Wilderspool Causeway

Some mid-season stats to kick off proceedings here, followed by the inevitable reflections on routes across the Thames and forgotten gloves etc.

Played 15  Won 6 Drawn 1 Lost 8  Goals Scored: 61  Goals Conceded: 84

Goals scored:  Mulvaney: 25  Saynor: 13 Parry: 8  Sexton: 6  Dance: 5 Xanthoulis: 2 Butler: 1 A. Mulvaney: 1

We seem to be locked into a never-ending battle with our neighbours from north of the border. Why are we playing Caversham again? Twyford Comets are in our league, but we’ve played them only once. Perhaps they’ve dissipated into the sky and are only visible at the ‘year’s midnight’ when ‘the sun is spent, and now his flasks/send forth light squibs/no constant rays’ and ‘the whole world’s sap is sunk.’ That could be Evan’s analysis, anyway. Looking up into a Crowthorne sky last Sunday, he said ‘Look, it’s Twyford! I know that because there’s still some detail in the clouds.’

Twyford, twylight – whatever. Coaches Peter and Michael were in Prague and London respectively, so before Connor, Amelia, Evan and I could even begin to contemplate the mists rolling in off the Loddon, we first had to find our way out of Woosehill. Which way do you turn when there are anonymous brown buildings in every direction? Citizens of Lower Earley have faced this crisis of being for the entire duration of their tenancy or period of home ownership. Woosehill is no different. All  roads curl at disappointing angles and you’re left with blind decisions, invariably leading you to either the right road in the wrong direction or the wrong road in the right direction, merging with a network of cul-de-sacs to confound even the most traffic-aware satnav, rendering it lost as a hospital corridor pacer looking for a ward that doesn’t exist or a bus to a time they’ve long since left.

‘In 200 yards, turn right but bear left. Do a U-turn and take the ramp. Continue for one mile, descending on the elevated section of the carriageway. At the roundabout, take the seventh exit and head back from whence you came.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Amelia, understandably. It’s best to turn off all the voices at this stage. You’re doing a U-turn, but only because there’s nowhere else to go. It reminds me of heading for Accrington but ending up in Henley, doing a ten-point turn on an irrelevant country lane after the fire brigade had shut the town down.

While we were aiming to cross the Loddon on Sandford Lane, Caversham had a few bridges to choose from to traverse the ‘dirty old river’: Reading, Caversham, Sonning and if they’re really desperate – Whitchurch. In this weather, they would surely be reminded of Spike Milligan: ‘Let us look at the River Thames/ One of England’s watery gems/ Oily brown, greasy, muddy/ Looking foul, and smells of cruddy/ The conservancy say they’re cleaning it/ So why is it the colour of shit?’

Leaving all this shit behind, we weren’t exactly liberated. The manager has to remember: goalie gloves, goalie kit, footballs, Christmas cards for the team, notebook, pen, crumpled squad rotation diagram, Connor and Amelia’s apples and biscuits, Evan’s drink, inhaler, club jacket, fleece and shin pads, the skills trophy, the man of the match wristband, how to be civil and the if-all-else-fails fundamentals: wallet, keys and phone.

It’s always so convoluted; we had long deviated from Heron’s Shortest Path, but perhaps it’s best not to overreact or compare. Maybe Caversham had their own shinpad crises to contend with, their own over-beveraged parents or bumpy mornings to put up with. Perhaps they couldn’t find their inhalers, either. Maybe they were stuck in Waitrose car park (after stopping for a coffee but forgetting their MyWaitrose card) or behind a laggard on Peppard Road. Our under preparation wouldn’t equate to over preparation on their part.

On the way, Connor (he of 25 goals in 15 games) decided to float an idea my way: ‘Alex, do you think I could maybe play for three quarters of the game instead of half today?’ As you can imagine, I was not entirely unsympathetic to his perspective. ‘Connor, I’m not entirely unsympathetic to your perspective here mate. Erm, let me think about it.’ If there was any glitch in the memo, Connor would play for the duration.

