Today is cup final day. P.S.B. Riverside, the football team sponsored by the Pet Shop Boys, have reached the final of the Mid-Hens Rural Minors League. Facing them are another team of under-16s, Bury Rangers, who each look about three foot taller and who have already beaten P.S.B. Riverside twice this season. For the first time both Neil and Chris have turned up to see a match (along with Chris' sister, Vicki, some friends, and Bubbles, the dog who looks so "cute" on the inner sleeve of "Introspective" but spends this afternoon running around disobediently). Neil and Chris are both huddled into the "dugout" (the bit that looks like a bus stop with a very low roof where managers always sit chewing gum on the TV) awaiting the 2.00 kick off. Tension is building.

"I'll be devastated if we lose," murmurs Chris.

"They'd better win," agrees Neil, joking that if he's managed to get out of bed on a Sunday the least the team can do is to win their match.

The Pet Shop Boys have been sponsoring this team for about a year. The idea came from their assistant Peter Andrea's (who, you may remember, took the photo on the sleeve of "Disco''). His brother, Paul, plays for the team and when their previous sponsors pulled out at the end of the last season Pete suggested to the Pet Shop Boys that they should take over. "We were quite up for it," recalls Chris, "because we thought 'oh good, we can design a kit'. That's how it all started. What we really

wanted to do is have some kind of Giorgio Armani number."

In the end that proved impossible - they approached manufacturers like Adidas to see if they could make a strip in the colors of the "Introspective" sleeve but there wasn't time so in the end they had to get standard kits.

In the program, which says that "in their first season in the league" P.S.B. Riverside have "proved worthy contenders and challengers for honors", it announces that Neil and Chris "try to attend the team's games". This is nearly true. Chris has been down to watch P.S.B. Riverside play about a dozen times - "it's quite a nice thing to do on a bracing Sunday afternoon, go to a football ground"

- but today is Neil's first visit. "My involvement has been more on a marketing level up till now," he jokes, explaining that for him "it's a long way to travel" (P.S.B. Riverside are based in Chestnut, just north of London). This is in fact the first football match Neil has been to since 1973 when he saw Tottenham Hotspur play. "I wish I'd come before," he says with surprise a couple of minutes into the first half. "It's quite good."

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