Man, this vermin problem is insane. Our clubhouse has always been kind of a dump, but we’ve never genuinely had anything this bad. Leaks, yeah. The snacks at the snack bar are terrible and the same every week, the hot food always tastes like someone’s been standing on it first, and…loads of other stuff. The smell, for one thing. But it’s always at least been OUR clubhouse. Now we get here for practice and find out that our soccer nets have been chewed through by rats, probably. Something has been snacking on them anyway. Maybe possums, but rats just seem more likely…I’ve never heard of possums sneaking in and eating something like this.
No matter what did the deed, we can’t play properly until we get new nets. For this practice we had to break out the old portable nets and put them on the horizontal sides of the pitch, because there’s another big problem with our club: the goal on the opposite end to the clubhouse just opens up to a sheer cliff face. Not a proper cliff, but a really steep hill that goes right down to a set of train tracks. Kick a ball through there without proper soccer nets and you’re not getting it back. We have to employ a team of people every game to stand there and stop it going over, and if it does, that’s it. New ball. We’ve got none of that during practice, so we had to improvise. At least we had our warm-up, where the coach sent us to find the place where the rats were coming from. So while THAT’S being sorted, and I guess someone else is sorting our soccer netting, we;ll have to be sorting out the rodent net-chewing problem by ourselves. The club only has so much funding, and I don’t think we can afford proper pest control. I think we’ll just have to keep doing warm-ups until we find all the rats?
We’ll just have to make do with the pitch being half the size as usual. Actually, that might not be such a terrible thing. Have I mentioned we’re a bad team?
I bask in the sunlit garden of utter defeat. Little did I know, all would be taken from me so swiftly; my dignity, my honour, my standing in the community, cruelly torn away at its zenith.