In professional football, you can expect fines for pretty much anything, including newspapers in the medical room. Imagine the levy for missing two games running, without notice. This unnamed player deserves a Christmas bonus though, for good as he is, he gave me license to torch the spreadsheet and ditch the rotation. It really was foggy.  After a minute or two, we conceded our customary soft early goal after the ball sort of ricocheted off their striker and rolled in at 2mph. We’re so used to this, we just accept it as incompetence tax and move on. Soon we had a corner and scored from an unusual source: the ball fell to Ciara on the edge of the box and she wellied it for all she was worth: 1-1. Evan was out of the picture this stage, digitally revolved and carrying a knee injury sustained in training.

Thanasie Xanthoulis – another rare and temperamental source – popped up with the second goal before Connor opened his account on the stroke of half-time. I had been nicknamed ‘Big Sam’ (preferably for a degree of tactical brutalism rather than mere size, I guess) but in truth there wasn’t much of a tubthumping message I could give them at the break, other than to keep doing what they were doing: it will lead to the same results.

Evan tried to play in the second half, but limped off tearfully after only a few minutes. He wasn’t able to get back and defend, but we needed him to. It stayed 3-1 until fairly late in the second half, when Evan decided to re-enter the fray as a striker, minimising the possibility of stress on the knee. He soon picked up the ball opportunistically on the edge of the box and made the score 4-1, but it wasn’t comfortable. Caversham had a young Maldini at the back, a wise and nonchalant player who could easily play a telling ball to unlock our historical sieve of a defence. With 3 minutes to go, we were 4-3 up and anything could have happened. Thankfully, Evan fired the ball into the left corner with the outside of his right foot and Connor added another to make the final score 6-3 to the Satsumas. Amelia won the Skills Trophy for some fantastic flourishes, consistently outwitting her opponents who seemed to carry a degree of complacency in their assumption that they could take the ball from her at will.

On the way home, things took a philosohpical turn. Connor’s idea was to play ‘Would you Rather’, and he opened up with: ‘Would you rather be a bin or a window?’ This seemed weird, but also a great question. You’d naturally gravitate to the window side of the equation, perhaps, but quickly remember that a window can be cracked or smashed whereas a bin is routinely emptied of its rubbish and can be cleaned with anti-bacterial wipes.

Texts referred to:     A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day by John Donne

Father Thames by Spike Milligan

What a bizarre game against the shoulderclappers of Wokingham & Emmbrook Rangers. Coach Michael was about as organised as Britain’s response to Brexit, arriving without goalie gloves or the teamsheet. While he rushed back through the drizzle to get it, the ref said ‘In positions please!’ I had no choice but to select the team myself. Mark Sexton arrived late, but seemed altogether absent. Why oh why did I put him in goal?

We started with broadly the same line-up which was so unyielding last week. After 5 minutes, Michael arrived with his typically exaggerated view of the players’ fungibility. He rang the changes. Thanasie was taken off and collapsed in tears. Ciara entered the fray in her beanie hat. Josh was put on – except Josh wasn’t actually there, having omitted to arrive for the game. Amelia was thrown on instead. Confusion reigned.

I had been drafted in as garb monitor and henchperson – I tried to keep tearful Thanasie mollified, but he started making strangled, high pitched noises like an injured lupus cub. On the pitch, things weren’t much better. With Mark ‘gone’ (it would be an insult to space cadets to put him in the same category), when Rangers started taking shots, it was a disaster. Goals started flying in like seagulls at break time. At half-time it was 8-0.

For the team talk, I expected to take a back seat; the rotation policy has become a shibboleth – we’ve sort of been neutered by a spreadsheet. However, my perception of Michael as one of life’s great indifferentists (imagine Ringo Starr’s voice, amped up to 10 and pierced with a knitting needle: ‘Win or lose it doesn’t really matter: well played’) was ill-founded. He was not a happy bunny. He went absolutely Carragher: ‘We need to turn up here! You’re not doing anything we learnt in training and you’re not playing anything like you played last week.’ In a surprising gesture, seeing as I was there last week in Michael’s absence, he then said: ‘Now Alex, what have you got to say to them?’

