So...
Apologies will follow to the Accies who've recently passed personal milestones, but first an apology to the whole club! Our recent nine-goal thriller vs Sporting Brixton Old Boys was the club's 1,000th recorded match across all forms of the game (5-a-sides, 8-a-sides etc etc etc). A momentous occasion which I recall I knew was approaching but then, as usual, forgot to mention on the day. Would've been nice to raise a glass to a millennium of matches! Oh well.
Thursday's match against Crystal Palace & Dulwich Super Veterans, meanwhile, was our 350th 11-a-side tie. It was also our 200th draw across all forms of the game – although, and this is where anyone with any sense will stop reading – do bear in mind that any drawn matches in intra-club games (Streatham North End vs Dinamo Bar Pitch, for example) count as TWO drawn games for the club overall in my stats. Exciting, eh?
Crystal Palace & Dulwich Super Veterans' equalising goal on Thursday also means the club is still 2 games away from our 100th ever 11-a-side victory. We've won 98 11-a-sides, so all being well, by the time I get back from my forthcoming fortnight's holiday, we'll have reached a century of wins.
So far in 2012 our success rate is pretty similar to last year's decent record, but one stat leapt out at me: we're harder to beat so far this calendar year. Overall last year we lost 42.86% of our 11-a-side matches; this year so far we've lost 34.62% of our games. That statistical difference is partly due to the fact that we've already drawn more games this year (6) than we drew in the whole of 2011 (5).
Moving to personal milestones, there have been a couple of big movers in the all-time 11-a-side scorers list so far this year. The top 3 in that list remain Sam, Simon and Perre, and those 3 are currently the front-runners in a close race for this year's golden boot. But Joe Sene's remarkable recent goalscoring run – scoring two goals in three successive games – has seen him leap from 9th to 5th in the list, leapfrogging Bobby Rauchenberg, Steve Spurdens and Gary White. In addition, Neill Robertshaw's 5 goals this year have seen him break into the top 10, and Paul Archer's 7 goals in 2012 see him just outside that top 10 – it's surely only a matter of time before he breaks into that top 10.
Now the apologies: I failed to mention a few weeks ago that Simon Mesner became only the 6th club member to play 200 11-a-sides for the Accies. Simon's now on 204 appearances. Good work, Mes! Dave Rudd, who prompted this statattack, is on 198 11-a-side appearances, and Joe Sene is on 196. Luke Fallon and Andy Thornes are both on 190, so by the end of 2012 there should be 10 members of the "200 Club".
Apologies and congrats also to Lee Clifford and Tremayne Macdonald, who both recently played their 100th 11-a-side game for Effra Academicals. Greg Rainey is on 97 appearances, so will shortly hit his century. And Paul Archer is on 49, one away from a half-century, having made his Accies debut less than two years ago.
That's more than enough of stat – I mean that...
