After last week’s hypershambles, the coaches summoned us through Thursday’s sleet to an echoey gym in downtown Winnersh for some essential training. Hopefully the players would sweat out the toxins, emerging into the nothingy retail hinterlands of Berkshire with faculties unclouded by the bitterness of the past.
The idea was for the keeper to yell ‘SPACE’, prompting the defence and midfield to exploit the full dimensions of the pitch rather than to receive the ball in a potentially dangerous central position.
I’m not a good chess player, but perhaps this approach is analogous to the hypermodernist strategy of attacking on the flanks rather than through the middle, opting for something like Larsen’s Opening – utilising the peripheral pawns first – rather than a central attack through a more typical move such as the Queen’s Gambit.
If you expand, please don’t forget to compress. All the danger comes through the middle. Of course it does – the goals are centrally positioned. This means that any work on the flanks is always and obviously very much on the borders of relevance. We can nudge and shove the ball up and down the line, but that means nothing in the face of a Budapest Defence, a decent through ball or a Fried Liver Attack from Caversham.
Anyway, chess aside, we needed to play something resembling football rather than a shot at meaning in a dead letter office. Rest and recuperation from a difficult week at home, school or work is desirable and necessary, even biblical, but will have to be postponed to accommodate yet another win or loss: shame.
Have you ever wondered what God did on the seventh day? Brad Roberts has: ‘After seven days he was quite tired so God said “Let there be a day for picnics with wine and bread.” He gathered up some people he had made, created blankets and lay back in the shade. The people sipped their wine and what with God there they asked him questions like “Do you have to eat or get your hair cut in heaven? And if your eye got poked out in this life, will it be waiting up in heaven with your wife?”‘
On the way, I wanted to believe the auguries were good. As we passed the Bonwick Milling Heritage Consultancy (supporting owners and guardians of windmills) on Lines Road, we saw a flash of green in the grey winter sky: the parakeet of contested provenance. Were a pair released by Jimi Hendrix in 1960? Did they escape from Shepperton during some filming in 1951? Or have they been here much longer than that? Whichever way you look at it, whenever species proliferate they reach a tipping point at which it becomes acceptable to shoot them out of the sky.
When we eventually got to Woodley and the purgatorial lobby of The Goals Centre, the coaches were in bobble hats. Michael’s was swamp-green while Peter’s was an edgy yet warm and homely mixture of white, black and orange with BRONX woven into its central band. A static glare from Michael suggested we were slightly late for the warm up.
Once the game started, a marked improvement was evident in the team’s play as they whipped the ball across the pitch and down the line, but to little effect. Even Mulvaney’s nimiety of skill wasn’t granted much licence by Caversham’s tall and bustling defence, who in their dark red kits resembled Eddie Howe’s Bournemouth in their Championship winning season, closing down the opposition as if they were an independent cafe at a service station.
By half-time, it was 5-0 and Evan hadn’t even stepped on to the pitch proper. He showed some interesting flourishes, including an Ibrahimovic-style flick which nearly found the net, but didn’t quite warm up enough to find his rhythm. In the end, Jack scored an impressive goal – captured on film – but Wokingham could wrest very little from the wreckage of the first half.
This was a disappointing, chastening experience of being bombed out of the only cup competition we were left to compete in, the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy of youth football. We were left only to consider – with mystification and conjecture – the origins of the parakeet, what happens on a rest day in heaven and that enduring chestnut: concentration on the league.
Wilderspool Causeway 