Newly unsilenced, I was taken aback and my mind went blank. This was an opportunity to earn Michael’s trust after our confrontation a few weeks ago. So here goes: ‘Jack, you’re wandering around like a godwit. Now get your head on. Mark, I don’t know what to say to you. That was disgusting out there today. Amelia, this is football: you’ve been flailing aound like you’re drowning in the Limpopo. Now screw your head on. Evan, clean your teeth.’ No. What we really gave them was a clear reminder of the simple things they did so well last week: keeping their shape, passing, tackling back and taking their chances in the final third.

The second half was a completely different proposition: anyone could have told them they just needed to wake up. Evan was now up front and began to turn on the style, gammoning up their defence something proper and firing into the corner to pull a goal back. Rangers were not content to drift into the West Woodley doldrums, though. They had their own objectives to work towards and would do so, picking through the rubble of the opposition train wreck with scant regard for the casualties. They even sent their keeper up for corners, despite being 10 goals up. Crack shot Connor Mulvaney waited on the sidelines, patient and watchful in our brand new club jacket. His hat-trick in the last part of the game meant we won the second half 5-4.

There was absolutely no sugar coating from Michael after the game. “In the first half we weren’t very good. We were…”                                                                                                                  “Rubbish!” said Ciara.                                                                                                                                  “Well yes, in a word. Crikey, I feel like a proper manager here!”                                                      He sounded like it, too, and it was heartening to hear of the strengths of the second half after the absolute trout and zugzwang of the first.

n.b. Mark had a good second half, bless him: compos mentis, fiery and skilful.

Parklife: the pick of Friday night’s excellent range of covers by King Loud at the Broad Street Tavern brought all Adidas and Fred Perry in the house to the dance floor for a raucous, lager-fuelled nostalgia trip. Parklife back in the late 80s and early 90s, a time I remember with great fondness, meant playing on  bobbly, excrement-peppered surfaces in front of parents liberated from latter day FA Charter reminders that  ‘coaches are human beings, referees have feelings and linesmen are normal people whom we should treat with love and respect.’

When a player received the ball it was customary for parents to yell ‘Get rid of it’, causing us to bungle all over the pitch and hope for an individual moment of brilliance or a propitious bounce ‘in the mixer’ to get us out of jail. Parents would routinely argue or even fight with opposition parents and respect  was absolutely not on the agenda. One dad was a TV racing pundit, even more of a wide boy than Boycie from Only Fools and Horses. I remember him strutting onto the pitch with a fat cigar to confront the manager in the centre circle: ‘You don’t know what you’re doing. Why isn’t my lad up front?’ One fight spilled over into the car park after the game. Both mine and my brother’s teams contained players who were essentially criminals, some of whom are now in prison or dubiously bailed.

It was rough around the edges, but unforgettable and allowed us to develop great ball control under pressure – before we booted  it away again. Also, Saturdays were amazing. Training was at 9am after a chat with the milkman. We picked up a King Size Mars Bar on the way home and I savoured it after a hot bath while reading Roy of the Rovers magazine and waiting for Saint and Greavsie to start. There would be further treats in the afternoon with either a visit from grandparents or a trip to Fulham before The A Team in the evening and bed.

With Evan though, although we try to make his Saturdays broadly similar, we’d have to talk about ‘Astro-turf life’ rather than ‘Parklife.’ I’m not sure if it would quite have the same ring to it: ‘Confidence is a preference for the habitually rotated children of Wokingham: Astro-turf life! A morning stroll can be obstructed by a well meaning official with a clipboard: Astro-turf life! Who’s that floppy mop laughing? You should cut down on your chickpea felafel mate. Have a Mars Bar!’

England’s park life genuinely used to be mental. According to Stuart Hylton’s Little Book of Berkshire, the first recorded football match in the area was in 1598 between neighbouring parishes on the outskirts of Didcot, with church doors as goals. In a distant echo of Reading’s current vice captain, Chris, one of the parishes had a player called ‘Ould Gunter’ who ‘carried a dagger throughout the match with which he murdered two of the opposition, Richard and John Gregorie.’ This would have been a game of mob or ‘Shrovetide’ football, with teams of unlimited numbers. So was he a local villain, outlaw or evolutionary anomaly acting on instinct? Maybe, but ‘what was particularly striking was that Gunter was the local parish priest.’

