Sometimes you have to realise where you are: how to adapt yourself so as not to offend against protocol. If you train at a Seventh Day Adventist college, for example, don’t expect to retire to a bar for a refreshing post-match pint of San Miguel – not on campus, anyway. All you’ll find are warehouses of pasta and good intentions. To find what you’re looking for, you’ll have to venture off site, bound for The Vic, The Three Frogs or the Jack O’ Newbury. That’s life in Binfield: straight roads,religion and Pope’s Meadow; a pleasant, uncultured place with a view of the past and peace in the present – a place which, for obscure reasons, sees itself as slightly more refined than Bracknell proper.
To thrive in these kinds of places, though, children don’t seem to resort to the same kind of coping mechanisms relied upon by adults. They have their imaginations. For example, in The Three Frogs, out of the blue Evan delivered an aphorism: ‘Humans will not last for ever – and neither will YouTube – but the truth will. And the false.’ It seemed to have the ring of the profound, but I’m still not sure why. What is the false, and why will it endure? Perhaps it’s Pluto, the false planet, the dwarf which has lost its place on the glossy maps of the solar system. Or perhaps the false is best epitomised by the notion of a ‘false 9’, embodied majestically in the deep lying forward play of Lionel Messi which draws the sternest of defences out of shape with unanswerable questions.
Without tactical nuance, even at a young age patterns can be adhered to and wide varieties of tactics adopted. AFC Reading, a new team from the North Reading hinterlands, went for a 2-3-1 formation with a ‘unit’ up front to act as focal point for the team’s play, a physical presence in the mould of Shefki Kuqi. Their midfield hustled and bustled, but unfortunately it was no match for Wokingham’s more fluent passing game. Connor scored with an exceptional long range strike to commence proceedings, and Wokingham could have been 10-0 up at half-time were it not for some extraordinarily wasteful finishing. A rare moment occurred in the second half when Evan whipped in a corner and Josh scored only the second header in the team’s history; this was a convincing win which probably should have yielded more goals, but who am I to judge from the sidelines? Maybe the Adventists’ choirs which strike up in the upper rooms of the college hold the key: ‘I used to think, as birds take wing, they sing through life so why can’t we?’
Wilderspool Causeway 