Wilderspool Causeway

Purley Jubilee Lions – recent survivors of the Whittington’s Tea Barge saga in which a postbox mysteriously appeared on the wall by the river mooring plots – travelled east from their North Wessex base to meet Wokingham & Emmbrook in the sweet and nutty autumnal air of Solly Joel Park.  While a kick off time of 10 a.m. doesn’t quite match last season’s nadir of a 9 a.m. start in a blizzard, it is still far from ideal. The Purley parents would have been up early doors to move in a counter-intuitive direction – out of the house and east. I wonder if any of them had The Pet Shop Boys blaring out: ‘Go West, we will love the beach (together) we will learn and teach, (together) change our pace of life, (together) we will work and strive!’ I would class them as post-Cath Kidston, arrayed on the touchline in polka dots, expressive wellies and bright macs of unknown provenance.

Granted, when you’re up and about kicking off early it ‘leaves the rest of the day free’, but what are you supposed to do with it? It’s fine for the people who were tucked up nice and early the night before and have lists of tasks to accomplish, but not so great for the listless among us who stayed up later listening to James Taylor and drinking San Miguel. Anyway, 10 0′ Clock it is, as decided by the local F.A. ‘The law is the law and you can’t change it’, as was once proclaimed in an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine (original series). Sodor’s new policeman, similarly groggy after too little sleep the night before, objected to Thomas whistling a morning greeting as it could have caused a crash. To make matters worse, Thomas was breaking the law by having no cowcatchers or sideplates. He was then branded a ‘regular law breaker’ and despite the Fat Controller hastening to the police station in his defence, Thomas still had to be fitted with cowcatchers and sideplates and therefore felt totally shipped off as this would make him look like a complete tram. This reminded the Fat Controller that the island of Sodor did in fact need a tram, so he called  Toby with an offer of a relocation package. This added insult to injury for Thomas as he now had a new and useful rival, but they reconciled when Toby sounded his bell to scare the policeman. It was a tale of grouchiness merging into open-mindedness: think for yourself, don’t look like a tram; have a fat controller in the background if possible. Be reconciled with those who do look like trams.

On the pitch today, Wokingham and Emmbrook definitely needed grouchiness to be transformed into something better. Attitudes at training were questionable to say the least. Sadly, the words ‘this is crap’ were uttered by a key player.  Manager Pete had set up an intriguing drill involving lots of cones and barely heard strictures. I only faintly understood it, to be honest, and I was supposed to be helping him out. Training plans are downloaded from somewhere in Northern Ireland, I think, and sent to me in advance. I simply hadn’t read it and none of the players were able to access the session either. But maybe these things still register somewhere in the subconscious? Is comprehension overrated? Did they need to understand the experience in order to learn from it?

The recent emphasis has been on teamwork and knowing when to stick rigidly in formation and when not to. It’s been a case of one step up and two steps back in this regard, with results so far being 1-4, 0-6, 3-2, 1-6, 1-1 and 2-2  in a very tough division.
I would suggest that the trend towards tighter results means that some messages have been absorbed. According to Mircea Lucescu, it helps to know the laws but it’s more important to know their underlying purposes and to be flexible: as he said to Gazzetta dello Sport, “A coach should not join a team with a formation already in his mind. Rather he should adapt to the quality of the players he finds, and choose the right tactical set-up.” That’s fine, but banal in its lucidity. I prefer Ron Atkinson’s version: ‘Well Clive, it’s about the two Ms – movement and positioning’ and ‘You can see the ball go past them, or the man, but you’ll never see both man and ball go past at the same time. So if the ball goes past, the man won’t, or if the man goes past they’ll take the ball.’ The steadfast nonsense of Big Ron never ceases.

Regardless of positional discipline, it would help if our players had a minimum degree of alertness – an attitude they seem to lack early on in games. Our stand-in goalkeeper looked mystified; he may as well have been in Caledonia or asleep dreaming of morning croissants, adrift in the dubious patisseries of the mind. Not everyone was half asleep though. Jack Parry, by contrast, searched and fought for the ball as if it  contained hidden meanings, bypassing the opposition midfield as if they were a mildly inconvenient breeze on the final approach to a Cambrian summit. The problem was that the Purley players, egged on by the Boden brigade, managed to snuff out anything we tried to ignite in the attacking third, putting huge pressure on our defensive trio of Saynor, Ferguson and Butler. They soon achieved a two goal lead, but we became more authoritative as the game went on, fighting back in the second half courtesy of a full-blooded performance from Thanasi Xanthoulis, some cultured passing from Evan, stout defending from the team as a whole and two excellent left-footed strikes from Connor.

All the best to the Purley people on their way back to the Wessex hills and waterways, the Joules catalogues and the windswept instagram dog walks.