Propelling a pig’s bladder between churches, with the only rule being to avoid manslaughter or murder in the process, was a rule which even priests couldn’t uphold: these are the roots of English football. Maybe the 80s weren’t so bad.  Coaches Michael and Peter, though, seem to favour tactics evocative of a time long before Christ and the mob values of his witnesses.

Wokingham & Emmbrook reanimate an era before 299 bc when Cuju was invented, a game which was unmistakably football, albeit with only one set of goalposts. FIFA recognise this as the first form of the game. As Cuju evolved, it split into two branches:  Zhuqiu and Bhaida. In Bhaida, which flourished during the Song Dynasty of 960 – 1279, goals became obsolete. There were no goalposts and scoring a goal was no longer part of the game. Points were awarded for keeping possession, practising skills, playing elegantly and outwitting opponents; they were deducted for poor passes and fouls. Judges awarded points for the quality of play and decided the winner accordingly. Wokingham’s footballing philosophy originates, as far as I can deduce, in Cuju; it’s the essence of Baida.

In the build up to the game, the coaches sent  a somewhat testy message to prepare me to take charge of the team: ‘Play the ball out from the back. That’s our base. Allow the players to make mistakes as that’s how they learn. The score doesn’t matter…’ A few weeks ago I had unwisely shouted out an instruction to Evan and was publicly reprimanded and embarrassed for doing so. I would never play a long ball game or have a go at someone for making a mistake, though, so I was slightly irritated. They are Baida personified: goals seem to be an irrelevance and an irritation, particularly if we score them. Indeed, when I texted later to report on the team’s goals and general success, the response was a manually produced ‘raised eyebrow’ emoticon: quizzical rather than celebratory.

Despite any residual frustration, though, Mrs Dance and I would stick to instructions; I admire and respect the coaches despite falling short of their ideological position. Mrs Dance took the team through an official warm up, while I rummaged around in plastic bags trying to find inhalers, goalie gloves, coats, drinks and our Gabor Kiraly Fulham goalie kit with ‘SAYNOR’ on the back. Soon after the game kicked off, Mark Sexton snuck through the Caversham defence like a lipid in The Royal Mint and sent us into an almost unprecedented 1-0 lead.

In the second half, we had to decide how rigidly we’d stick to the formation and philosophy. The coaches wanted 4 goalkeeper rotations in 40 minutes, and we adhered to that. However, when Evan drifted back into defence when he should’ve been attacking, we turned a blind eye: Evan loves defending, and we were 1-0 up. There was a bit of transgressive pragmatism in operation but we didn’t ‘park the bus.’ With no substitutes at all, there had to be room for interpretation to allow the players to sustain their brilliant show of energy.

It remained 1-0 until half-time before Caversham struck back with two impressive solo goals to condemn us to a probable defeat. Evan’s defensive position allowed him some space, though, and when the ball fell to him just inside their half, with only two minutes to go, he curled an equaliser brilliantly into the top left corner. A minute later, Josh broke free from the defence and struck decisively to win the game.

No acrimony followed the final whistle. Instead, the players lined up and shook each other’s hands sportingly, a gesture I eagerly monitor and slightly cringe at. It’s the perfect moment for a subtle comment, refused handshake, dirty look or slap to spoil the atmosphere. There was nothing of the sort. Their coach told us we had some good little players.  ‘Nothing to do with our Vorsprung Durch Technik though, mate’ I answered as we headed back towards the bar for a coffee and a bacon roll.

Three stalwarts of Wokingham – hair of white and grey attesting to a fair few trips around the sun – stood in the doorway of The Queen’s Head with a King Charles Spaniel and conversation seemingly determined by their adult children: ‘Well mine’s got whooping cough!’ offered one. I happened to know that the son in question has held cultic services on his mother’s lawn at god-forsaken hours of the morning. ‘Whooping cough? That’s something infants get. Are you sure?’ enquired the spaniel owner in a gently mocking tone. Whooping cough seems somehow incongruous with  the powers of darkness. Not sure why. Misguided though the coughing visionary may be, though,  sometimes you have to at least acknowledge the effort. They’ve done something rather than nothing.

