reports do so with the assistance of illegal chemicals. If Lemsip contains hallucinogens then it should be marketed to a different demographic, but it is perhaps ironic that the primary source of these allegations seems to be a respectable middle-aged gent whose own youth coincided nicely with the late sixties, and his habits were decidedly “experimental”. Allegedly. According to a source.

So with that all cleared up, it is with some smugness that those in the know can reveal that what “appeared” to have been a complete thrashing of the Turtles (statistically speaking our worst ever loss), was not in fact that at all, but a moral victory.

Lets start with some background. The season finished last week, when the Turtles clinched Third in the league by beating Varsity (for Third read “moral First” - the other Karori team, who won, should never have been in the grade in the first place, and Naenae, who finished second, won it last year so should have gone up). In a totally relaxed mood, Tel then invited everyone back to play one last game, a light jog against old friends. This meant including Ross, Livi and Murray, who hadn’t played for a month or more, and several others who were carrying injuries. The pre-match email propaganda took the form of Brodie-baiting, winding up the excitable sleaze-bag with talk of record stats, and comparisons of his lot to the great Turtle teams of the mid- to late-Eighties. The result was a full strength Karori team for the first time in months, and you could tell they were fired up when half an hour before the game they were all changed and banging their heads against the changing room walls.

Prior to kickoff, more smirking from the Turts. Tel won the toss, and chose to play into the howling gale. The oppo still didn’t seem to see the funny side, so every single Turt was played out of position. Snout, our beanpole target man, was in goal; our normal keeper, Paily, was up front; Weas, big tough centre half, was wide on the left; etc, etc - it was like the end of school.

Right from the start it was just hilarious. The oppo tore into it, running around like it was a cup final, whilst we strolled around cracking jokes and falling over in the mud to give the crowd some fun. Wal tripped Brodie for a giggle, but it just made him more angry. As a result he scored a couple of lovely goals, as did Weiner, another Turtle reject. Occasionally Tel, Si or Brodie made a tackle or clearing header, just to make sure the score didn’t get silly, but the rest just wandered around in a happy daze. At 3-0 we decided we should get at least one, so Weasel threaded it up to Stu for a clinical finish under another reject, Tony. One was plenty though, and Matt made this clear later on by running around their 19 stone centre back, then stopping to let him catch up and tackle.

5-1 at half-time was fine by us. Tel wandered off to show the girls his latest piercing, and the rest of us chatted amiably about the weather and quality of the drink (good old SNO). For some reason the oppo were still in a hurry at the start of the second half, so we countered this by putting on Spratty, surely the punchline. Still not a flicker of recognition from them, so Spratty was forced to pull a few gags. At the first chance, he got the ball, ran forward to the biggest patch of mud on the field, tripped himself up and fell in face first. Still nothing - tough audience. With grim faced determination the oppo kept coming, and got three more goals pretty promptly. At that stage our best players feigned injury and wandered off, but still no penny dropped. For the last twenty minutes we shut the game down, subtly giving them the odd chance but always doing just enough to stop any more goals, thus preserving our record.

At the end the oppo were still pumped, and could be heard singing away and congratulating each other vigorously in the showers. The Turts changed quietly, smiling and nodding to each other, acknowledging the successful execution of an elaborate joke. The game had been a subtle suspension of reality - those who watched or took part thought it was real. Was it?

So another Turtle season ends. Will there be another one? If a man speaks in a forest with no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?

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don@soccer.net.nz