Wilderspool Causeway

After a barren run which is now officially longer than The Grateful Dead’s encore on New Year’s Eve 1978, we lined up against Reeves Rangers, under a punishing sun, for our final game in Woodley.

‘I HATE this team’ reflected Jack’s dad, a mild mannered vegan from the Black Country. My thoughts were not dissimilar, but your perspective will depend on what you think of ‘anti-football.’ Is there a style of play which, though within the rules, is worthy of condemnation?

Thinking back to ‘Crazy Gang’ era Wimbledon, I remember admiring how a small club from South London could rise from non-league to topple one of the best Liverpool sides ever and win the FA Cup.

When you look into their story more closely, however, you realise the extent to which their success depended not merely on a liberal interpretation of the rules, but on a none-too-inconspicuous degree of criminality.

The dressing room culture was designed to eliminate any trace of weakness. John Scales’ car was torched as a ‘prank’; as a semi-reasonable human being, he didn’t quite cut the mustard in the eyes of Wally Downes, Vinnie Jones and John Fashanu, whose wrong sides could take you down avenues from which you would struggle to emerge.

When the ball’s in the air, the contest is physical – a fight to see who can gain control of it as it drops. If you’re willing to punch, elbow, bollock tug…you’ll get it. Reeves Rangers made the ball into an Alpine Accentor (a bird rather than a dodgy computer or model of Honda, believe it or not), propelling it so high it appeared to merge into a cumulonimbus backdrop, only then to drop in time for a striker to steer it home from the ‘mixer’.

It’s hard to play football when the ball’s twenty feet above your head – it’s obvious that you have to play the man rather than the ball. For Wokingham to adapt their tactics to do this, though, would be nigh on impossible. At the best of times, calling to the players is tantamount to trying to whistle a fling of whimbrel in from the sea. The sound gets lost and even if it didn’t, it would be filtered through an 8-year-old’s brain to basically mean the square root of f’ all.

Reeves won with time to spare, despite a footballing fightback from Wokingham which brought the score back to 3-2 and led to dominance of possession in the second half, a futile stat when faced with the ultimate short-termism of the long ball.

Anyway, as a post-season reflection on his teammates, I decided to deliver Evan the exact questions put to Ryan Sessegnon in the Fulham v Ipswich Town programme this week:

Q.) Who would you least like to fight with?

Evan: Josh because his dad’s very tough.

Q.) You have £100. Who would you buy a present for?

Evan: I’d buy Connor some trainers because he wears rusty Tiempos at the moment.

Q.) Who’s your best mate at Wokingham & Emmbrook?

Evan: Mark because we grew up at nursery together.

Q.) Who’s the teacher’s pet?

Evan: Me because our coaches are better than the other teams’ coaches. All they do is get their teams to boot it, but our coaches teach us to do skills and not boot it.

Q.) Who has the worst haircut?

Evan: Can I base that on a player who isn’t in our team? Balotelli.

Q.) Which player is management material?

Evan: Um, I think Mark because he knows what to do but never actually does it.

Q.) Who would be most annoying to be stuck in a lift with?

Evan: Ciara because she’d be chasing me around the place.

Q.) Which player is the vainest?

Evan: Me because I love to see what I look like and if I look bad or not.

Q.) Who’s the easiest to wind up?

Evan: Ciara. Every time I disagree with her she cries.

Q.) Who would you ask for help in a quiz?

Evan: Amelia because she knows almost everything. If it was a maths quiz I’d pick Jack because his dad’s a Maths teacher.

Q.) What’s your favourite memory of this season?

Evan: Scoring the first goal of this season and the season before.

Q.) What are the team’s aims for next season when it’s 7-a-side?

Evan: This is a target for the coaches: stick the players in the positions they want to play in or are best at.