Wilderspool Causeway

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.’

The motto ‘Carthage Delenda Est’ should have told us all we needed to know about Rotherfield. Not being much of a Latin speaker, though, I was grateful to club historian Patton Cuddie who’d travelled down from Charlbury at an early hour to make preparatory notes over Lavazza Intenso in the foyer of the Goals Centre, Woodley.

‘Carthage must be destroyed’ he explained, happy that he was no longer the bar’s sole occupant. ‘That’s our philosophy: we hold and give, but do it at the right time. We can be slow or fast, but we will get to the line. I’m quoting John Barnes there, of course. In the final third, a Rotherfield side will try to punish you. In defence, we’ll close ranks.’

This was a cup game and we were two divisions below. Last season’s 7-7 draw against Hector, Horace, Auberon, Ernie and Stan would count for nothing. According to Cuddie, Rotherfield had strengthened in the summer window. They now had Ptolemy, Manfred and Helmut to draw upon too. Furthermore, they had a new management duo: Toland Waldeck from Cerne Abbas (former special adviser to the Bundestag on youth football in Dorset) and Ward Holstein, on sabbatical from the English School of Cologne.

In the warm up, they stroked the ball around with simplicity, at Ward’s behest, while we seemed distracted by textile impedimenta – the snoods, base layers, gloves and hats of darkening seasons. Rotherfield played nonchalantly, as if presented with a sub-eleven plus Maths problem, while we struggled not to clatter into the advertising boards. Before the first rotation, however, Wokingham had resisted them very well through the skill and force of Josh, Evan and Connor.

A watching Bracknell Town coach observed that Evan’s ‘a different player this season. Completely different.’ I wasn’t sure about the ‘completely’ part, but as other family members would testify, Evan now plays with total determination to win the ball, whether in the air or on the floor, with a valid tackle, arm tussle, studs-up lunge or any means necessary. He also hectors and harangues his own players to a point which borders on the extravagant; he’ll drag the goalkeeper to the near post or yell instructions from the sidelines. Last season, he played more like a young cross between Berbatov and McManaman. He would rarely, if ever, tackle or defend but was often deft and clinical in attack.

Perhaps his recent passion for defending is inspired by a topic he initiated early in the morning and returned to as his final question before walking to the pitch: ‘Dad, who were the most famous wrestlers of your time?’  was the first one. I struggled to think of any, but eventually popped out Hulk Hogan. Secondly, ‘When you were alive, dad, did The Rock used to say “wake up and smell what’s cooking?”‘ I’m not old enough for ‘old dad’ sentiments, surely, but such were his thoughts before the game.

After 10 minutes, it was level at 1-1. The aforementioned W&E trio were withdrawn by spreadsheet dictat and by 20 minutes, at half-time, we were 7-1 down and out of the cup.

With the hardcore from Wokingham and a bumper crew from Oxfordshire, there were almost as many spectators as it takes to compose one of Hillary Clinton’s tweets. It was getting stranger. Every time we attacked, a cry emerged from our Oxfordshire brethren: ‘Hannibal! Hannibal ad Portas! Hannibal!’ along with a stray ‘Helmut! Eingeschlossen! Einfall! Einfall!’ Normally a font of all knowledge, my friend Andrew looked quizzically at the opposition ranks. There was nothing for it but to search out Cuddie again. ‘Hannibal at the gates!  You Carthaginians will not prevail!’ I now felt sure they were a boarding school in disguise, and he was on the payroll. Fed up with being educated by someone in Jermyn Street weekend wear, I thought I’d look up the German later.

Elias asked if he and Thanasie could have a lift home. On the way back, there was much hilarity on the back seats. ‘Thanasie: you look that way and I’ll look that way.’

‘What are you doing, boys?’ enquired Elias.                                                                               ‘We’re looking for weird and unexpected things’ replied Evan, as he and Thanasie laughed at pretty much everything they saw and we pulled up alongside Winnersh’s electronic cigarette specialists ‘Berkshire Vapers.’

When a toddler’s in close proximity to a canine, what’s your first thought? And what do you say? I expect it depends whose side you’re on, or if you’re just a disinterested observer. As a parent, I think ‘Go on then, reel off the dog platitudes’ and as an owner, maybe you just launch into them: ‘she’s harmless; just trying to say hello; loves children; bred as a sheepdog so probably just trying to round you up a bit; big softie; too stupid to hurt you; it’s men she doesn’t like.’

