Entec Six-a-Side Football Tournament
JJB Soccerdome, Manchester
The annual Entec Six-a-Side competition took place on 5th July 2003 with 12 teams representing the following Entec offices: Gosforth (3 teams), Leamington (2 teams), London, Northwich (2 teams), Glasgow/Edinburgh and Shrewsbury (2 teams). In addition, a team was fielded by Entec's management team.
The venue was once again the heat and humidity of the JJB Soccerdome in Manchester and the standard of football on show was again very high. The 12 teams were split into two groups with the eventual top two from each group going through to the knockout stages.
In a tense final, the eventual winners for the second year running were the Shrewsbury team (captained by Keith Phillipson) who beat the Floor 5 team from Gosforth (captained by Richard Home) on penalties. Hero was goalkeeper Francis Crozier who not only saved one penalty but then stepped up to score the winning spot-kick. Alongside Keith and Francis, were Gordon Coombs, Ann Taylor, Neil Thurston, Martin Boland and Sean Coombes.
Captain Keith Phillipson was clearly delighted with the victory and declared, “Hopefully retaining the trophy will go some way to alleviating the sorrow which overwhelmed the town following Shrewsbury’s relegation from the Football League, and help put the town back on the Football Map of the World! It was also good to see Gosforth put up a better showing this time around, hopefully ‘wor’ Jackie will be revolving less slowly in his grave than after last years wooden spoon performance…”
The wooden spoon instead went to the Management team, captained by Simon Armes-Reardon, who had somehow avoided the fateful prize last year but were unable to repeat their escapology act this time around. They were beaten by two goals to nil in the play-off match by Ed Shaw’s Floor 4 based Gosforth team.
On the other hand, the victorious Shrewsbury team returned to Shropshire with
the problem of finding some more room in their trophy cabinet and the task
of organising next year’s tournament.
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