Wilderspool Causeway

i.m. Jo Trott

This is a difficult report to write. Jo took a great interest in Evan’s football and is one of the few people for whom we consciously play and write. That won’t change.

Today we were up against a team we had never faced before, a team from the affluent Chelsea Belt whose fans came bedecked in the most luxurious outdoor clobber available to man, as if they were expecting at any moment to be scooped up by private jet for an Esquire fashion shoot in the Pyrenees or by Lake Geneva. Woodley wasn’t really the place for them. Their pre-match banter was arcane, esoteric and difficult to latch on to. Oh no, it wasn’t actually: despite the most outlandish sartorial flair, it consisted of a series of mock/cock-er-nee standards:

‘Your boys done well to be fair.’
‘Yeah he’s a lovely fella mate. Diamond.’
‘Brilliant, yeah. Lovely jubbly mate. Gutted, I was.’
‘Lovely guy.’
‘Great fella’
‘Lovely stuff.’
Lovely.’
‘Bang on, mate.’
‘Yeah.’

I wondered who the source of all this loveliness was. Jose Mourinho, presumably. I looked down at my supermarket jeans, boots inherited a few years ago and hoodie from a discontinued high school drama called ‘Britannia High’ and thought…well I didn’t know what to think actually so I left the catalogue boys to their endearing London-based banter and watched from a wet and lonely vantage point, not noticing through the drizzle that my friends in the Wokingham and Emmbrook crew were amassed behind the railings at the opposite end of the pitch: huddled, dishevelled and half South African.

Equally clueless and ill-positioned, Wokingham spent the first few minutes (with Evan on the bench, I might add), bumbling around in the club beanie hats which had been misguidedly issued before the game. They looked brilliant in the warm up. I deleted sacred videos in a doomed attempt to free up space on my phone to capture them, but they were simply not right for the match. Anything which makes the experience more comfortable should be left in the bag, surely. That’s for after the match. When you’re under pressure, you need to generate the warmth from the effort you put in; if you start off freezing, being made warm artificially just won’t help you. On Thursday, Evan came home and said that during the Great Fire of London, ‘Samuel Pepys buried Parmesan, wine and his papers’ in the ground. In a strange moment as an 18-year-old, I bought a hardback biography of Samuel Pepys which I never read. I hurried to the index, but there was no mention of the cheese in question. Still, is it not a similar principle? In times of pressure, get rid of every extraneous encumbrance and rely on fight and ingenuity to survive: a slingshot. Bury your Parmesan.

Wokingham and Emmbrook drifted about meaninglessly while Marlow, in their Chelsea-style blue shirts and Chelsea-inflected accents, carved us apart with ease and alacrity, cruising into an unassailable 4-0 lead in no time at all. Things went from bad to worse and by half time it was 8-1, with only a deflected shot from Jack Parry for the coaches to seize on by way of consolation during the team talk. Without wishing to be too critical, perhaps the first good decision of the day was to put Evan and Connor on the pitch at the same time. Soon after the whistle, Evan ran down the left flank and hit a brilliant left-footed lob over the keeper. A couple of minutes later he found a bit of space at the edge of the box and side-footed the ball into the corner before Connor seized the initiative, scoring a hat-trick- including an outstanding left-footed effort from range- as Marlow, bereft of subs, began to tire. This is when the Marlow coach began to earn his money.

Jurgen Klopp currently has a hamstring crisis to deal with at Liverpool; not only that, he has to engage with Sam Silly Sausage of Sunderland in the media. But at least Klopp’s problems are real. In typical Chelsea style, Marlow began to invent problems, skilfully arresting Wokingham’s progress and momentum. Suddenly, players were hitting the floor. I heard Evan lash out at one after a corner: ‘You’re just on the floor because you want a penalty.’ Suddenly, the goalkeeper had a problem and it was crucial for the coach to enter the fray for some much needed ‘glove adjustment time.’

Neither the problems, nor the time, really existed. During a New Year’s Eve training session I told Evan that we’d be going home ‘in a minute.’ He replied ‘Is that a real minute or a notional minute?’ I had introduced him to the idea of a ‘notional minute’ because of his tendency to count to sixty when told something will happen ‘in a minute.’ Surely it’s good to learn that words are often devoid of content, have pragmatic rather than literal meaning and are often empty signs designed to guide you towards some kind of holding pen while adults decide what to do. So if the ref was asked if he was going to add time on due to stoppages, he would have made the best noises he could but the fact was that the Amsterdam Arena had to be evacuated by 10:30. Notional minutes were in abundance. I have since tried to introduce the idea of a ‘notional biscuit’ too, but that hasn’t been quite so successful.

Marlow were soon able to find a rhythm of their own and score a few more goals, sending their well groomed acolytes back to Buckinghamshire with the fairly innocuous-seeming pride they arrived with, as well as a few shots across the bow courtesy of Evan and Connor.