Old Loughtonians 7s travelled to Southend and came home with a 3-1 win, our first away victory of the season, a climb to sixth in the table and, by popular agreement, the best teas in Essex (apart from Lou's, of course).

I should also confess that I wore a lapel microphone in goal from the warm-up to the final whistle, recording everything, in the hope of capturing how the game unfolded. It worked out really well, so expect more of this every week!

We tried something new: a 3-5-2, which went against our usual 4-4-2, but, hey, live life on the edge and all that (although against the bottom of the table, we thought it was safe to give it a go). Manu sat in the middle of the back three, wandered up to the halfway line, completely bossed that zone and even swung in with a last minute tackle to dispossess their marauding top scorer. Southend did not get past him. Mike, Andy and Simon tidied up behind, and in front of them the midfield skipped everything that moved, but mostly their midfield did not.

The pre-match formalities began with Jamil, our team psychologist, being overly nice to the umpires, a sneaky strategy to earn brownie points in a fawning attempt to reduce the number of stick tackles against him later on. Asked what he remembered of the afternoon, Jamil's main recollection was Mike squeezing into his yellow top. Mike went on to play as if it fitted perfectly.

It did not start brilliantly. I lost the toss, so we played the first half squinting into the low, glaring sun. It hardly mattered. Southend had no midfield to speak of (their star forward spent most of the half asking where it was), so their plan was to hit the ball as hard as they could down the middle and hope something good happened to them.

What followed was one-way traffic. We had the ball, then we had it again, and the youngsters turned Southend's missing midfield into a cones drill: Toby, Jeremy and Robert zipped around them with great little runs up front, Alex pinged passes into the D, and Rohan kept driving down the left. Rohan's early cross was stopped by Jamil, but the ball then rolled lazily over the line, as if it had somewhere better to be. Manu was running the show from the halfway line, Josh quickly picked up one of his aerials and took it out to the left corner, but the attack fizzled.

The shots came too, in a steady supply: Toby had one blocked, Alex missed the target, and both Jamil and Robert found the Southend keeper, who spent the half making himself very large and very annoying. Every visit to their D was a revolving door: in, out, in again, and still the ball would not go in. At the other end I was the best-protected spectator in Southend. Our defensive line barely moved from the halfway line all half, the one ball that did come near me was cleared by Simon before I could be inconvenienced, and I was reduced to remarking, to no one in particular, "Hmm, it's not normally this quiet.".

Sure enough, then, with five minutes to go before half time, a shot in our D, a rebound I did not clear strong and an oppo given far too much time without being challenged. It went through my legs from four yards, totally against the run of play. Very, very frustrating!

So, we were a goal down at the break, and the team talk was short: shoot, be selfish, follow every shot in. There was a question about whether we should change the formation, but in my mind, there was no hesitation: it was working, we just needed a bit more time, and belief. And it did work, quickly: three goals in under six minutes, and no more conceded.

Jeremy equalised about five minutes after the restart. Robert pushed it in from the right and Jeremy, with the keeper right in front of him, held him off, spun a full 360 and slid it home. (From the far end I first announced that Robert had scored.) Rehan made it 2-1 with an opportunistic tap-in from waist height at the right post after a deflected cross. A couple of minutes later came the third, the best of them: Alex ran the right wing and found Rehan in the corner, Rehan whipped it flat across the face of goal and Josh ran in from the left and put it away smoother than the lovely butter on the bread we had in the pub.

The thing I will take away from the day is our resolve. A goal down at half time, the lads went out fighting, and the kids led from the front all afternoon, getting the ball into the D, hammering it, crossing it in from both sides and running to the corners and the back line. Jeremy and Robert dribbled past more or less everyone, Rohan and Alex fed the wings, and Toby and his dad passed the ball pang-tastically! It was great to see the Pangs back, and Manu reports that Toby pretty much took charge of his dad all afternoon.

With about a quarter of an hour to go there was a particularly hairy moment when Southend won a short corner. That short bloomed into three: in the first, Rohan got it away but sent the ball off the backline, and in the next one I got a bit too physical with one of their forwards and he collapsed to the floor like Neymar. ("I didn't run through you," I told him, "I just nudged you.") Finally, they managed a very good shot on the third, but it was within range of my extended leg radius and I (deftly, if I say so myself) kicked it away. After three close calls with our hearts in our mouths, we were very relieved when the whistle blew not long after and we all gave our three cheers with very happy gusto!

**Honourable mentions.** Inde was solid in midfield and took our short corners: the first with power and purpose (straight into a Southend foot), the second with the patience of a man waiting for a bus. Andy, told in the warm-up to apply "light pressure" and in the match to "man mark", did both adeptly. Stephen intercepted, dribbled and set up a late chance, and fell over exactly once, which we only mention because Toby is in charge. Simon beat forwards to the ball by getting there first and marked their dangerous number 49 out of it. Alex wiggled around the top of the D, then was told to hurry up and asked if he was all right in the same breath. Jeremy was told to cause havoc and did, then scored. And Jamil won at least one short corner with a lovely weighted shot/pass/dribble into their foot.

Then a sumptuous tea at the Traveller's Joy: sausage, chips, onion rings, bread and butter, chicken nuggets, plates and plates of it. Someone pointed out that a few of us were missing and we would never finish the banquet in front of us.

We finished.