ChemEng Soc beat Southside to Cup Glory

Back in April of last year, there was a vision. A vision shared by two chemical engineers; to start a sports legacy for their department. And so, having created a procrastinating nest of Imperial students revising for exams/hoping for a miracle, Max Fawcett and Will Batchelor laid the foundations, as captain and manager respectively, for the first Chemical Engineering football team.

Come October, the team had been formed. ChemEng students from all years turned out for the first ever match that this fledgling team would play, a pre-season friendly against Queen’s Tower Rangers. The team warmed up, psyched up, kicked off, and then duly lost 6-4. Not exactly the dream start that had been imagined.

While this defeat would have demoralised most teams, the men of ChemEng did not falter. With the manager drawing up new tactics, the team arrived at Hyde Park for the first game of the season against feared veterans Linstead Hall, and proceeded to comprehensively dominate the match (and literally send Linstead into mid-match crisis talks) to seal a 3-1 win.

The rise to the top had started. Throughout the first month of the season, ChemEng remained undefeated with a string of victories, catapulting them to the top of the league. But a shock 1-0 defeat to Pembridge and Parsons Hall in week 5 brought them crashing back to terra firma, bringing about a shaky run of form. Entering the season’s latter stages, ChemEng had only won two of the last five matches. The dream looked in peril, but ChemEng believed; the team rallied, impressively routing all of its remaining opponents to claim the league title with one game to spare!

However, the greatest challenge was yet to come – the cup final. Having progressed through the quarters and semis with decisive wins over Xenia and Beit, ChemEng arrived at the hallowed grounds of Harlington for the final. After a few drills and a quick warm-up, they kicked off against Southside. This match proved to be both the strangest and toughest yet; Lotanna Agu (the Yaya Touré of ChemEng) injuring himself in the line of duty after 20 minutes, Mayowa “Mario Balotelli” Okulate abusing that finesse button to score the only goal in the game at the 60 minute mark, before refusing to celebrate (“why always me?”), Sandy Nimmo trying, and failing, to skill the opposition striker as the last man just outside the box, forcing our keeper Ankush Nehra to perform a David De Gea-esque save to keep us ahead, and Jonathan Trofimov managing to instigate a “fracas” involving “fisticuffs” by just looking at someone (luckily it did not evolve into a “kerfuffle”), with the ref refusing to send anyone off because he had left his cards at home.

After a tense second half, under pressure from a valiant Southside team, the final whistle was blown, and ChemEng were the winners, claiming the Double for ChemEng in its first year of formation. Max, Will and the team had fulfilled that vision set out (not) so long ago.