Every week my DisOrient FC team and I would show up at the Park Tavern, our second home, drown our sorrows after a five-a-side match and forge ongoing friendships
Whatever else you might say about the Park Tavern, you can unequivocally say this: it is, without question, the closest pub to the five-a-side pitches where my team DisOrient FC used to play every Tuesday night from 2011 to 2016.
Look, I’m not going to pretend that my team’s love of the Park Tavern didn’t start out as a marriage of convenience. It was close. It served Guinness. And it had (just about) functioning toilets. There were, quite clearly, “better” pubs in the area, the kind that get in Time Out lists. While the nearby Faltering Fullback had an exterior draped in foliage, served decent Thai food and boasted a multilevel beer garden, the Park Tavern’s chief talking point was that it still had an advert up above the urinals for the 2001 PlayStation game Hogs of War. Every time I had a wee there, I was forced to contemplate the strapline: “Who’s got the biggest weapon?”
But after 40 minutes getting trounced on the pitch by some or other group of bigger men, our team didn’t have the energy for traipsing anywhere else. And so the Park Tavern became our second home. It helped that it was never very busy. That meant we could always get a table at which to dissect how, exactly, we had just lost 7-1 to a team that only had four players for the first 25 minutes. Over two, three and then inevitably four pints, we would drill down into our performances with chat about formations, marking, playing through the thirds. All of which was utterly pointless because the next week one of us would turn up without their kit and have to play in chinos.
