Wilderspool Causeway

With Iris in tow (and in fine conversational form) we were in the territory of trying to eat Hula Hoops while wearing mittens and constantly speculating about the paths of planes and vapour trails in the sky above. She thought they might collide, and I wondered if Sandhurst’s Lord of the Skies Chris McCann had been trusted with a debut at Swanwick, a youngster off the bench and in control of the corridors. Other parents then expanded the scope of the conversation to include transport in general, asking Iris if she’d ever been on a boat: ‘No, because I might be eaten by crocodiles’ – I’m not sure they meant a boat on the Everglades though. As to where she imagined the planes were going, ‘to the airport’ drew a laugh, followed by the observation that ‘ghosts eat turtles and slugs.’ Again, a pragmatic response: ‘because they’re hungry.’

I could see the right side of the pitch, with Iris’ head blocking the left because she was chilly and insisted on maniacally gazing at me while being carried. The mission seemed to be to bounce back from last week’s fiasco when I was in charge and the team folded completely in the second half after dominating the first. The coaches must have got wind of my liberal tactics because at training on Tuesday I had never seen so many cones. There were cones everywhere, muddled rainbows of plastic to discipline the wayward and induce migraines in the susceptible. Transgression beyond your cones would lead to consequences – there was no way my  Latin/Central American ideas would be granted anything more than a temporary licence. I would suggest that Coaches Michael and Peter have a more Dutch ethos: creativity allied to organisation.

Reassuringly, normal service was resumed with the team’s signature error surfacing within five minutes of the start: radically absurd defending. In this case, the ball was drifting past the post until our goalkeeper rushed over and took a swipe at it to send it spiralling back towards goal and into the net. This was a team we could recognise and buy in to, making mistakes in a safe environment so as to learn from them at some unspecified future time.

Does the time come, though,  to stop making mistakes and start getting things right?  There’s a quote from Bill Clinton on the wall where I work: ‘If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person. It’s how you handle adversity, not how it affects you. The main thing is: never quit, never quit, never quit.’  But what if you make a mistake that’s decisive, leading to your impeachment? What can you really learn from that? Don’t lie on oath about illicit liaisons in your office?

The reason  gaffes are reassuring within a youth football game, though, is that they show the players aren’t playing ‘percentages’. It may seem silly to opt for a move which only has a 1 or 5% chance of success in favour of one with a 70 or 80 % success rate – but if they always picked the straightforward option, the harder skills would never be practised: a good decision can result in a negative outcome. That’s why the coaches never see the result as the main indicator of success or failure, prioritising the process even if it sometimes feels like nothing more than fine motor skills under mittens.