But what if something in the nature, breed or behaviour of your dog/human defies this nonsense? You could have a psychotic child or a rottweiler in the midst; there’s a sudden, imminent threat and you won’t be patronised into ignoring it. In this case, I loudly said ‘Don’t worry Iris, it’s only a pitbull off its lead’, hoping the owners might show some genuine understanding and actually catch up with it. To their credit, they reneged from the dog apologist role and offered a limp and disturbing  ‘Say hello nicely, Poppy!’ instead. A further two pitbulls were to surface today – one near Jubilee Avenue and one among the pumpkins outside Waitrose – but for now we were in a pitbull-free enclave for a drizzly game in Woodley.

Wokingham Cougars – drawn largely from the historic houses of central Wokingham – play in a lower league to us having spent most of last season learning the rudiments of the game under the guidance of their  floppy-haired manager. At one point in last season’s match, we agreed to a goal being disallowed after his protestations: ‘Typical Klopp, always making excuses’ exclaimed one of their own fans before we went on to win 5-2, with Evan scoring a penalty.

This time, one of the Cougars’ coaches volunteered to officiate in the absence of an independent ref. ‘I’m not happy about this; we’ll be watching you’ said a concerned parent (me). ‘Well I’m a FIFA registered ref so, er…any brown envelopes?’

We were back in the comforting environment of the Amsterdam Arena. Whereas at previous matches we tended to congregate at the Heineken Music Hall end of the ground, this time we were on the Boris Pasternakstraat side. Half-term seemed to have taken its toll; last season, the Cougar aristocrats brought a large and vociferous crowd (the guys who boasted about dancing on Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery and laughed about knocking my coffee over), but this time they were thin on the Amsterdam ground.

Evan, too, seemed a little thrown by time and place. Yesterday, he woke up on Ribena Hill (spelt Rhiwbina) on the outskirts of Cardiff, wondering where on earth he was, and then again between hedges on a lane just north of Newport where we saw an unbelievable sign put up by estate agents who know exactly who they are: ‘Crook and Blight.’

Furthermore, just before the game Evan ventured to some of the farthest reaches of nonsense, to regions where there seem to be only one or two outlying villages of truth. He envies Year 6 their annual trip to ‘Manor Boxing Arena’ which they visit every year because ‘there’s a highly professional medical area there. It’s highly professional. So when they get hit, they can just go there and be healed.’

The first goal Wokingham & Emmbrook scored was one of the best we’ve seen, setting the tone for a commanding and destructive performance. Xanthoulis pinged the ball along the floor to Dance who controlled it brilliantly before driving a perfect ball through to Jack Parry who turned and side-footed it into the corner. There was much laughter and exclamatory stuff from the Boris Pasternakstraat side. When Jack scored with an excellent strike 2 minutes later, eyebrows were raised.

‘What on earth did Jack have for breakfast?’ Elias and I wanted to know, so Andrew went at it both barrels: ‘Breakfast was a nightmare! He wanted rice pops and Cheerios, but the flavours were disturbed so then he asked for rice pops on their own, which he wouldn’t eat. In the end I just gave him toast.’ Andrew and Jack are Wolverhampton Wanderers fans and vegans who won’t buy a Wolves shirt due to their dubious sponsorship, so instead Jack attends training bedecked in the luminescent greens of Forest Green Rovers, a pro-vegan (‘Vegan do it!’), progressive club who are sponsored by Sea Shepherd, another favourite of the Parries as they support the disruption of Japanese whaling, and rightly so.

The landed gentry would not go gently into the Woodley night, though. They prodded a neat volley home from a corner and generally sought to withstand the motley rabble from the railway side of town. However, they were intriguingly stretched by none other than Amelia ‘Rensenbrink’ Mulvaney who clung to the far left wing as the widest middenvelder in Woodley, niggling away at them and executing Cruyff turns in desolate cul-de-sacs of Cougar territory as the clock eroded their chances.

The entrance of her cousin, Connor, would effectively end the match as a contest. As a substitute, he’s like one of those contractors hired in on a short term basis with the most advanced equipment on the market. In Wales, they’re called ‘contract shepherds.’ When your common shepherds can’t find their flocks, or have to rely on archaic equipment when they do, they call in the contractors. They even have online forums which we can peruse. One contract shepherd said their best customer is ‘a lady with 6 ewes, good cake and cold beer. £80 + VAT. Pity I only go there 6 times a year’ to which another big hitter responded with  ‘That probably says something about you’ and left it at that. The conversation went on, but it’s probably best to post a link rather than go into it in too much detail: http://farmingforum.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?6227-Contract-shepherding-man-dogs-and-prattley.

