As Caversham Kites emerged from the mists rolling in off the Kennet, leaving Sonning Lock behind them for the descent into Woodley, we prepared for the possibility of Evan being dropped to the bench after a decision he made last night when faced with one of the perennial dilemmas of life itself, never mind football: do I go training or do I go clubbing?
Would he opt for the path of freedom, and hedonistic abandon, or submit to a tackling drill – designed primarily for him – on the ill-lit astro turf of Maiden Erlegh?
And which careful, euphemistic words would I text to Coach Michael when, inevitably, he chooses the darkness of the local night spot and the neon of the dancefloor lights at the school disco? I opted for ‘event at school’ – to radio silence from the manager. Evan’s sleeve-pulling and two footed lunges would have to remain unremedied this week.
Word had got round the parents: ‘At least he didn’t tweet about it!’ offered Andrew with reassuring grace. Fears regarding Coach Michael, however, were to prove unfounded for he had made a choice of his own. ‘Can you help me today, Alex?’ asked Coach Peter in supplicatory scouse. ‘Yeah, sure. Where’s Michael?’
‘Oh, he’s off at the races. Last day of the flats. Big day, I think.’
Due to a trauma in the mid mandibles, however, I couldn’t talk much, or shout, and was on a high dosage of painkillers: it was probably just as well after last week’s public reprimand for overslabbing the instructions.
My role was reduced to glove fitter, shoelace man, sleeve reverser, coffee boy, nonsense fielder; I was to keep totally quiet about everything else.
FA censorship would cast its totalitarian spell, even to the extent that when the ref definitely misrecorded the final score (in our favour), I and the Caversham managers were powerless to persuade both him and the league official that it was a draw rather than a Wokingham win.
By way of an aside, Evan experienced another benign form of censorship this week when his class were asked to write a sentence about Donald Trump. ‘He’s an inappropriate man, but he did apologise’ wrote Evan before being asked by his teacher to cross out the second part of his sentence.
With Connor Mulvaney back from a string of christenings, we were hopeful of success against the Kites – until, that is, they soared into a seemingly unassailable 3-0 lead within 10 minutes while Connor, Mark and Evan were roistering on the sidelines.
After a triple substitution, we were soon heartened by the reality that Mulvaney is to football what Muller is to yoghurts: he will always find something special and put it in the corner.
By half-time, however, we were sinking like a Fenland fruit farmer in his East Anglian schloss. It was 4-1. We were in the silt and they were nonchalantly circling above. Or had they merely risen like ghosts whose graves and ‘monuments shall be the maws of kites?’ Could we deem them phantoms and send them down to a footballing slumber?
Could we fire some vanilla choco balls into their corners yet? Almost as soon as Connor had halved the deficit to make it 4-2, however, a freewheeling Caversham lad with a straggly bob executed a limpid strike into our corner, compromising the script.
With Coach Peter having been away on the christening tour with Connor, Evan’s performance seemed to be an enigma to him. Last season, Evan’s tackling had become tentative. This season, in Peter’s absence, it has become bold and obtrusive. So when Peter says ‘Tackle, Evan! Keep going!’ he is effectively asking him to up the intensity from impassioned to potent/dangerous rather than – as he might have intended – from limp/misguided to accurate and effective. As a result, Evan absolutely steamed into a tackle at full-pelt and with both feet off the floor (a straight red in any other game). ‘I don’t know what to say about that’ Peter said quietly to me, with – I think – concealed pride.
So, at 5-2 down, Evan managed to commit a legal tackle and won the ball in his own half before going on a run, eventuating in him outwitting three or four of their players before shooting past the ‘keeper to make it 5-3 to Caversham. Pride and emotion was duly suppressed for the benefit of the FA. With Connor now off the pitch again, Wokingham & Emmbrook counter-intuitively went into ‘park the bus’ mode, playing so deep it was almost philosophical. Peter tried to force them away from their own goal: ‘JACK! Push Evan out! He’s supposed to be attacking! Push him out!’ Eventually, forward momentum resulted in man of the match Jack Parry prodding it home himself to make it 5-4 before Mark Sexton added insult to Caversham injury by outfoxing their AWOL goalkeeper to level the scores right at the end.
As a curious postscript, there was total disagreement about the final score among all parties. I approached the ref (having assiduously kept a record and totally sure that it was 5-5) who said: ‘It was 6-5 to you.’ I then approached the Caversham managers who thought that it was 6-5 to them and canvassed their players, all of whom confirmed it was only 5-5. I told them the ref had marked it down as 6-5 to us but that I would correct him, to which they said: ‘Yeah, it was 5-5.’ But the league official and the referee himself would not be moved, despite my protestations and insistence that there was no way that we had won the game and it was definitely, definitely 5-5 and a draw.
Sometimes (most of the time) we can’t win and sometimes – it seems – we can’t lose. Today we couldn’t even draw. The official result was 6-5 to Wokingham but for the record books I make it 5 apiece and a brilliant game.
Wilderspool Causeway 