A bit like Mr Brown in the song Next  Door Neighbour: ‘I wonder what became of him. They say he chucked the tele through the window. He went berserk and jacked whole world in. Although he may he have hit rock bottom, he went out with a bang and so he is not forgotten.’

So it is with Reeves Rangers. They  make a point, however unpalatable it may be. Their managers’ jackets are straight out of 1992 and so is their unkempt appearance and football. They make Gerry  Francis (‘What I said to them at half-time would be unprintable on the radio’) and Dave Bassett (‘We need to weigh up the pros and cons and put them in chronological order’) seem almost coherent and progressive.

It’s no exaggeration to say that every time the Reeves Rangers goalkeeper got the ball in the first half, he had a shot on goal. This despite a league directive which makes it compulsory for the opposition to retreat to the halfway line so the defence can play fluent football from the back. When a defender got the ball, the bestubbled gaffers went with ‘Have a crack, son’ instead of helping them to develop actual football skills such as passing and finding space. It was so infuriating to be around that I retreated to the Goals Centre foyer, which has the anonymous yet strangely comforting vibe of an ocean liner, to buy a bacon roll and a latte.

In so doing, I missed Evan’s first decisive contribution of the game since entering the fray after half-time: a goal from the edge of the box after a scramble following a corner, according to Andrew ‘vegan do it’ Parry, my preferred ally behind the green fence. I was disappointed with myself, but also replenished.

As the second half wore on, the Reeves Rangers managers even began to make the eponymous hero of Mike Bassett: England Manager seem enlightened when he named Ron Benson and Tony Hedges in the England squad: ‘Tony Hedges, York City? I didn’t pick him…And who’s this clown? Ron Benson, Plymouth Argyle?’                                                         ‘Look, Mike, they were on the list of players that you gave me!’                                               Mike: [holding up the cigarette box he wrote the squad list on]’Oh, come on, love! Show me where it says “Benson and Hedges” on that.’

As the match unravelled, we at times countered fire with fire, but at other times countered fire with that most redundant of redundant skills, the ‘rainbow flick’. It’s a hopelessly complicated manoeuvre which if successful results only in sending the ball into a loop in the air and an indeterminate, random fate as it drops. Still, it was amusing to see football stretch to these ideological extremes. Route 1 v Route What the hell are you trying to do there?

Connor was frustrated by some capable goalkeeping and Evan scored again, knocking the ball behind his left leg to create space and then finishing with a determined left footed prod into the corner. Even the Reeves managers, to give them their due, applauded our better efforts and stuck to wry smiles when faced with our none-too-veiled criticisms from the sidelines. Their agricultural tactics were within the laws of the game. Legal parameters and the consequences of breaching them are all that matters to some, it seems.

Perhaps Mike Bassett wasn’t as ignorant as we assumed either. He openly challenged England’s endemic drinking culture, after all,  when star player Kevin Tonkinson was found somewhat over the limit at the wheel. ’88 bloody milligrams! You go on the piss all day and you’ve ballooned out like the Pillsbury Doughboy! You’ve really let me down this time Tonka and f*** the apology. You could go to jail for this! What sort of system am I going to play then? Three across the middle and one in bloody Pentonville?’

This was a game between the pragmatists and the idealists. I’m still wondering where the balance should be.

No need to own the road: just buy the tollbooth. Apparently that’s a business concept which enabled Warren Buffett to make a lot of money. If you have shares in Gillette, what else do you have to worry about? Wilkinson Sword?

Find an unavoidable gateway in life and set up a tollbooth, porter’s lodge, hut next to a gate in a national park occupied by a semi-vagrant with a dog, The Mauritius Command and a flask of hot squash. When success is so palpable, yet the standards required to achieve it are so low that you can’t trip over them: that’s the dream.

In footballing terms, this idea complements my favourite definition of skill: ‘minimum effort for maximum effect.’ By this definition, a block or a simple pass can be every bit as skilful as a Cruyff turn or trans-Linekar Panenka.

‘Let the ball do the work’ describes the efficiency of sending the ball somewhere with one touch rather than taking it there with several – a bit like putting a letter in the post box rather than cleverly dodging traffic on the Guildford bypass to take it there yourself.

