Every week, come rain or shine, our small BAS walking football group gather together on a Tuesday morning at Horfield Leisure Centre. 

We have a catch up chat and collect the subs while waiting for everyone to turn up.  Andy or Kieron or Jason take us through some gentle warm up exercises and one of the Steves usually does the 'church notices' and reminds us of the main rules. 

We pick the teams and sort ourselves into 'Pinks' and 'Bibs' and go to our pitches to start playing walking football... and nearly every week that's when a little bit of magic seems to happen. 

Players, who 20 minutes earlier had struggled to do the gentle warm up exercise without clinging on to the fencing, will suddenly produce a burst of movement that would make any of the physios proud – or, even more impressively – perform some kind of triple salchow move before firing the ball into the back of the net past the flailing arms of the beaten keeper - usually Ron...

We've all seen and admired the top professionals when they do acrobatic back flips to express the sheer elation they feel when they score a goal. That same sense of pride and joy is no less intense for any of our players when they perform a tricky manoeuvre or score a match winning goal. 

Even better, we all get to feel it as that sense of joy spreads to the whole team and all the other players on the pitch as we stop open-mouthed while we take in what just happened – again.

I keep meaning to write to the Match of the Day people to tell them they've got it all wrong when they pick the goal of the month. It's not the technical skill or the distance of the shot that they should be judging it by - it should be measured by the amount of joy the goal brings. (And I think I've worked out the formula, if anyone is interested). 

But I digress - back to the Tribute.

PS: I've no idea how you perform a triple salchow or a double axel for that matter – I only know they exist because the sports commentators would tell us when they'd seen one!