Mourinho. Ferguson. Errol Waters. All names of significant managerial prestige and a list, I hope that by the end of the year I will be joining.
I’m Daniel Golton, a second-year Physics and Philosophy student, and I have just been handed the inestimable honour of captaining the Langwith Fourths this year. It’s a challenge I feel well equipped for, having been a regular bench warmer in the Threes last season during our unprecedented run to the Semi-Finals of the *cough* Vase.
Langwith has never had a Fourth team before, which is a shame because we’re suitably crap at football, you’d think that we’d have done away with the First team years ago and just had the three teams below instead. However, this year something is different. Due to a league shake-up we now have a four-tier relegation-promotion system and with a space going in the bottom league it has never been a more opportune moment for Langwith to unleash what could be its worst team yet upon the world!
Despite what appears to be a lot of nay-saying about my own college’s abilities in the above paragraphs, I’m actually rather excited, perhaps even quietly confident about our chances this year. We happen to have a strong store of untapped talent in Langwith who failed to turn out last year through a combination of laziness and poor planning; luckily I’ve bribed them all and now we take to the field with no less than the only (not yet certified) hat-trick scorer in Langwith footballing history and hopefully (if he passed his exams) a former Southampton Under-11s player.
I’ve already had a few people ask me about what I’m going to do regarding an ever-present problem in Langwith football: the defense… and the midfield… and scoring. Well, in answer to those people, I’ve got several as yet unseen tactics up my sleeve and I’m about to reveal some of them to you lucky readers! Whilst I understand that this is a risk and that my rival captains may attempt to pilfer some of my revolutionary ideas from this column, I shall rest easy knowing that these formations are simply so avant-garde that it would take a tactical genius with balls of steel to pull them off in a real game situation.
So without further ado:
10-0-0: I have a lot of admiration for my man Jose Mourihno. A born winner, he 
restored some former glory to Chelsea and turned Stamford Bridge into a fortress in his first spell in charge. More recently though, he’s become associated with “parking the bus”, or in other words, shoving players en masse in front of their own goal to prevent the opposition from getting a shot in, let alone a goal. Well I’m sorry Jose but if you’re going to do something you’ve got to do it properly! Why have 5 players in front of the net when you could have your whole team there? Chelsea conceded 27 goals last season in the Premier League but with my system in place I can guarantee Langwith will concede less goals than if we’d literally bricked the net up!
5-5-5: Because, let’s be honest, the referees in this league wouldn’t notice if I armed half my team with claw hammers and asked them to lynch the opposition.
3-1-4-2 (with full-backs and supporting CF): If the trialists show any promise this year I’ll be looking to crack out this old chestnut! Famously used by Rwanda in their incredible 2011 Cecafa Cup turn-around against Sudan, this tactic aims to squeeze the opposition midfield and cut off the supply to the wingers. The full-backs can then pick up stray balls and bomb forward to give an already potent attack yet more firepower!
Using tactics like these I’m sure we’ll have the comically pink-uniformed Constantine Firsts quaking in their as yet unfilled boots and James Fours frankly have a better chance of winning the lottery than beating us! Who knows? If we play well enough we may even find ourselves in the same division as the Langwith Firsts one day! Even if it is the third division…
With all this in mind I’m looking forward to trials to see what you freshers out there can offer me! If you’ve got flair, imagination and basically no technical ability make sure you head down to the Langwith’s trials; details on our Facebook group (www.facebook.com/groups/langwithfc).
Look out for the continuation of this column in subsequent print editions of Vision!