Start of year: Martin & Martin. Flick, flick, flick, flick, tackle, tackle, flick, flick, flick, flick...

End of February: Kranj tournament, Martin P's first tournament and first tournament goal.

March: two more players! Woohoo! Another Martin, this time with the female version of the name. Oh, and an Andrea, for a bit of variety.

End of April: Budweis tournament. Munich had one player too many, so Martin P donned his lederhosen and Martin R became a Hungarian woman, complete with beermat breast implants. But with Budvar beer being passed through the serving hatch from the brewery next door at one Euro for a half-litre bottle, it's a pretty safe bet that nobody remembers that.

Mid-June: website and posters completed, so advertising was started in earnest on englishforum.ch, Expats-In-Zurich and in the various supermarkets around Zürich. Several came to try it, some even stayed! And better still, one that stayed brought another one that stayed!

End of July: co-founder spreads his wings among the little people of the equator.

September: the two stayers attend their first tournament in sunny Parma on the one and only occasion that the Parmacup tournament has actually ever seen sunny weather. Founder has problems with planes, trains and automobiles and inadvertently solves the problem of having eleven players for a ten-man team. Spends the final hour of the tournament tarting around any team that will have him, only managing two, but still rejoins his original team for a convincing and unchallenged win of the party.

November: the Parma three join the Munich team for the annual Alpine League tournament in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Martin is sat between two Germans who weren't actually Germans and driven to the door of the tournament to ensure that he actually gets there. It probably wasn't strictly necessary, though, as the team's most riotous success came as a result of strategically leaving Martin on the subs' bench.

End of year: woohoo, more players than we started with, good cameraderie, new friends made and a great basis on which to go into 2010.

Martin Reed