Wilderspool Causeway

Everyone just edge out into the middle and take your chances: make lots of eye contact in four directions and remember the words of Aunt Marjorie who said ‘The Arc de Triomphe is the safest place you can drive.’ Just head into the mix – you don’t know if you’ll make your turning unless you put yourself out there. That was the situation at the crossroads this morning as the lights were out all over Winnersh. It’s a dog eat dog place, from the ‘bright air conditioned hell’ of the Triangle to the outskirts of Homebase.

The scenes in Winnersh prefigured the pattern of the game, relocated from the bogs of Woodford Park to The Silesian Stadium at Woodley Goals Centre. For those in the dark, each pitch is named after a stadium of historical note, this one being the Stadion Slaski, a Polish stadium in the city of Chorzow in the Silesian highlands, historically under Bohemian overlordship before being conquered by the Prussians in 1742.

Amelia would be leading the line. Would she be Prussian in outlook, or more in keeping with the sensibilities of the Habsburg Empire? Would she attack with a sense of the ground’s history, its historical weight? Time would tell. Evan was on the left and Connor on the right: Evan and the Mulvaneys – a passable band name at the apex of the formation.

As in Winnersh, you have to try. You have to put yourself out there. If you don’t shoot, you don’t score. In goal for the Cougars was a lad who had been loaned out to us last summer. Without wishing to cast aspersions, the loan didn’t quite work out. Clive – Mark’s uncle – was particularly sure of what was written in Woodley’s Polish heavens: ‘You watch; he’ll play a blinder today.’

In the first half he must have saved about 7 goalbound efforts, while we blazed over 7 or 8 more. It seemed like a goal would never come until Evan went on a little run and swept the ball into the corner at Clive’s loud instigation: ‘Just shoot, Evan: SHOOT!’

On a bigger pitch than usual, the players were drawn out of position as if in thrall to an area of low pressure in the Gulf of Genoa, adrift on the mistrals of childhood. Just before half time, Evan went back into defence and attempted to block a shot only to be sent flying backwards after the ball hit him straight in the Gulag Archipelago. He got up with a smile as a cautionary ‘make sure you count them, Evan!’ sounded from the coaches’ technical area.

With a new roster in the second half, the team were dominant but continued to squander chances. New signing Hayden Harris has scored goals, but always seems slightly out of alignment with the team’s core principles. His dad’s advice to ‘hit the ball up the effing pitch’ means he has to listen to conflicting instructions, with the coaches’ emphasis on ball retention  playing second fiddle to the sound of a latter day Dave Bassett cutting through the Woodley air and the wisdom of the coaching manuals: ‘why play 50 passes when you can do it in one?’

Despite this, Hayden played well and scored with a lovely free-kick, curling the ball into the bottom corner. Thanasie ‘mad dog’ Xanthoulis – having apparently received an elbow – exacted revenge Roy Keane style, felling the blonde aggressor in an apparent revenge attack. His determinaton, crossing and re-crossing the boundaries of acceptability and good taste, eventually resulted in the final goal (and man of the match award) after he surged through and smashed the ball into the bottom corner.

An unconventional performance, but Winnersh had spoken. From the moment you pass Sadler’s Lane and go under the motorway bridge, you enter a different spiritual and emotional microclimate, an environment which poses you questions – rhetorical questions which contain their answers: answers which are probably best avoided, but often salutary.

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?’

 

When Intermarchè cut the price of Nutella by 3 euros, they probably couldn’t have foreseen that a day later the citizens of Toulouse would be rationed to one pot per person in the wake of tension at the hypermarkets. Nutella has a high profile among the youth of Wokingham too, I think. At the Mulvaneys after the game, Mr and Mrs M were given the absolute runaround, making coffees, bacon rolls, cheese and pickle sandwiches and Nutella on toast – with butter – at the same time as trying to fit a 3 port valve to divert the central heating and hot water. Mrs M also needed to get her hair dye out so didn’t want the water off.

The butter question was divisive, but not critical; it certainly wasn’t going to spill over, creating a public order issue on the streets of  Woosehill. The team had performed brilliantly in the game. ‘You’ve earned your hot chocolate and X-Box time today’ was Coach Peter’s post-match verdict – a verdict he was willing to act upon with an offer of hospitality on the outskirts of Wokingham.

They had played – over two games – with a great balance of freedom and discipline. The problem with that equation is that, all too often, discipline and organisation act as brakes on creativity. At its best, the balance between order and freedom means ‘go wherever you want, but watch each other’s backs’ – you’ll leave a gap wherever you’ve left. At it’s worst, the two forces cancel each other out and you’re left with fear and stasis.

Against Burghfield, the team were free-scoring but vigilant. Evan proved to be a key player in the first half, scoring after a run through midfield and again from the penalty spot to make the score 2-0 at half-time. He was then subbed off, against the coaches’ better judgement, and the game turned into a Wokingham goalfest, finishing 9-1. So was it the wrong decision to sub the double goalscorer?

