Gamechanger

by Spencer F. C.

  With just 15 minutes to go, we completely fell apart. We conceded two goals in five minutes, with the second a real blow for the Stevens family bragging rights as Matt Stevens outmuscled his older brother to score it. And then they added a third – a great free-kick, to be fair – to finish the game as a contest.

  We could point to things like the weather and to Dan Brown and Rich Beck, two stalwarts of the side, being missing for the match, but that’s no excuse. They had to deal with the weather in the first half, just like us, and illness, injury and suspensions happen to players throughout a season. It’s how you deal with them as a squad that counts.

  I think we’d just got a bit cocky. When Leicester lost Jamie Vardy to suspension during the run-in of their title win, other players stepped up and they got results in their big games. We had a little way to go yet before those Leicester comparisons we’d been making were in any way valid.

  We got back to winning ways against AC Belmont, thrashing them 8–1 in a match that featured the first sending off in any of our games. When we were 5–1 up, Seb rented a bit of space in a couple of their players’ heads – he was making a bit of a pest of himself – and they just lost it. Their keeper took a swipe at him first, getting booked and giving away a penalty in the process, which Rich Beck coolly converted.

  Another of their players threw the ball away and was booked for it, and then seconds later he had a swipe at Seb too and got his second yellow card for that. My brother is a merciless competitor and can be a real nuisance on the field, but you have to be able to deal with that, and these players clearly couldn’t. They left the ref with little choice but to get the cards out.

  Now, as I’ve mentioned, the referees and linesmen we use in Hashtag matches are all fully qualified, decent officials who are used to presiding over a much higher level of football than we’re playing.

  In our early matches, they thought it was all just a bit of fun and they didn’t take it too seriously. They were a bit too relaxed for our liking, and I think they got a real shock when they saw us going mental when we scored – or for different reasons when decisions didn’t go our way – and realised what it meant to us.

  I had to say to them, ‘Can you please treat these games like a cup final? You need to take this seriously because we really care about this, the people we’re playing care about this and the fans at home do too. You might not be aware of it, but in terms of audience numbers, this is the biggest game you’ve ever refereed. Go to my YouTube channel and have a look at how many hundreds of thousands of people are watching and scrutinising every single one of your decisions.’

  They tended to get it after that, and now the refs are all on board with it and do their best. They’re usually decent, but just like goalkeeping, being a ref is a thankless task. Booking players is part of the job, no matter whose side they’re on, and we wanted officials to be impartial and professional because these games were everything to us.

  We weren’t expecting anything to be easy about our game against NWA, a football club from north-west London that unsurprisingly didn’t feature Ice Cube and Dr Dre up front. They were in fact a group of mates who had each played at a very high youth level and they had a bit of a social-media presence. They also had an eloquent, ambitious manager and a very impressive montage of goals on their challenge video that made me think, These guys are unbelievable.

  Now, you should never base an opinion of a player on his YouTube highlights reel, but these guys were the real deal, certainly more than good enough to mug me off a few times on the pitch! We went 2–0 down in the first half and I thought, Oh no, this is it. This is where we finally get smashed.

  A part of me thought we needed that and the series needed that … but the rest of me, the competitive part of me embroiled in a really tough game, definitely did not want to lose this match. Like the match against Mongolian Horses, it was a really windy game with the sun sitting low in the sky. We were playing into the wind and facing the sun, and we couldn’t see a thing. But that was no excuse.

  If we could just hang in here, maybe nick something before half-time …

  Cometh the hour, or at least the minute before half-time, cometh the man, and Ryan Adams managed to squeeze a shot under their keeper and throw us a lifeline. At half-time I told the lads I was sure we could turn this around. We came out for the second half only 2–1 down – and with the sun strong in the eyes of the NWA defence and the wind blowing firmly in favour of Hashtag United. We’d learned our lesson from the Mongolian Horses game. We needed to use the elements to our advantage this time.

