In most soccer matches a hat-trick is cause for celebration. But the top scorer in a weekend game at Halton, England, staggered off the pitch after scoring 109 goals.

He and 21 other players had just broken the world record for marathon soccer matches. The two teams, one from Royal Air Force Base at Halton, the other from staff of the famous paraplegics hospital at Stock Mandeville, kicked off at 10 a.m. on Saturday.

The game finished at lunchtime on Sunday. The total duration of 27 hours 45 minutes beat the previous marathon soccer record, set up by R.A.F. Changi base in Singapore, by 44 minutes. Final score was R.A.F. Halton 233, Stoke Mandeville Hospital 141. And when the players staggered off at the end of their marathon, they'd worn out eight referees and two Visnews cameramen.

SYNOPSIS: At a Royal Air Force station just outside London, the local station commander kicked off for what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary game of soccer.

The time was ten o'clock on Saturday. The R.A.F. team, in the dark strip, were the first to score. And at ten o'clock on Sunday morning they were still scoring. Their opponents were a team from the staff of the world-famous paraplegics hospital at Stoke Mandeville. And the two sides had set out to break the world record for marathon soccer matches. To achieve their aim, they had to play an ordinary ninety minute game -- plus a further twenty-six hours of extra time.

By nightfall on Saturday, the scoreline read in terms of scores of goals and by dawn on Sunday in terms of hundreds. With a temperature drop of something like forty degrees fahrenheit, the players had a problem keeping warm. But for those injured there was the consolation of attention from a touchline nurse -- the sort of consideration not available to professional footballers. Still the scoring went on -- with the R.A.F. side passing the two-hundred-goal mark. The previous marathon soccer record was set at another R.A.F. base -- at Changi in Singapore. To beat it the players in the Halton game each had to run several score miles.

There referee, the eighth one to supervise the game, blew for full-time after twenty-seven hours and forty-five minutes -- forty-four minutes better than the existing record. Top scorer Jimmy Dodds of the R.A.F. side was chaired off after hitting a hundred and nine goals. He helped his side to victory by a suitably extravagant margin -- two hundred and thirty-three goals to a hundred and forty-one.