You know what it’s like. You’ve worked your way from Division Three of your league to the Prem. The going is tough – but then you play the leaders.

 

And not just any leaders either. Nope, these boys were serial league winners. But, like when Wrexham beat Arsenal in the cup, or like when Villa thumped Liverpool this season, football is wonderfully unpredictable, and in this case the underdogs had their day the Chester Monday league that night in November, with the Try Hard’s winning 1-0.

 

The team were looking for a way to commemorate this – and they decided to collect some cards.

 

These, though, weren’t reds and yellows, though. Not at all. They decided to use the report from the match that was on the Leisure Leagues website as their Christmas Card.

 

Try Hards player Tom Sunley takes up the story: “As soon as we got the write up from that win on the Leisure Leagues page I took a screen shot and I was planning on doing something with it.”

 

There was something special about the game with Mickey’s as Tom adds: “We’d just lost two games in a row in our first Premier League season. We had been messaging all week to each other about what we needed to do differently against Mickeys Magnificent 7, they’d won the Prem something like five seasons in a row, so we knew they’d be really good. We turned them over and won 1-0. We grafted like mad for that win and proper deserved it so we were all buzzing. Then we got the write up I thought: ‘I’m going to do something with that.’

 

For Tom and the lads, though, their weekly games have come to represent so much more than just football: “2020 has been pants so we’ve loved having footy to play,” he explained.

 

So much so that one of the lads has kept a spreadsheet for all their matches, goals scored, appearances and other starts: “Mike Newton does that,” laughed Tom. “It’s just good banter, isn’t it?!”

 

For Leisure Leagues Jon D’Arcy, though it represented everything that was good about the 6 a side football leagues: “This story is fantastic as it shows just how important the football is to communities up and down the land. These players maybe aren’t the elite ones, but the games they play with us mean so much to so many.”

 

This is a sentiment that Tom agrees with, as he put it:  “We joke all the time about our team name “Try Hards” we know we’re not the best team so we know trying hard is important, and that goes past the match too.”

 

 

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