AFC Caversham, presumably the offshoot of an older, bigger Caversham FC north of the Charvil Meridian,  are backed by some big hitters in addition to Sheabutter Cottage (sourcers of Marula balm, ‘activated charcoal’ and Sankofa cream) and the usual retinue of local solicitors and tyre merchants. They are a ‘Nike Partner Club’ and the managers’ jackets attest to support from VISA, the ultimate tollsters and 24 hour portal people.

Would their commercial acumen translate to successful tactics on the pitch? Due to necessary ‘shape work’, Wokingham’s defence has been deep of late: too deep. If the game was taking place in the English Channel, for example, our defence would be up by Orkney as a distant blockade. While this might prevent the ultimate insult of enemy access to the Atlantic (i.e. defeat), it leaves coastal towns of the midfield region such as Scarborough, Whitby, Hartlepool, Lowestoft and Yarmouth open to attack from the Germans.

They’ll attempt to lure the dreadnoughts of Evan, Mark and Connor from their base at Scapa Flow, making an Atlantic route possible. It worked, to an extent, and Caversham scored first, but with Evan and Connor now occupying space in Caversham territory to counter-attack, the consequences were devastating.

Evan scored twice from just inside their half and Connor began a rout which made the score 6-3 after only ten minutes. How difficult would it have been for Caversham to use the Visa or the Sheabutter money to send a scout to watch us last week? £15 and a hotdog would have told them that you give these boys an inch and they’ll take a yard, half the North Sea and your fading hopes of victory.

My favourite example of the dividends of ‘shape work’ is, of course, Fulham’s run to the Europa League final in 2010. Whatever you think about Roy’s England tenure, Paul Konchesky and John Paintsil could not have triumphed over the likes of David Trezeguet and Fabio Cannavaro without masterful coaching in the arts of defensive discipline.

The irony is that in glorious Portsmouth sunshine two years earlier, Danny Murphy defied manager’s orders and scored after a run he wasn’t supposed to make, keeping Fulham in the Premier League and on course for Europe. A mundane conclusion might be ‘rules are made to be broken’; among the straight lines and rows, there needs to be be some fluidity, some wiggly lines, improvised lemonade stalls and the bravery of C.S Lewis’ Somerset Light Regiment.

Sad as it may be, I once wrote a poem in honour of Roy and Ray, beginning ‘With those air miles, Roy, you could tour the moons of Jupiter/Ensure the planets are in correct formation/no-one stepping beyond their sphere/Your Wikipedia page has crashed my computer/somehwere between Gravesend and Neuchatel…’

Once the bigger guns were off, a phoney war began and the score remained 6-3 for about 20 minutes, with Wokingham remembering to pass and provide width while in possession, and to compress the space without it.

In a final twist, Evan returned to the pitch with two minutes to go having limped off after a crunching challenge and the disappointment of a penalty miss early in the second half. Our coaches invited the slightly eccentric bobble-hatted ref (a few weeks ago he spent the whole game wandering about with a coffee) over to the touchline for a chat which looked oddly heated; we were winning, so what was the problem? I think they were indirectly making sure Evan would have at least a  couple of minutes of play after the earlier stoppage.

Things don’t normally work out like this, but with the last kick of the game Evan hit the ball across the ‘keeper to make the final score 10- 4 in a minute that possibly shouldn’t have existed. On the way out, there was the standard 90p Galaxy-snare of the vending machine before a rush back to Winnersh Triangle for a probable part-time purgatorial party session at Kids ‘n’ Action.

As for AFC Caversham, this is only the first chapter. We meet them again in the next round of the cup where another close eye on strategy will be in order – we haven’t detained them in the Gutter Sound yet.

In training, a lot is lost in translation as the players try to decode the coaches’ simple messages and put them into practise. The following day, memory warps their meaning even further. Last week, a day after training, Evan said ‘We were learning about our stigma.’ I always like to reinforce Michael and Peter’s messages, if possible, but this was a tricky one.

