1st XI v Highgate School
On: Saturday 28 November
Venue: Home
Result: 4 - 2 win
The final game of the season saw Highgate School come to Big Ground. Two schools whose old boys class themselves as ‘OCs’. One school Elizabethan in origin, one Stuart. Over 800 years of history between them. And Charterhouse played with the weight of all those years on their shoulders for the first 15 minutes, as if wearing Elizabethan ruffs and wandering round in some confusion about whether the state was Catholic or Protestant and whether transubstantiation was de rigeur or not. And in the midst of all this, Highgate were treated to the opening goal, after a lax pass allowed pressure to build and presented a tap in to the Highgate front man. But then Charterhouse began to rebuild. Ortega and Hammond started to control midfield and Platts, Wainwright and Yiadom began to plot and scheme, like Guy Fawkes and his mates. And when Wainwright nicked the ball on the outside of the box, he was then felled in the area, leading to a penalty, which was promptly dispatched by Yiadom. 1 - 1. But what about Ortega-Olazabal you ask? Wasn’t he screaming the house down, diving into improbable challenges and yelping for fouls? Well yes he was. But he also scored a goal from a corner and began shouting about it like he’d just holed a chip to win the Ryder Cup. On the 18th. In Spain. It was simply deafening. And while normally there is a standard period, which we’ll call ‘celebration time’ before players regroup and then return to their starting positions, Ortega just kept screaming, long after the accepted time slot. But we love that passion!
Into the second half and the game got tense, tight and occasionally fractured. Ollie Platts came on up top and deflected, thrust, parried and jabbed. And Highgate didn’t like the cut of his jib. Charterhouse began to stifle the life out of the Highgate back four, with Yiadom and Wainwright pressing high on the wings and Puvanesan nicking the ball in midfield, making the Highgate back line very much resemble Louis XVI and his family, stuck in Paris and not able to get out to St Cloud to celebrate Easter mass. And then, out of nowhere, Wainwright, who’d already won a penalty and had a ball absolutely hammered into his face, danced around a defender and unleashed a venomous, curling shot into the far corner of the goal from just outside the box. And it was 3 - 1. Just play out the match boys, see out the game, manage the situation… Hang on what? Highgate have scored? 3 - 2?!? As that girl asked that boy once, ‘What devil art thou that dost torment me thus?’ I think they both died in the end. Shame that.
But if there’s one man for a crisis, one acronym for such a situation, one unlikely hero, then it’s ‘R-J’ or Frederick Russell-Jones, for whom the word ‘stalwart’ was surely designed. And if one were to ring up Paddy Power and ask them the likelihood of RJ scoring the winner with a right-footed volley in the last five minutes, it would be instructive indeed to hear the answer. But there he was, centre stage, 8 yards out, guiding home the Charterhouse fourth after a Puvy free kick. Amazing scenes. It was a bit like that Tony Adams goal against Everton in May 1998 with Martin Tyler’s ‘Would you believe it!?’ Commentary in the background. In some ways.
And so Charterhouse recorded their ninth win of the season to go alongside nine losses and two draws. And as the balls are packed away, the kit is laundered for one last time and we think back on another season of Charterhouse football we wonder where the time went. From Notts County in August, to Highgate in late November, twenty games in all, plus the ISFA sixes. And so it’s time to put the boxes back in the loft, shut the dusty books, bang the boots together one last time and maybe, just maybe, start to look ahead to the future and the next chapter in the long, proud history of Charterhouse football. There aren’t many longer or prouder.