  It didn’t take long, as minutes into the second half John Dawson scored what was voted the best Hashtag goal of the year with an absolute belter from 30 yards. Sam Adams then gave us the lead after some head tennis in the box, and it was all Hashtag from then on, with no little help from the sun.

  We had reason to be unhappy with the officials who ruled a Dan Brown effort out for offside, despite being about four yards onside, but there was no stopping us. Dan eventually got his goal with a sweet finish and we won the game 5–3, which was an incredible result against a very good team of genuinely decent players. We’d really turned up, and what a comeback!

  Our next match was a tricky away fixture at Newhaven FC, the under-21s side of a semi-pro team, who had some very familiar faces in their ranks. Theo Baker and Joe Weller were lining up against us and they were out for revenge after they’d lost in the Wembley Cup, and to make things even more interesting, we were playing in front of a crowd for the first time as a club.

  We were missing a couple of key players for the match, with Phil Martin and the Adams brothers unavailable, but we’d learned our lesson from last time. We recalled midfielder Jack Harrison for the occasion, and, with Sam Adams missing at the back, the Chairman sorted out a very special loan signing: Mr Jimmy Conrad, former USA captain and World Cup player. Playing at Newhaven might be a bit of a first for Jimmy, too.

  Joe Weller wasn’t at his best as he was suffering from an injury in this game, which would eventually keep him out for the best part of a year as he ended up needing surgery. However, despite Joe not being 100 per cent, Newhaven still had a really good side. It was a tough game played in freezing-cold conditions down by the coast, but in the end we had a little too much for them. We’re a bit older than those boys so we were able to physically boss them a little bit, and our extra experience counted as we won the game 2–1. Dan Brown was in inspired form as he bagged a brace.

  Another factor in the match, which we had definitely learned to deal with by now, was the cameras. While we no longer had the advantage of other teams not taking it quite as seriously as us, we did have the experience of playing regularly and being filmed with hundreds of thousands of people watching on YouTube. Even in our team talks, the lads barely even noticed the cameras were there by this stage because we were so used to it. It had become second nature to us.

  A lot of the teams we played weren’t used to being filmed, so they were out of their comfort zone. Joe and Theo are young lads but old hands by YouTube standards and they’d played in the Wembley Cup, so the cameras were hardly a problem for them, but for their teammates it was a new experience, and some of them might have been a bit dazzled by the lights. According to Joe in his post-match interview, his teammates might have been worrying a bit too much about what people on YouTube were going to say rather than having their heads 100 per cent in the game.

  I could relate to finding the cameras distracting. It was why I had Saunders in charge of the production because once the whistle goes, I only want to be thinking about the match. We were playing some very good teams, and if my head wasn’t in the game I’d be mugged off very publicly. Sometimes I’m still mugged off anyway! You can’t afford to have any distractions once the whistle goes if you want to give the best account of yourself.

  We only needed three more points to secure promotion, and we had our chance against a team that broke with the Sunday league theme of the division,
but would still offer us an extremely tough game.

  Daniel Cutting, my teammate in the Wembley Cup, had put together a team of freestylers to challenge us. I was well up for this, because with freestylers, yes, they might have some unbelievable skills, but you’re never quite sure just how good they are at playing the game itself. How would they gel as a unit? Is it possible to be both a freestyler and an uncompromising centre-back?

  I knew Daniel was a very good player, but a whole team of freestylers?

  It turned out they were very good. A lot better than we expected, in fact. We found ourselves 3–2 down with only 10 minutes to go, and I was watching from the sidelines with a dead leg as the big man James Stevens, who had replaced me on the field, set up the equaliser for Dan Brown. We wouldn’t be getting promoted in this match after all, but it did feel like we’d got ourselves off the hook and salvaged a point against a team who were playing their first ever match together. Fair play to the Freestylers – they were decent.

