Wilderspool Causeway

‘She really gives everything she has, every week: I mean that.’ That was a response not to Amelia or Ciara of Wokingham & Emmbrook – though the same could be said of them – but to Iris’ ecclesiastical antics last Sunday as, once again, she dragged her little chair into the priest’s line of vision and began to imitate his posture and movement, adding her own swaying meditative flourishes and Upsy Daisy dances to the liturgy.

And it’s true: she gives what she can. This morning, with Evan suffering a crisis of nerves, incapacitated by the encroaching prospect of Woodley Zebras to the point that he was willing to consider hanging up his Indigo Venoms for good, Iris arrived to reassuringly press something into his hands: ‘Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have I will give unto thee’ – in this case, dishwasher tablets.
‘OK, Evan? Tablets!’

He was bewildered and just marginally grateful enough to retreat from the precipice of early retirement. Just when you feel like you’re living in an aviary – with all that squawking – Iris will give you something to cling on to: quite literally. You may not know where she got it from, what it is or why, but whenever despair threatens to strengthen its grip, Iris will invariably scamper off and retrieve something for you from the domestic hinterlands. Sometimes the intention to be a supportive presence is support enough.

One Monday night, large remote controlled aeroplanes – of the sort that can induce fear – were being flown on the pitch next to ours. Part way through the game, one of them plummeted onto our pitch and the owner walked tentatively over to inspect the wreckage. He seemed ashen-faced at the loss of his plane rather than in embarrassment that he could have killed us. We stood there in a silent ‘WTF’ stance, until one of our players defused the tension: ‘Have you found the black box, mate?’

Children don’t have these mechanisms; they can’t contextualise experience or reduce it to the realm of ‘harmless banter’. Hence the fear of Woodley. The sun was hanging a little too high for comfort today. We appreciate it. It puts one heck of a shift in for us. It’s the source of all life, for no reward. It can send us a photon in eight minutes, about the time it takes Evan to locate the front door from the porch.

This is strange because on a football pitch, he can sometimes thread the ball through the eye of a needle, spot a pass which removes 3 of their players from the game or intuitively drop into exactly the right position to thwart an attack It’s just that when he’s put one sock on, or he’s part way through a door, or he’s eaten half his Shreddies, he’ll need reminding that there’s more to come from him, that there’s another side to the equation, even though it’s as clear to him as the dark side of the moon. You have to go through the door, put the other sock on: finish your Shreddies.

Woodley are managed by a compact, diminutive man with a squint. They cruised into a 3-0 lead and the comfortable attitude of victors: parents began to praise our redundant efforts and ceased to celebrate their sons’ triumphs. That was before Connor entered the game and scored one of the most outlandishly brilliant left-footed free kicks you could imagine, curling it high and with power from his own half. For most of the game, it could have gone either way: when Connor left the pitch with 10 minutes to go, it was 6-4 to Woodley.

Even Coach Peter – relentlessly supportive – couldn’t put a positive spin on the catastrophic capitulation of the last 10 minutes. ‘What did we practise in training. Why didn’t we do it?’ It was one of those situations in which you feel chastened just by virtue of listening. But surely that’s wrong: It’s only those in the game who know why something’s difficult. In the end, you have to keep your head up like a golden oriole, whatever the score. As Michael Stipe reflected, ‘I used to think, as birds take wing, they sing through life so why can’t we?’