‘I don’t mean this crudely, but do you have any resentments from the past?’ You had to feel for the man facing this question as he stood in the cafe queue after the game. He was in for one heck of an intense coffee session, starting with an opening delivery which is absolutely unplayable. If you say ‘yes’, you’ve opened yourself up. If you say ‘no’, you know you’ve lied and if you pause, you give the game away. It didn’t help that the guy asking the question looked about 18 and placed a suspect coffee order (decaf mocha) while the man with potential resentments was about 50 and ordered a much more solid americano.
I overheard snippets of the conversation which followed and it appeared to be some kind of mentoring session, with the older man surely a reluctant ‘mentee.’ I heard comments like ‘really growing’, ‘really flourishing in his faith’, ‘lacks spiritual ambition’ and ‘Just a bit of feedback for you. You spoke for slightly too long for what they could take in. Just one thing I thought could be better, that would be good for you to know.’
Evan’s coaches don’t tend to offer ‘feedback’ (criticism), without first checking that the player is ready to hear it. He played well, making some important contributions in attack, but felt disappointed that he hadn’t scored or played as big a part in the game as he did last week. When his manager said ‘well played today’ after the game, Evan suggested that he wasn’t altogether happy with his performance. I saw the manager’s eyes light up at this, but he just said ‘OK, so what were you not happy about?’ before listening to Evan’s answer and then saying ‘Right, well I think one thing you could try is this…’.
That’s not to dismiss the faith theme altogether. As The Boss observed, ‘Forty days and nights of rain have washed this land/ Jesus said the money changers in this temple will not stand.’ The lady who served Iris and me a burger and a bacon roll before the game was certainly not intent on exploiting Woodley’s sacred ground for commercial gain. We were charged £2 for both delicious items when the advertised price was £5.20. Happy days. We ambled over to where Evan and friends were already warming up ready to face AFC Caversham, a bunch of mop tops from north of the river. Could we repeat the success of last week’s resounding win against Reeves Rangers?
While Evan and the Oranges were playing in front of us, Iris was post-burger, running around kicking a Peppa Pig ball with Ian Butler, Ciara’s dad. He essentially formed a crèche as the game developed, chasing all over the park with the little brothers and sisters and not stopping until the game was over. He’s a very generous guy but I also wonder if he was a bit bored by the match, and to be honest I couldn’t blame him.
The pitch was bobbly, to say the least, and the left side of it seemed to exert a gravitational force, drawing most players into its corridor of frustration; Evan tried to find space up front, but our midfielders couldn’t ‘get out’ of the throng of players to release the ball. It was quite a scrappy game, certainly not one for the scouts and purists. Connor scored an excellent long range free-kick, but the three other goals were tapped in after unlucky rebounds and ricochets.
So it was a very encouraging win (2 on the bounce now), but with an element of frustration tucked under the surface. This continued while listening in to the faith mentor in the cafe afterwards, though it was quite amusing to see the young enthusiast’s mum arrive to pick him up an hour later and address the older man: ‘Thank you for meeting him. It’s really lovely of you to do that. He said you’d been trying to get together for a few years.’ Good bit of mothering, that.
Wilderspool Causeway 