For the Senior Cup game against Haverfordwest Cricket Club - a team who Manorbier FC had comfortably dispatched in the league just a couple of weeks earlier - manager Sarrionandia had decided to deploy a squad rotation system.

In a bid to keep legs and minds fresh, he had sanctioned shopping trips, overtime working and time on the sofa in tracky-bottoms watching Spongebob Squarepants for some of his key players.

Thinking like a thinking man's Neil Warnock, Sarrionandia probably saw the game as a sub-Carling Cup distraction - but nevertheless sent out a team which should have been able to handle an opposition who had turned up expecting to play cricket.

With the flamboyant Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen in goal, and The Face, The Wall, The Cigarillo and Crazy Legs Crane at the back, the defence looked solid.

Billy the Fish had returned from his lengthy holiday in Dorset to occupy the left midfield, Blackwell and Sarrionandia were once again coupled in the middle of the park, and Paddy brought some scouse nouse to the right flank.

Up front, The Foreigner returned, but the Milk Sheikh once again looked like he had curdled, having been left out of the fridge the night before, and was yearning for his Philippino mates on the oil rig.

The epic games of the mid-'90s between Liverpool and Newcastle provided the template for this contest, as the teams played out a match that had more twists and turns than a rattlesnake with a hernia trying to make its way across hot coals.

Four times the cricketers took the lead, and four times the home side responded to level the score.

End to end, side to side, up and down, the game's balance lurched like two drunken teenagers on the Jubilee park see-saw - but throughout, Manorbier still felt they would win.

But with minutes left, and somehow still a goal in arrears, Manorbier had to metaphorically un-plumb the kitchen sink and throw it into attack.

Thus, it was that the coolest man in Pembrokeshire football - Luke Askew found himself up front, clean through, with no defenders in sight, just the 'keeper to beat, with one minute to go. Surely he would feint and drop his shoulder. Surely he would throw a dummy and go round the 'keeper. Surely he would clip the ball into the bottom right corner. Surely he would take the game into extra-time. Surely the Haverfordwest manager would be broken and slump over the advertising hoardings like Keegan. Surely.

But (and perhaps with the stresses and strains of Pembrokeshire's very own Carling Cup in the back of his mind) Askew 'accidentally' missed the goal, heard the ref blow his whistle for full-time seconds later, and then strolled back to the changing rooms knowing that The 'Bier can at least concentrate on the league from now on.