Did they go on a reverse-psychology rant at all the players, picking out their weaknesses and oddities so that they could face and own them?  Did they say, after a particularly dull session,  ‘Yes you do live in a trailer with your mom and you do have a dumb friend named Cheddar Bob who shoots himself in the leg with his own gun’, Eminem style?

Or did they turn the stigma message against themselves, Al Pacino style, as a cautionary tale? ‘I look around, I see these young faces and I think, I made every wrong choice a middle age man can make. I pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who’s ever loved me. And lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror.

You know, when you get old in life, things get taken from you. That’s part of life. But, you only learn that when you start losing stuff. You find out life’s this game of inches. So is football…On this team, we fight for that inch. On this team, we tear ourselves, and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our finger nails for that inch!‘

Stigma? So what did they mean by that, Evan? ‘Stigma. You know, when you run in every minute of the game and not just some of the minutes.’ OK, yes. Stamina. They were teaching you about stamina and trying to help you to keep going because you’ll need to do so against Caversham this week. I’m with you now.

When you’re 7, it seems you’re permanently the Bob Harris (not the whispering sort) played by Bill Paxton, drifting around Evan’s favourite city in Lost in Translation. Tokyo’s his favourite place even though he hasn’t been there.  He likes the overwhelming atmosphere of the bright lights and the fact that there’s a five-a-side pitch on top of a skyscraper. He’s too young to factor in the loneliness of ‘a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows.’

The other message from training was that of ‘shape.’ Now, whenever the goalkeeper gets the ball they are supposed to yell ‘SHAPE!’ as a cue to the full backs to provide width. This is intended to avoid the regrettable and common scenario of the ball being rolled out into a central area to be seized by predatory opposition attackers and rolled into the net with ease. This was all very well, but we knew with certainty what would prevail in the game: the Certainty of Chance.

With prompting, they did remember both of the key messages: stamina and shape. As a result, they were able to bounce back from a 4-1 deficit to go into  half-time with the score at 4-3 after two excellent opportunistic strikes from Mark Sexton put us back in the game.

Michael seemed animated in his delivery of the team talk, but behind a metal fence rather than netting it was difficult to work out the general thrust, let alone the detail, of his message. I would hope for pragmatism mixed in with the idealism.  As Uncle Jon observed, ‘If you mix a dodgy batch of cement, you get shouted at. That’s real life.’ In this case they jointly mixed the dodgy batch, so hopefully they were collectively encouraged and reprimanded rather than individually given the hairdryer.

With two minutes to go, leitwolf Connor Mulvaney’s  hat-trick – including an exceptional left-footed loft into the top right-hand corner – had made the score 6-6, but I had a sinking feeling: a ‘gut feeling’ that the Mapledurhamites would score a winner in the final seconds and we would exit the Plate.

I’ve had to accept though, in recent years, that my gut feelings are often wrong and my ability to misinterpret situations is probably without limit. The Trents, now in the toxic wastes of Woodley rather than the cleaner air of Caversham Heights, did indeed score a winner in the final seconds. I knew it.

At kick-off, Michael said something  which was music to my ears: ‘Evan, when you get the ball, just shoot.’ A few seconds later, Evan sidestepped a midfielder and curled the ball high towards the goal, albeit fairly close to the ‘keeper who couldn’t quite get hold of it: 7-7.

Penalties. Evan put his hand up to take one, and I just managed to scramble the camera into gear to record him slotting it into the corner. The Trents took their next two penalties well, as did Connor and Mark for us, and we were into the endgame of Sudden Death. It seems an odd call for the ref to make to seven-year-olds, but it reflected the reality of win/lose that was just a kick away.

The Caversham player hit the ball well but centrally, and Connor – utility player extraordinaire – tipped the ball over the bar to send Wokingham into the collective Klinsmann slides and the next round of the plate. Michael concluded in his post-match comments that his cat would not have to be kicked today, while our journey back through the drizzle to the car was complicated by player-of-the-match Evan running strangely out of his way and directly into a  lamppost, proving the truth of  Neil Finn’s dictum that ‘It doesn’t pay to make predictions/ sleeping on an unmade bed/ finding out wherever there is comfort there is pain/ only one step away/ like four seasons in one day.’