1 week ago
17
Park Tavern, Finsbury Park
Whatever else you might say about the Park Tavern, you can unequivocally say this: it is, without question, the closest pub to the five-a-side pitches where my team DisOrient FC used to play every Tuesday night from 2011 to 2016.
Look, I’m not going to pretend that my team’s love of the Park Tavern didn’t start out as a marriage of convenience. It was close. It served Guinness. And it had (just about) functioning toilets. There were, quite clearly, “better” pubs in the area, the kind that get in Time Out lists. While the nearby Faltering Fullback had an exterior draped in foliage, served decent Thai food and boasted a multilevel beer garden, the Park Tavern’s chief talking point was that it still had an advert up above the urinals for the 2001 PlayStation game Hogs of War. Every time I had a wee there, I was forced to contemplate the strapline: “Who’s got the biggest weapon?”
But after 40 minutes getting trounced on the pitch by some or other group of bigger men, our team didn’t have the energy for traipsing anywhere else. And so the Park Tavern became our second home. It helped that it was never very busy. That meant we could always get a table at which to dissect how, exactly, we had just lost 7-1 to a team that only had four players for the first 25 minutes. Over two, three and then inevitably four pints, we would drill down into our performances with chat about formations, marking, playing through the thirds. All of which was utterly pointless because the next week one of us would turn up without their kit and have to play in chinos.
Over time – and many more pints of Guinness – things began to change. I don’t know if it’s fair to say we got good, but we certainly worked out the mobile numbers of other people who were good. The Park Tavern became not just the scene of constant gallows humour and grief but one of joy and triumph too. On the night we won the B League we cracked open the barman’s finest fizz, which I think was a bottle of prosecco that cost £14. The landlord, who turned out to be a cracking fella, even let us put our trophy up behind the bar, although it did get hidden by a bottle of Baileys over the years, and I can’t say that was entirely accidental on their part. By this point other teams were following our lead and the pub seemed a lot livelier. Maybe they didn’t want to play favourites.
Given that we drank at the Park Tavern on a weekly basis, I thought I had stories galore to tell about the place. But aside from one of us once spotting Beppe from EastEnders in the toilets (did he have a bigger weapon?), I’m not sure I do. Sorry to go all cheesy, but what I really take from those days is the immense friendship formed between the seven regulars who played and drank there – one that is still going strong today. Surely that’s the true measure of a great pub.
At first the locals at the bar seemed rather bemused by this bunch of younger lads turning up in full kit. We weren’t the usual clientele. There might even have been a bit of grumbling, and I wouldn’t blame them for that. There weren’t many pubs left in areas like Finsbury Park that served the old guard. But gentrifiers tend to crave change – they want craft ales and natural wines and spicy chicken wings with hot honey glaze. We didn’t want any of these things. Apart from maybe getting a new freshener for the urinals, we didn’t want the Park Tavern to change one bit.
