Wilderspool Causeway

‘David Fairclough never cried.’ Coach Michael’s closing rebuke, buried in Scouse folklore, was probably designed to fall on deaf ears. A true estimation of the footballing and emotional weaknesses on display today would have been too much to bear, like looking into the face of God is supposed to be.

Previous encounters with Caversham have generally been more favourable (even including our best ever result: an 11-0 win in which Evan scored a hat-trick), but today Wokingham & Emmbrook went to pieces in such style that the main parental and coaching objective was to spot who was next for the emotional quicksand. Three players dissolved into tears mid-game, one of whom resisted substitution with the determination of Swampy holding out against the Newbury bypass, face contorted against change.

Perhaps this reflected Wokingham’s outlook in general: meandering and philosophical. Driving down Miles Road before the game, I mentioned that on Wednesday I ran along it as part of a strange Woodley loop which ended in horrible stomach cramps: “What were you running from?”, asked Evan. Nothing,  I replied (though that wasn’t entirely true – I had spotted a former colleague pulling into the Loddon Vale Tesco Extra car park I started from).”OK. Were you running from or to something?” Neither. But did he have a point somewhere, albeit unwittingly?

Though it wasn’t evident on the pitch,  Caversham had their own crisis to contend with before choosing their Saturday bridge over the Thames, probably opting for the big boy: Caversham Bridge itself. In midweek, their best player thumped a teammate in the face and was therefore suspended for today’s action. Their moment of catharsis was in the past, now, and seemed to have been distilled into a sense of common purpose characterised by ruthless and fluent football.

After the game, as already noted, the coaches couldn’t quite approach today’s play head on, and nor can I. Instead, they ranged across the years for useful analogies. We needed to be more like Wimbledon in 1988. We needed to be more stoical, like David Fairclough. We needed to remember Pat Van Den Hauwe (in my opinion) – he didn’t cry either and to this day he takes care of Everton’s walking footballers, holding his head high in the launderettes and bakeries of Bootle after leaving the questionable dealings and unfortunate diseases of the murky underworld behind him to embrace a new future thanks to the support of visionary Toffee Denise Barrett-Baxendale.

We might as well let it out; turn the experience into a watershed, catharsis, wholesale renunciation of football. Perhaps the only way to rebuild is to truly collapse, to lose your way completely in the cul-de-sacs of Reading’s south-of-the-river suburbs, succumbing to at least two of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, kites and blossom notwithstanding.

Post-script: an extra training session was called today near Marjorie’s tree, Cantley Park – Aslan is on the move.