moment for the frugal team coach, Billy Letice (66), a former electrician from Gorgie, Edinburgh, who has lived in Australia for 43 years.

A man in whose breast beats the heart of a Bill Shankly, Billy’s passionate team talks are legendary. They might actually be working, too. For, deviating from the TV series script, this group of ex-pats has been actually winning, moving up three divisions in three seasons.

Strolling round to the first match of the new season, where my son, a veteran player, was captaining the side, the team’s players were patently on the sluggish side. By the half hour it was beginning to look like a doctor’s asthma clinic out there; well into the second half, tactical decisions like a wild shot that vanished into the shrubbery over a fence provided a much needed breather for the lads, whose average age is by far the highest in a league full of teenage Aussies.

Later in the match, an own goal featured when a pass-back to the keeper suddenly morphed into a full-blooded shot which, had it happened at the other end, would have been cheered to the raſters. However, Barnstoneworth gamely fought back and in the final minute scored an equaliser to make it 3-3.

A couple of days later, in a Sydney pub, we ran into the team coach. “Your boy,” he pronounced morosely as he ordered a schooner of beer, “is no’ fit.”

True enough. But he wasn’t alone in that respect. And the team, fair play to them, gave their all. Despite the club’s world-wide reputation for wackiness, Barnstoneworth actually take their sport extremely seriously.

For the club’s 25th anniversary last year, a grand plan was hatched to film Barnstoneworth the

Movie. Michael Palin, the club’s honorary president, was keen to take part and had this message for the players. He said: “Twenty-five years of glorious disaster and failure; a team like no other. It’s been kept going more than anywhere in Australia, so good on you.

“Graham Rumbel contacted me years ago to ask permission to use the club name. I said, of course, provided you keep on losing. A few years later he owned up to the fact they had won their division; that’s when I was about to disown the club.”

He added: “I think it’s great that Barnstoneworth are still playing. It just shows you that failure can turn into success. I think the Barnstoneworth experience corresponds to a deep-seated awareness that supporting a football team is about failure. You know it’s not about success, you just get terrified and frightened that it’s not going to last; failure is the default point for supporting most teams.”

Fin Cuthbertson, the club president, currently

back home in Glasgow on holiday, said: “The significance of the 8-1 score line was immortalised in an episode of Ripping Yarns, so we decided to put it in the club’s constitution: if ever we had an 8-1 score-line the commitee would buy beers for all the players. This always proved popular with the lads, if not the Treasurer and commitee members trying to keep some money in the coffers.”

The club’s moto, A hard, ruthless, tough, fighting unit, is also taken straight from Ripping Yarns.

78 August 2015