Wilderspool Causeway

According to one of the strangest charts I’ve ever seen, published in The Daily Telegraph, today’s teams represent the best two postcodes in the country in which to enjoy a high quality of life. Apparently, average earnings are high, the schools are OK and nothing else really matters. You certainly wouldn’t think it possible to drive on the Reading Road or any of its tributaries and think ‘this is a nice place.’ Nobody would do that, surely. Last week, though, I chatted to a grandmother from Worcestershire. She said ‘they don’t have facilities like this in Worcester.’ So there you go.

Today the teams took a break from The Amsterdam Arena and the Olympiastadion and played at the damningly named Camp Nou. There was an element of confusion before the game because one of the parents (the type who has seen enough before they’ve even woken up) arrived in an orange tracksuit and conducted a training drill with the waiting Wokingham and Emmbrook players, also dressed in orange. He was dressed appropriately for the task he had set himself. The ref said ‘Excuse me coach, we’re going to start the game’ to which the orangeman replied ‘I’m not the coach’ and carried on with the drill.

Sometimes people take action. They get involved and they get mobile, however ill-advisedly. They thrust themselves into a zone of animation. They bark and cajole or speak quietly if they deem that to be a more soothing and therapeutic coaching pathway. Unfortunately, as we know, at least 99.9% of instructions to 6 year-olds are redundant. If you tell them to do one thing, they’ll forget to do lots of things. If you tell them to do lots of things, increasing the inputs, you just increase the randomness of the output.

When the game started, Wokingham reassuringly conceded a soft goal in an extremely short space of time indeed. The game then sort of degenerated into niggly nothingness. There were more free kicks than in any of the previous games put together and you wondered whether the players were battling for the Telegraph summit, cognisant of their rival status as top towns in Britain. The Woodley players seemed to commit more fouls, but the Oranges committed the more decisive ones. Evan started the game on the bench and then played in goal until half time, making a couple of good saves before handling outside the area and conceding Woodley’s second.
After the break he played up front, and quickly latched on to a through ball, hammering it into the corner to make it 2-1. In Woodley’s next attack, one of their strikers was felled just outside the box and scored from the resulting free kick. Connor Mulvaney then put an extraordinary shift in, scoring two goals to wrestle the game back again before a ridiculous rugby tackle right at the end resulted in Woodley scoring a penalty (taken twice due to incursion) to win the game. The Woodley fans were jubilant, but were cryptically targeted by the Wokingham faithful with an adapted version of Love etc by The Pet Shop Boys:

DON’T HAVE TO BE
a big bucks Hollywood star
DON’T HAVE TO DRIVE
a super car to get far
DON’T HAVE TO WEAR
a smile much colder than ice
DON’T HAVE TO BE
beautiful but it’s nice

YOU NEED MORE than the Gerhard Richter hanging on your wall,
a gulf stream jet to take you door to door
somewhere chic near The Bulmershe School
You need more, you need more, you need more, you need more,
YOU NEED LOVE.