  We hit the road again for another away match, this time against Biggleswade United, on a grass pitch so that any advantage we might have gleaned from playing on our 3G artificial surface, which we’d had plenty of practice on by now, wasn’t a factor. This was a big one, too. It was our sponsor Top Eleven’s derby: the two teams they sponsored would be playing.

  Biggleswade are a semi-pro team with a very special director of football in Guillem Balagué, the Sky Sports presenter. He sent in the challenge and promised a very interesting match-up, with him playing up front.

  When we played semi-pro teams, this was usually the case. As good a unit as I felt we were becoming – we had a few guys in our ranks who had played semi-pro and one or two who could no doubt play it – we were still amateur footballers. We wouldn’t stand much of a chance against a semi-pro first XI, and while some people might love to see us get smashed in the videos, it wouldn’t make for much in the way of entertainment every episode.

  So a semi-pro team would usually put an XI together with a few first-teamers, a few under-21 players, maybe some staff and a star or celebrity performer, like Guillem, for the match. In the case of a club like Biggleswade, that’s still a very decent team, and they had another very familiar face in their starting line-up: former Barcelona and Chelsea midfielder Enrique de Lucas. Make no mistake, this was going to be a tough game.

  We were proudly sporting rainbow laces for the match as part of an anti-homophobia in sport campaign, and I was also sporting my Movember moustache as part of the men’s health charity campaign for the month.

  It was an overcast day down at Biggleswade, with the floodlights on to illuminate events on the pitch. The scores were level at 1–1 with half-time approaching, when de Lucas received a good pass, got past Rich Beck … and then the man-mountain brought him down in the box. Penalty!

  Who else but Guillem Balagué stepped up to take it, and he struck it firmly enough, but Jamie ‘Jacko’ Jackson in goal pulled off an amazing stop, pushing it away for us to launch a counter-attack. I hit it long and left Dan Brown and Ryan Adams to take care of the rest, as they combined superbly, with Ryan breaking away and having his shot parried by the keeper, and Dan there to follow up. Unbelievable!

  From staring down the barrel of a 2–1 deficit at the break, we were now 2–1 ahead – all in a matter of seconds. It was a real #MiseryCompiler for Biggleswade.

  Things just got better and better after the break. I rolled back the years to my school days, when my heading prowess was enough to get me noticed, and I scored a pretty decent header. Best of all, it was the Manjdog himself who supplied the brilliant cross: great link-up play between the two founders of the Hashtag United seven-a-side team to put us 3–1 up.

  We then ran over to the side to do a haircut celebration. I’d done a big Movember charity stream in which we raised the best part of $60,000 for the charity, and as part of the incentives to donate I’d said that I wouldn’t get my hair cut until I scored for Hashtag. Given that I hadn’t scored since we demolished the comedians’ team by a margin of 18 goals, the odds were pretty strong on my locks getting very long indeed.

  I’d been getting a fair bit of stick for rarely scoring, so it was a good challenge for me, but, unbelievably, I’d scored in only my second match since making the claim. However, it would be a little while longer before I made a trip to the barbers!

  My goal wasn’t the only thing I had to celebrate by the end of the match. Despite Biggleswade drawing things level at 3–3, we went ahead and finished the game strongly. We won 6–3, and secured promotion to Division 2, as well as the new star signing promised by the Chairman, in the process.

  We finished 2016 off with the Hashtag United Awards, a great evening with the lads at YouTube HQ and an opportunity to swap the yellow-and-blue kit for black tie. We handed out the player awards for the year, including the players’ player of the year, which went to top goal-scorer Dan Brown, while the fans’ player of the year went to his strike partner, second-top scorer and leading assist-maker for the year Ryan Adams. I told you they were the dream team. John Dawson won goal of the year for that strike against NWA.

  Being solid at the back had been just as vital to our success, however, and the Chairman, who loved a clean sheet, certainly recognised this when he made the man-mountain himself, Mr Rich Beck, the Chairman’s player of the year. The Chairman, of course, couldn’t be there in person, but he talked it through with me before the ceremony.

