Lawyers gutted at final defeat

The English legal profession's domination of the European stage was almost neatly matched on the football pitch recently after London Lawyers FC narrowly missed out on claiming the coveted European Lawyers Football Cup at a tournament held in Frankfurt.

Having beaten Bilbao (4-1), Rome (2-0 with three Italians sent off to live up to their professional footballers' temperamental stereotype), the Hague (4-0) and Livorno (2-0), the team found itself in the final against Budapest.

They went one down early on after 'a cross fortuitously swirled into the net' - this part of the report we received may well have been written by the team's goalie, we suspect - and despite sustained pressure, the Londoners failed to equalise, with four Hungarians booked for time-wasting as they 'hung on desperately' (that part was probably written by the strikers).

Lining up before the first game were: back row (l-r) Mark Duncan (Latham & Watkins), Ritchie Hinton (Reynolds Porter Chamberlain), Ciaran Hickey (Landwell), captain Matthew Smith (Slaughter and May), Neil Gillard (Richards Butler), Luke Mines (Linklaters), Alejandro Worthington (Barlow Lyde & Gilbert), Marc Da Costa (Richard Freeman); front row (l-r) Chris Groves (Reynolds Porter Chamberlain), Richard Pecha (Lovells), Andrew Jolly (Slaughter and May), Mike Morris (Greenwoods), Marc Chowrimootoo (White & Case).

Meanwhile, in a blatant and entirely successful attempt to curry favour with us, Hill Dickinson in Manchester has sent us this picture of partner Mike Morrison (left) attempting to play keepie-uppie to 'celebrate' his work on advising Leicester City manager Micky Adams on a new three-year contract with the club.

Either that or Mr Adams demanded some kind of innovative no header, no fee agreement.

LINKS: www.londonlawyersfc.com