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North County v Merrion: Division 1 match played at Inch, Balrotherry, on Sunday 12th September

To fortify myself for a long day, I had a breakfast of pork steak, potatoes, spinach and asparagus, before returning to Inch to watch Merrion again, this time in a refixed league match against champions North County.  It was a lovely day, the pitch looked good, the raven had taken to the airways again to chase off the buzzard, there were house martins galore twittering around with the last of the emigating swallows.

But there was no sign of Merrion.  At 10:55 a convoy pulled in and disgorged eleven bodies very much the worse for wear.  Anderson won the toss, chose to bat, and sent out confirmed no. 11 Patel and yesterday's no. 12, Jeff Short, to bat.  Merrion had absolutely no interest in playing and, skipper Anderson apart, didn't.

I don't blame Merrion, and I don't really know how we can avoid such meaningless matches which one or both sides don't want to play.  I'll leave that to the barrack-room lawyers on the cricketeurope/ireland forum.

Merrion were bowled out for 85 in 18.2 overs, Anderson scoring 24, Eddie Richardsom taking 5/39 and Conor Shiel 3/26.  The best shot was Kade Beasley's reverse sweep for six which neither Joe Curtis nor I managed to catch on camera.

In reply, John Mooney made a fifty inside five overs with some magnificent straight hitting, but was out for 52 before County got home for the loss of two wickets in 6.2 overs.  I drove home and gloated over the sheer ordinariness of the Scouse Gits as they were very lucky to escape from St. Andrew's with a 0-0 draw.

The thing is, apart from the Dalglish team, they never were that good.  It's a horrible truth that everybody else was worse!  Now we play proper football on proper pitches, instead of pitched battles at Paschendaele, Liverpool just can't compete.  We hate you, yeah, yeah, yeah . . .