Couple of 'away' matches when I was on Cachalot.....
A visit to Workington (titter ye not, young matelots, it's a good run!). Somebody managed to arrange a football match against the local club. Now Workington FC (the football team) has alrady gone out of business at that time, so whoever our Visit Liaison Officer was (a twit), had arranged what he thought would be the nearest thing - a game against Workington RLFC - the 13-a-side Rugby League club! Anyway, we rustled up 11 fairly sober players and turned up for a game of footy - though the opposition weren't having any of that and played us by
their rules! We lasted until all of us had been flattened and jumped on by 13 great big hairy Cumbrian brutes - perhaps about 15 minutes - and then unwisely tried to play by their rules. Several concussions, a few missing teeth, and some severely twisted scrota later we had to give up entirely and retire to the bar, where I'm afraid they even beat us at that. :lol:
Another one in Tangier - why on earth would the local "American School" want to play football against us? They were all about 16, ran around like gazelles and got us dizzy. We did our best to slow them down a bit - if you saw either version of the "Mean Machine" you know what I mean. Narrowly avoiding a diplomatic 'incident', we disappeared back into the hotels/bars we'd been flushed out of and continued our run ashore. :?
Another one - a visit to Barry Island. Match against RAF St Athan. Think we lost about 12 - 0, but had our own sods' opera afterwards and embarrassed the crabfats so much they left their lady crabfats in the bar for us to impress and so we did!
Oh my word - all this talk of Navy footy reminds me of the floodlit matches played in HMS Terror, Singapore..... Brilliant!!! I remember Albion v Hermes, (1968?) while two huge ships companies took over the Armada club - must have been about 3000 there! (the man with the peanuts ran out of stock a bit early) :wink: