Sunday 27th September and Bilbao were looking to push on after an impressive opening day win over Donnington Park. Today’s opposition were Esher Park a team that came with the reputation of being one of the leagues better sides, who play football but like to bully and intimidate the opposing team in submission

Played on a rock hard & lumpy pitch Bilbao went 1-0 down early on only to strike back with a moment of brilliance from Paul Fagan, cutting in off his left wing sidestepping his man and launching a superb shot into the very top of the left-hand corner...apparently Paul doesn’t score tap-in’s.

From here the game took a turn for the worse the Esher tackles were starting to border on assault, after both Neil and Eddy had been elbowed in the face. Benny H made a scandalous tackle & hacked their striker down he raised his hands and had to go… this sparked all out war they might as well have left the ball on the sideline and run around kicking us… Neil then had his his legs completely cleared out from Behind which caused another skirmish.

At half-time Keith made the only sensible decision & after consulting with one of the leagues board members he called the game off. They had no ref and hadn’t notified us beforehand the replacement tried his best but just couldn’t cope. I’m sure this will now have to go before a league tribunal, hopefully a sensible result will be the outcome and we can replay the game in a sensible manner with a qualified ref then neither side will lose out. The real victim in this was Paul who’d had an absolute screamer of a goal disallowed !!!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following week Bilbao played our arch rivals Walton Town and a physical game turned sour in the second half and climaxed into a 25 man brawl, as Walton lost thier heads after Bilbao's late winner. They had four players sent off in the skirmish, while the Bilbao hard man Calver also walked. In the referees report, it has since been documented that Walton were the main agressors and guilty for the brawl.

During all this you must be wondering how Steve had fared and i'm pleased to say apart from the odd bit of vebal in the Walton game, he was pretty well behaved and remained unbooked… see miracles can happen.