Probably not. And was it wrong for Arthur Church to stay at the Bucks Free Press for 72 years, with a major stint as editor? He loved Wycombe. If you cut him, his blood would flow in light and dark blue quarters. He was a free member of the Free Press who found freedom in Wycombe. It didn’t matter if the Scots found independence or not – it wouldn’t affect him. He was happy where he was and sceptical about the rest. When colour photography first came in, he was presented with an option to print a view of the earth from space: ‘but it’s not in our circulation area’, quipped Arthur.

Next up was the hot-chocolate-meriting performance against Barton Rovers.  Their manager was one of those people who are shaven-headed, overweight, shaggy-bearded and tattooed with a loud, gruff-yet-friendly voice and overall quite a lot of nonsense behind the ‘no nonsense’ attitude.

The players were simply ‘no nonsense’ though. In contrast to Wokingham & Emmbrook, there were no snoods, gloves, under layers, beanie hats, flashy boots or flowing locks – just sensibly short hair and a direct, aggressive approach. They scored first and ran towards their coach, bundling each other as if it was an injury time winner in the final of the Grecian 2000 Shutterstock Plate at the Madejski Stadium.

The euphoria was short-lived though, as Connor scored a hat-trick soon after and Hayden notched another before Barton seemed to suffer under sniper fire, hitting the deck time and again for no discernible reason. What is it that gets us moving? Big question. We were trying to unpack something to do with The Charge of the Light Brigade when a Reading Academy footballer – a lad from somewhere like Peckham or Stratford who usually seems nonplussed at the idea of sitting about in Winnersh and tends to see my lessons as a chance for forty winks – slowly lifted his head and his hand, shooting me a meaningful look. I thought ‘after all, he’s got it. Something’s hooked him here and he’s woken up – it’s the poetry.’ It was such a rare event that everyone stopped to listen, pregnant with expectation. ‘Sir, erm…I think I’ve lost my yoghurt.’ He’d changed the direction of the lesson for sure, but if you have to judge every situation as a unique moment and not according to a textbook then what could we do but commence the search?

 

 

 

‘Reason I cancelled my trip to Woodley is that I’m not a big fan of the Obama administration allowing it to exist in an off location 4 miles from central Reading and contribute “peanuts” to our economy. Bad deal. Wanted me to lead the teams out – No!’ We had to invite Donald, though, because Evan’s sure there’s something underhand about Michael Wolff’s revelatory White House book and that it’s ‘undemocratic’ to allow a petition to affect his visit. It’s almost as if someone has bought Evan a subscription to a right of centre magazine for children which he loves reading every week.

Woodley United Cyclones. What a name and what a well turned-out team, resplendent in sky blue like Coventry City at their most stylish. Evan was due to play in goal and accepted the commission for the first time in about a year. It’s taken 3 years to recover from the debacle of Christmas 2014 when Aunt Marjorie and I independently bought him outsize goalie shirts, hers slightly too big but mine grossly so – to the extent that he only just fits into it and wore it today. It’s Gabor Kiraly era Fulham – Gabor Kiraly being the iconoclastic Hungarian who wears baggy grey tracksuit bottoms in goal and was signed by madman Felix ‘Cheese Rubber’ Magath.

In the warm up, Evan apparently pulled off a wonder save, diving up into the corner to tip the ball around the post – everyone was talking about it. In the game, though, he went for a difficult punch, flopped it and Woodley scored. Apparently this was very unlikely news. Fake news, even. They hadn’t scored for five weeks, according to one parent. Was this ‘strange news from another star’ – a miracle – or just randomly strange news like when you ask someone what happened to their unassuming son: ‘Oh, he’s at er, the…University of Strathclyde studying Equestrian Psychology. Or was it International Spa Management? It was joint honours, I think…’

Anyway, the pattern was that Wokingham & Emmbrook dominated possession and the chances, but couldn’t finish, whereas Woodley played economically, in straight lines across the Blockbusters grid rather than winding and meandering about. Actually it was more like Snakes and Ladders, but with fickle snakes. We went for the snakes, sometimes falling down them and sometimes climbing them to the next level, whereas Woodley played it straight, always going for the ladders but not always finding them.

In the second half, Evan was out of goal and situated at left back, nudging the ball around the defence and down the line, progressing into midfield as a catalyst for forward play, scoring one goal from close range and another direct from a corner after the keeper fumbled. Evan’s boots, though, were an ‘off’ colour – deep red rather than steely blue. As the half progressed, the Woodley players seemed to go down quite regularly with head injuries. Their excellent keeper hit the deck for a bit, as did a determined midfielder who was desperate to soldier on despite the manager’s beckonings from the touchline. He was not a happy bunny, reacting to the substitution like a Scot discovering that their cherished Irn-Bru recipe is soon to be tinkered with for good.

In some ways, we were lucky. Woodley were only a milliner’s yard away from succeeding at their more straightforward game, while our flair – always a double-edged sword – was eventually enough. The received wisdom is that ‘simple play’ is best. When I was younger, you kept the ball for more than two seconds and listened to the shrieks: ‘Get rid of it! Get out! Release! Don’t be selfish!’ It takes a long time for certain styles of play to ‘cross over’ from eccentricity to acceptability. Why is that? The same applies to the names of schools and institutions. Hawthorns, Chestnut, Willow, Acorn, Oak, Beech – fine. But why? Why not Pecan or Peanut, Seasoned Nuts Technical College, Cashew Nut Primary or Mixed Nuts Community College?

