Spending a week on the Orkney mainland gave us the opportunity to see a few more of the sights. We had a wander around Stromness, a town where I’d played Bobby George at darts thirty-one years previously. He won. The Cuween burial chamber involved a walk up a hill that gave some good views across the island, but the chamber itself didn’t take up too much of our time as it had a gate across the entrance.
The Ring of Brodgar was worth a visit, particularly as it had a path around the stone circle that then detoured away alongside the nearby loch. It is a popular attraction and any photos that we took without people in them were carefully framed and timed to avoid the coachloads of visitors from the cruise ships.
There were some football games kicking off at seven o’clock on the Thursday evening. That gave us sufficient time after I finished work for the day to head out to Yesnaby Castle. It is a two-legged sea stack that you get to by walking along the top of the cliffs.
It was windy enough for a waterfall to blow upwards. We thought that we had spotted some nesting puffins, but closer examination of the photos revealed that they had skinny pointed beaks, so they were probably some sort of gull.
The fixture I’d selected was at the Dounby Community Pitch. It is next to the school and just along from a community centre. Dounby seems like a proper village, more so than the likes of Harray or Twatt (yes, really) with the Smithfield Hotel providing a focal point at the crossroads.
The game was in the Reserve League, with Dounby in second place and Thorfinn sixth of the seven teams in the League. The teams play each other twice and we are closing in on the end of the twelve-game season. Dounby needed to win if they were to keep the pressure on Hotspurs at the top of the table.
The blustery conditions made life difficult for the teams and neither side really got to grips with the wind in the first half. I watched most of it from my car, pitchside, as did the other six or seven people in attendance. The ref limited the half-time break to five minutes, which I think is sufficient. FIFA take note.
Dounby had chances to clinch the points in the second half, hitting the same post three times in the space of eight minutes. Sometimes, though, it isn’t your day and Thorfinn scored twice in the last quarter of an hour for an unlikely victory.
As Dounby only had one remaining fixture, the result meant that Hotspurs would be crowned champions.
Tags: Bobby George, Dounby, FIFA Half-time
Trail of the Lion King 
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