Wilderspool Causeway

In training, a lot is lost in translation as the players try to decode the coaches’ simple messages and put them into practise. The following day, memory warps their meaning even further. Last week, a day after training, Evan said ‘We were learning about our stigma.’ I always like to reinforce Michael and Peter’s messages, if possible, but this was a tricky one.

Did they go on a reverse-psychology rant at all the players, picking out their weaknesses and oddities so that they could face and own them?  Did they say, after a particularly dull session,  ‘Yes you do live in a trailer with your mom and you do have a dumb friend named Cheddar Bob who shoots himself in the leg with his own gun’, Eminem style?

Or did they turn the stigma message against themselves, Al Pacino style, as a cautionary tale? ‘I look around, I see these young faces and I think, I made every wrong choice a middle age man can make. I pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me. And lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror.

You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches. So is football…On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our finger nails for that inch!‘

Stigma? So what did they mean by that, Evan? ‘Stigma. You know, when you run in every minute of the game and not just some of the minutes.’ OK, yes. Stamina. They were teaching you about stamina and trying to help you to keep going because you’ll need to do so against Caversham this week. I’m with you now.

When you’re 7, it seems you’re permanently the Bob Harris (not the whispering sort) played by Bill Paxton, drifting around Evan’s favourite city in Lost in Translation. Tokyo’s his favourite place even though he hasn’t been there.  He likes the overwhelming atmosphere of the bright lights and the fact that there’s a five-a-side pitch on top of a skyscraper. He’s too young to factor in the loneliness of ‘a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows.’

The other message from training was that of ‘shape.’ Now, whenever the goalkeeper gets the ball they are supposed to yell ‘SHAPE!’ as a cue to the full backs to provide width. This is intended to avoid the regrettable and common scenario of the ball being rolled out into a central area to be seized by predatory opposition attackers and rolled into the net with ease. This was all very well, but we knew with certainty what would prevail in the game: the Certainty of Chance.

With prompting, they did remember both of the key messages: stamina and shape. As a result, they were able to bounce back from a 4-1 deficit to go into  half-time with the score at 4-3 after two excellent opportunistic strikes from Mark Sexton put us back in the game.

Michael seemed animated in his delivery of the team talk, but behind a metal fence rather than netting it was difficult to work out the general thrust, let alone the detail, of his message. I would hope for pragmatism mixed in with the idealism.  As Uncle Jon observed, ‘If you mix a dodgy batch of cement, you get shouted at. That’s real life.’ In this case they jointly mixed the dodgy batch, so hopefully they were collectively encouraged and reprimanded rather than individually given the hairdryer.

With two minutes to go, leitwolf Connor Mulvaney’s  hat-trick – including an exceptional left-footed loft into the top right-hand corner – had made the score 6-6, but I had a sinking feeling: a ‘gut feeling’ that the Mapledurhamites would score a winner in the final seconds and we would exit the Plate.

I’ve had to accept though, in recent years, that my gut feelings are often wrong and my ability to misinterpret situations is probably without limit. The Trents, now in the toxic wastes of Woodley rather than the cleaner air of Caversham Heights, did indeed score a winner in the final seconds. I knew it.

At kick-off, Michael said something  which was music to my ears: ‘Evan, when you get the ball, just shoot.’ A few seconds later, Evan sidestepped a midfielder and curled the ball high towards the goal, albeit fairly close to the ‘keeper who couldn’t quite get hold of it: 7-7.

Penalties. Evan put his hand up to take one, and I just managed to scramble the camera into gear to record him slotting it into the corner. The Trents took their next two penalties well, as did Connor and Mark for us, and we were into the endgame of Sudden Death. It seems an odd call for the ref to make to seven-year-olds, but it reflected the reality of win/lose that was just a kick away.

The Caversham player hit the ball well but centrally, and Connor – utility player extraordinaire – tipped the ball over the bar to send Wokingham into the collective Klinsmann slides and the next round of the plate. Michael concluded in his post-match comments that his cat would not have to be kicked today, while our journey back through the drizzle to the car was complicated by player-of-the-match Evan running strangely out of his way and directly into a  lamppost, proving the truth of  Neil Finn’s dictum that ‘It doesn’t pay to make predictions/ sleeping on an unmade bed/ finding out wherever there is comfort there is pain/ only one step away/ like four seasons in one day.’