Perhaps the hollowest boast I ever made was when I once told someone totally deadpan that in 1999 I was the 9th best under 16 subbuteo player in the UK.It's no lie, in my teen years I did play competitively at a time when most lads were on their Sony Playstation or equivalent. And for a while I was starting to get pretty good, I could play fairly fluid, although perhaps a better defender than I ever was as an attacker.
The only problem was that aside from a few friends I convinced to play too most people thought I was insane to wanna play. At the ripe old of 16 I decided perhaps it was time to retire (girls, college, a part-time weekend job etc) and spent very little time in the following few years thinking about it until I made that appalling earlier boast a few months ago. Something within me clicked and I started looking online as to whether people still played. To my utter disbelief just before Christmas I found out that a fella I beat when I was 14 was now the WORLD NUMBER 2! He lost in the final of last year's world championships to a Dutch bloke. (Since then he's slipped to number 9 in the world)
At the start of this year I made it my pledge (and I don't care how sad it makes me) to get back into my flicking groove and make 2009 my year of preparation to become the 2010 world champion.
However since then I have acquired a girlfriend and it's quite possible that there may be a few things that could well take priority over this quest. I've starting going to the odd meeting at a local club and intend to go to one or two tournaments this year. Maybe it's gonna take a little longer but the dream still lives on.
For the record it's not me in the photo but a lovely man called Tom Taylor from whom I recently bought a team of claret and blue Sureshots.
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