  At the climax of the awards we revealed the Chairman’s new star signing. And it was a familiar face to the YouTube community: Theo Baker. He would be wearing the number 77 shirt, and he showed signs of fitting right in as he Hashtagged it on stage in front of the lads. Theo’s a great player and it was a brilliant signing for us and, as ever, collaboration was the name of the game. We would both enjoy some exposure on one another’s channels. It was a fantastic night, and we looked forward to life in Division 2 with confidence.

  Of course, given the realities of how we make the show, filming the matches in advance of showing them, we’d already kicked off Division 2 at this point. And we’d done it with a bang, delivering the YouTube match-up everyone had been waiting for: Hashtag United vs Palmers FC. You wouldn’t want to miss this one …

  Every drama needs a good villain. Every hero needs their nemesis. Superman has kryptonite. Batman has the Joker. The FIFA Playa has KSI. And for Hashtag United, we had Palmers FC. The stakes were high, with YouTube supremacy at stake, and for the first time in a Hashtag shirt, things were about to get properly nasty.

  We’d been getting comments about how a team called Palmers FC would smash us if we played them, with people saying stuff about how they played in a ‘real’ league, which sort of missed the point of what we were trying to do with Hashtag.

  As for these ‘real’ leagues, I know all about them. I’ve turned out in teams in them for years and I know the kind of football that’s played, so there was nothing there really to fear, despite what some people might claim.

  We got in touch with Palmers to challenge them to a game quite early on and, to be fair, if we’d played them then, without building the understanding and camaraderie in our team that only comes from experience, who knows what the result would have been. But we were doing something different to clubs like Palmers: we’d already played at Wembley, and I was looking to do something cool on YouTube with my mates. I didn’t want to get into Sunday league. I felt like that had been done.

  Division 3, with its Sunday league theme, was our answer to that, and we’d proven we could mix it with these teams. By the time our match with Palmers came round, the comments were no longer an unequivocal ‘Palmers will smash you’. In fact, there was a genuine bit of interest in the game because we’d changed quite a few opinions with our performances. The thought of a good match between two decent YouTube teams was an exciting one for followers of both Hashtag and Palmers, and we could hardly disappoint our subscribers now, could we?

  From day one, it was clear that Pa
lmers didn’t like us, whether it was sending incendiary tweets or making little digs about us in their own videos. All good friendly banter, of course, and we’d respond in kind sometimes and it seemed like fun. Two YouTube teams creating a bit of theatre around the game, almost like the pre-fight promotion of a boxing match. Bring it on.

  Sometimes it went a little too far – from both sides. We originally organised to play them much earlier, but we had to cancel that match because the second Wembley Cup ended up being scheduled two days later. I couldn’t play any game two days before the Wembley Cup. If I’d got injured, I would have let a lot of people down involved in the production of the Wembley Cup series.

  So we told the Palmers guys we’d have to reschedule, hoping they’d understand and we could arrange a new date. And they seemed to at first, but then they’d go on Twitter and try to throw me under the bus, suggesting we were running scared because we cancelled. We challenged them in the first place!

  I’d come back with a bit of banter, something like, ‘We’re cancelling because we’re playing at Wembley – where are you playing, Thurrock Sunday league pitch?’ All good-natured fun, but I could definitely sense a bit of venom coming our way.

  You’re probably sick of hearing me use the ‘c’ word by now – ‘collaboration’, that is – but that really is the key to making these things work on YouTube. That’s why the Wembley Cup works so well, with all these big YouTubers collaborating. And it should have been like that with Palmers and us, two sides with a YouTube presence, but I think a bit of football tribalism was creeping into it.

  We have our genuine supporters and Palmers have theirs, and they each felt passionately about wanting to see their team win. I think that, combined with the needle between the two sides in the build-up, as well as the knowledge that Palmers were a very physical side, meant we had the perfect storm brewing for a real winner-takes-all grudge match.