The point is that for us, sea shepherd, pitbull or contract shepherd, Mulvaney’s the man, but he only sealed the win today; every player had one of their best games of the last year or so, a fact reflected by Michael’s inability to hand out an individual man of the match award, but to give it to the whole team or ‘the group’ as Brendan Rodgers would say, no question.

Canada geese: in late afternoon formation over Woosehill, arrowing above and then flattening out at speed towards Emmbrook. What mockery. They have no manager to silently humour, spreadsheet to dictate their rotation or vanishing spray to tell them where to be, yet they offer us a lesson in being available for each other while keeping a sensible distance. True, they also remain largely untroubled by predators on these shores as they tend to commandeer artificially constructed lakes in woodland dotted with ‘millennium trails’, stainless steel sculptures, visitor centres and other follies. Unsurprisingly though, their lives are a little too blessed for the taste of The Daily Mail’s Robert Hardman (June 4th 2008) who suggested that if they were human they would ‘claim every welfare benefit in the book’ because they ‘loaf around at home, laying waste to our public spaces’ while causing a form of colonial resentment among our hardworking native greylags.

Suffering with suspected atrophy of the olfactory bulbs, I withdrew my voice from the sidelines and entered the purgatory of silent observation; the coach had made it quite clear that parental injunctions – regardless of how sane or well meaning they might be – were not required. Complicating this, however, was his need for practical help in the absence of his co-manager. So, yet again, I was to be the dumb timekeeper, patient sleeve unraveller, committed laceman and mute enthusiast.

This time, though, it wasn’t only me who was silenced. As our players’ actions became increasingly difficult to comprehend, more parents fell foul of the gagging order, the super-injunction of suspended thought. Even the most innocuous comments, such as ‘Get a little bit closer, Thanasie!’ were met with rejection by the manager. If he was a top electrician, he would want his apprentices to create explosions rather than be habituated into correct wiring. If you help players cultivate the difficult skills alongside the basics, allow them to choose what to do and then demonstrate your respect for them by praising the effort and ignoring the error, you develop confident, skilful players who take responsibility for their decisions rather than playing like robots.

This philosophy stands in stark contrast to that of Wokingham Rangers, our neighbours from the ribbon development extending towards Hurst. Their assistant manager simply said: ‘I want to see lots of passing and no fancy skills.’ They put this plan into action, overcoming a 2-1 deficit in the first-half to exploit an Oranges performance which had long left Farce behind and was now approaching a checkpoint on the outskirts of Tragic, the ultimate sign of which was when our centre-back (who we’ll call Sol Padeine) ran futile circles around 3 attackers, lost out to a 4th and conceded a goal, which our manager clapped, without irony: ‘Well done, Sol: great skills!’

The paradox at the heart of the game, though, was the fate of our general wunderkind, Connor Mulvaney, who seems to have finally shrugged off the last of this year’s christenings. While everyone else attempted the skills of Old Ronaldo, the one player capable of consistently deploying them played as if in strict accordance with the Scandinavian socialist concept of Jantelagen: the team comes first. His perplexing interpretation of this was to play a series of limp passes to the serially ineffective, all of which were met with ‘Good pass, Connor!’ from the manager’s dugout. Mulvaney, whose presence is normally as reassuring as allotment smoke rising through a winter dusk, looked ill-at-ease, uncertain as to how to conduct his talent.

As parents, though, we were brought closer together; the lone voice of the visionary prophet in a tracksuit who offers praise before advice had given us something to talk about, much as those on the beaches of Weston-super-Mare must have huddled together against the drifting trips of ladybirds in the summer of 1976.

As yet more silence was called for, the carbohydrate shelter beckoned us: a time of hibernation, the ‘dark bee months’ of Saturday lunchtime. Kiera’s dad (way, way beyond – long ago and for ever more amen –  any serious concern for the game; sometimes he spends the whole thing in the foyer) was determined to get the coffees in. I was grateful, but couldn’t even scramble an answer when asked how I liked it: ‘OK, I’ll just get all the stuff in – the milk and the sugar.’ Thanks, Ian.  The beauty of the simple gesture, like contraband revels in the cinema, offered a platform for us to move on. He was in the manager’s camp, and I was less so, but in our small scale  version of ‘the seat reserved for beer by the boys from Abercarn: beer, pontoon, crisps and fags and a croakin’ Calon Lan’, it didn’t really matter. Sharing our ideas with the coach or players would be about as meaningful as projecting immigration narratives onto geese anyway.