The Winter Break
Now Is The Season of Our Discount Tents
The SteuerLig takes a little holiday
It's that time of the year between the autumn and spring schedules when The SteuerLig closes down for a few weeks in order for the players to get off on their trips for mid-season 'training camps' in warmer climes, like the sandy beaches of Ipanema or the plush pasturelands of southern Mustardy. At TAX Magazine we get no such lucky sunshine breaks and here on the sports desk we've been preparing a couple of articles to keep everyone going in the absence of some half-decent football. How is the World's Most Expensive Goalkeeper getting on in combat formations? What is our favourite Deltic philosopher-coach up to these days, and are his bullet wounds giving him any gip? Read on to find out this, and more.
...TL;NGR
• Custodio Reverso on a gap year • Enda Clentin at war
The Clench
Enda & The Tent City Blues
The Continuing Adventures of Enda Clentin
The Deltic Uncivil War is over! The Rake Teinton Women's Institute are defeated! Huzzah! In this series we have charted the second coming of Deltic coach Enda Clentin, inventor of the World Cup-winning Stoicpress, successful head coach of Delte and Gnejs, victim of the Uncivil War who nearly died several times of drowning, head injuries and bullet wounds - mostly inflicted by his ex-missus Brenda, who is still at large. After washing up on the shores of Taxhavn, being reunited with his step son Emlyn Blymmin - the cable guy - and a year off in recovery after another assassination attempt by Emlyn's rogue mum, learning how to talk again, how to judge distance with only one eye, how not to be afraid of floodlight towers and how to hang a pair of glasses on his ears when one of them was shredded by Brenda's bullets, what is he up to these days?
A man often caught up in social causes despite a distinct lack of interest in social causes, the former PE teacher at Oswark Grammar School was talked out of retirement last season by Gnejsian superstar striker Georg Bardo, partner of GnejsCo, the multi-club organisation that had recently acquired, among others, the refugee team Aubinsville Kickers. His job would be to lead on the new SteuerLig part of the refugee project - the Pro Kickers. They had paid for a place in Division Four and would effectively replace near neighbours Lithico St. Bernadine™ who had withdrawn from the league in protest, sparking the Bay of Greedy Pigs War. Fortunately for Enda, the Kickers stadium, The Shanty, in Aubinsville Tent City, was deemed unfit for use in the Trumpanzee Garbage Division Four so the Pro Kickers had temporarily relocated to Bizarro Park, just off Soccer Island and outside the occupation zone when the Lithico™ chopper invasion began. Right now the Pro Kickers were doing alright, mid-table in Division Four in their debut season - but not, as it happens, with The Clench in charge. Bontsi Kabelano, a milkman from Tent City (before that, the fallen state of Ossidiacqua) and Enda's appointed assistant is doing a good job of covering for his boss. But what's happened to Enda?
Well, he can now add 'kidnap' to his growing list of unfortunate experiences, and I'm sure he's also hoping he can soon put 'and ransom' after it on his CV. It hasn't happened yet but a deal is on the table for sponsors of the Pro Kickers, including goat cheese billionaire Fandango Molineux (the III), to cough up a sizeable fee to get him back in one piece. Well, most of one piece. He wasn't fully one piece went he got snatched, given what he's been through in recent years.
Anyway.
In a previously unpublicised piece of foul play by the Lithico™ army of lawyers, it seems the occupying usurpers launched a covert operation to the mainland and Enda's place - a billion shilling apartment in St. Bernadine city overlooking the bay which he shares with his billionaire step-son Emlyn Blymmins, the broadcast and streaming tech genius also known as 'The Cable Guy'. Employing a secret agent gun-for-hire with unique skills in home invasion (Agent B2), who happened to be Emlyn's mother and somehow had the access codes to his apartment, Brenda Blymmins snatched Enda under threat of death (she'd already attempted to kill him at least three times, so she wasn't joking) and took him back to Soccer Island, landing on the very beach where the Special Tax Service would soon meet their ignominious end.
So far as we know Brenda hasn't killed him, as the Lithico lawyers are running a back channel negotiation to ransom him back in exchange for certain Banks of Taxhavn account numbers.
The Measure of a Man Is Six Yards Wide
Notes From The Goal Line
The Continuing Adventures of Custodio Reverso
Gap Year For The Record Breaker: It must be an uncomfortable fact of life for the Farf goalkeeper Custodio Reverso, 34, that he has become a cult character and legend in his own lifetime... for all the wrong reasons. For the fourth consecutive season he has broken the divisional transfer record - but each season, it's in a lower division and for about a quarter of his value the previous season. Starting with a ₸x39m shilling league record move to Kierhuizen Boys, this season he signed from third tier McCunnald FC to fourth tier Lithico St. Bernadine™ for ₸x577,000 - a division four record transfer fee. Nevertheless he must've been excited to sign up with a team owned by his home nation, and connect with people from his own culture, even if it was in the unfortunate circumstance of Lithico's triple punishment relegation for tapping up offences and calling the executive committee of FA-Tax 'greedy pigs'. For Custodio, it should've been an opportunity to reunite with the administrator-coach Yzho Lal Da, the man who helped broker his move from La + Querida to The Boys at the start of his monumental decline, and perhaps help to reverse the slide. But things have a way of slipping out of Custodio's hands. Before he'd even dropped a ball in anger, Lithico withdrew from the league in protest at their multiple demotions. All players were given the opportunity to find a loan club for a season, pending the expected return of Lithico to the top flight for next season. Custodio managed to get a deal that reversed his general arc of disappointment by signing for a team higher up in the third tier, recently promoted energy drinks-sponsored village club Supersaurus! (exclamation mark included). Unfortunately after his first introductory training session it turned out The Fizzies had made an admin error and forgotten about another goalkeeper they had registered, and sent Custodio back to SoccerLand, Lithico's base. In further bad timing, Custodio was last man through the checkpoint before the Lithico™ lawyers closed the Golden Boot Bridge, having invaded Soccer Island while Custodio was on the bus back from Supersaurus! village (aka Plettenförde).
So now he's behind enemy lines, with his club out of the league and the home stadium sort of on fire (but not in a way that stadiums burn in Farfadillis, despite the occupiers best efforts). Fortunately - or unfortunately, it depends how things turn out I suppose - Custodio did have a prior occupation he can fall back on: he was a child soldier in the endless civil wars of his homelands. I can't tell you if he was any better at soldiering than he is at goalkeeping, but given the nature of the work and the fact he's still alive with all his limbs intact suggests he probably was better at soldiering. Fans of Custodio and his spiralling career will be hoping he at least makes it out of this alive to continue his keeper antics into the lower regional leagues, although most of them of course are backing Taxhavn in the Bay of Greedy Pigs War. Our sources on the island tell us that Lieutenant Reverso is now a training and tactical officer in the Lithico Boys Bridgade™, Tent City Regiment, Aubinsville Barracks. Early results - a spectacularly shocking victory over the Special Tax Service at Soccer Beach - suggest he may have found his level.
