Bristol Downs League

When I was a kid and my brother would go off to play football on a Saturday morning, I was green with envy. But this was the 80s and girls didn’t play football too. Or did they? I managed to join a local team only to get completely battered by the rough and tumble of it all. Several footballs to the face and nosebleeds later, I gave up but instantly started to miss the smell, the feel, the excitement of it. I consigned myself to believing that I would never experience it again until I had kids — that is until I moved to Bristol and discovered the Bristol Downs League. Hundreds of footballers of all ages and refreshingly, both genders, meet to play in their local league. The Down’s are buzzing with players and spectators and among them is one old guy who has been part of the league for a whopping half a century. Keep your eyes peeled for him, he has many a story to tell.

I’ve been playing in this league for about five years now and I can’t recommend it enough. It gets a bit of a rough ride from other leagues for the poor standard of the football and even worse state of the pitches, but there’s a strange camaraderie derived from playing on something akin to a minefield sat in a wind tunnel on an area not much bigger than a 5-​a-​side pitch.
Fascinating fact, this is the second biggest league in the country where all the games are played in one place (after Hackney Marches), which leads me to the real advantage: you don’t have to spend half your weekend driving around Inbredsville to play against opposition with approximately the same collective IQ as a pair of flip flops.