Wilderspool Causeway

“Dad, do I have any peculiararities?” Note the elision of ‘peculiar’ and ‘rare.’ At this point, I could mention the beer distribution racket he set up at Morten’s birthday party, wandering around with a fishing net and charging £1 to fetch cans of Kronenburg from the paddling pool while the in(or reluctant-to-be)capacitated from London blissed out in the shade. Or I could mention some surprising tendencies: cueing up Frank Sinatra on Spotify and singing along to ‘My Way’, for example. Unpredictability is a virtue of the lad, as is his encyclopaedic memory – a blessing and a worry.

On the football field, being hard to read is a blessing, an advantage he exercised when bursting through the Tilehurst midfield, cutting inside and laying the ball through for a goal – at times he’s been designated a candidate for a change of pace: capable of every skill, but not always of the tempo adjustment to make them truly count.

In this game, we got off to an absolute flying, rip-roaring start with Josh Dance tearing through the middle of the pitch to bear down on goal before despatching a shot decisively into the corner of the net. Andrew Parry – Emmbrook Maths wizard – and I assumed managerial duties in the absence of the usual coaches who were at an important family wedding in the north country.

So far, so good, but the little scamps from Centre Skills changed up their tactics in such a radical manner that we were left crudely undermined, mere shadows of our former competent selves. Almost as soon as we crossed the goalscoring frontier, they reassessed their priorities and seemed to alight on brute pragmatism as a useful platform for success, sending balls soaring into the Reading stratosphere before they plummeted beyond the ken of our unwitting defence for a prowling Centre Skills attacker to knock seamlessly into the net.

This pattern repeated itself several times, despite the aforementioned consolatory efforts of Evan and co., leaving the temporary management crew bewildered and denuded of practicable ideas: you can’t ask 8-year-olds to head the ball back into space, and nor can you ask them to ‘read the bounce’, an advanced skill known to scholars of AFC Wimbledon and other professional clubs, but certainly not to the average volk. All we could do was scrabble about among the crumpled spreadsheets and hope for the best, before accepting it wouldn’t arrive and heading back to Emmbrook for a Beck’s and a flavoured Volvic.