 

 

 

As it was the last game of the year, this post includes a statistical update prior to the inevitable reflections on missing beanie hats, scrappy football and the shadows of mortality etc:

Played 15 Won 8 Drawn 1 Lost 6

Goalscorers: C. Mulvaney: 17, H. Harris: 11, E. Saynor: 9, J. Dance: 7, J. Parry 4, M. Sexton 2, A. Mulvaney 6, O. Ferguson 1, C. Butler 1

 

Woodley has a transient population on Saturdays, but you can spot the residents hobbling around the precinct as if newly transported to the Isle of the Dead, lost in the realm of the becrutched but unable to navigate their way back to the dock to find an onward embarkation time. Instead, they are surrounded by confusing signs: ‘Tampa Bay Fish Fingers’, ‘Gravadlax-on-Thames’, ‘Highgate Road Walks and Washes.’ Maybe for them it feels like being a child again, slightly misinterpreting the central point of most conversations. On the way to the game, Evan said his teacher would be missing in the New Year because of ‘jewellery service: it’s where you go and chat with a judge for two weeks to see if he’s right.’

We were due to play Twyford on the neutral territory of Woodley Goals Centre, but if the name of the pitch – ‘Lokomotiv Stadion’ – represented reality, we’d have been off to Berlin on the Eurostar last Wednesday, arriving via Brussels and Cologne to board the Berlin- Warszawa Express, bound for a wander around the old town and Royal Castle before settling down for the 700 mile journey to Moscow, perhaps stopping in the birch forests of Belarus for a foggy friendly against AC Zhytkavichy Youth FC, avoiding the free-roaming bison from the ancient woodlands.

The game started and miraculously, it seemed, we were in the ascendancy. Connor seized the ball after only a few seconds and smashed it into the top corner: 1-0. What’s more, we seemed to have the game buttoned up. With Connor and Evan surging forward, Jack acted as a hinge between defence and attack, intercepting Twyford attacks and moving the play on skilfully. Twyford, for ever at a crossroads in life, rely on a fulcrum, a conduit through whom everything meaningful they create will pass. The problem, though, is that while their main man can play, he also hits the deck whenever possible, going down in instalments at the merest hint of contact: a typical modern day footballer. But we can’t be too critical, rising to every incitement; none of us is too far away from a Peter Buck moment in life, throwing yoghurt at an air steward before appearing at Uxbridge Magistrates Court the following morning to make amends.

With the score at 1-0, the Twyford maestro went down like power in a thunderstorm, plunging the first half into miserable darkness: penalty, surely. The ref blew his whistle and pointed, leading to the tangential thought: what would be the collective noun for penalty takers? It takes bottle, or in Twyford’s case, a dive. So what would we go for? A dive of penalty takers? A bottle? A Batty? A Waddle? Redemption for Chris: ‘England win the World Cup as their Waddle of penalty takers defeats Germany’s. Jake Livermore sends England into Russian raptures.’ Instead, though, it was a free-kick – which Twyford missed.

Half of the Comets seemed to struggle for dynamism, finding themselves caught in possession with regularity; Wokingham exploited this, particularly on the right side of midfield where Evan dispossessed the left back to fire the ball past the keeper at his near post twice in quick succession, the second goal a near replica of the first. With the score 5-0 at half-time, what could possibly go wrong in the second half?

When you have a big lead, surely you need to follow the example of Gillette and place a gigantic banner above the concourse at Waterloo Station, despite the fact that your closest rivals are Wilkinson Sword who can only work around the peripherique of shaving culture, adding a superfluous blade here and there in a plucky attempt to gain some traction in the market: still, don’t be complacent – tell London it’s game over.

Instead, with a revolutionised line up to maintain equality of game time, the veterans of the first half had to contend with the rhythms of new teammates, rhythms which were were retrogressive – atavistic, even – in nature; they swarmed around the ball, throwing composure and tactical shape to the four winds. It was a committed though generally hapless and misguided second half performance. When the first goal was slashed in off the boot of our own keeper, Clive wondered if the final score could genuinely be 6-5 to Twyford. A genuinely ridiculous display of ineptitude led to a second goal for Theresa’s boys after one of our defenders sent the ball spinning through the air behind his head and ultimately into the goal.

Thankfully, Hayden Harris, our junior Peter Crouch on blue smarties, raced away with the score at 5-3 to put a little more daylight between the teams. This was compromised , though, when further calamities made Clive a prophet: with 2 minutes to go, we were only 6-5 up and there was an epic goalmouth scramble to decide the game.

The ball bounced around in the box for what seemed like several minutes, with absolutely nobody in control of where it would end up. This culminated in probably the most unconstrained celebration we’ve ever been part of as eventually the ball broke loose to set Ciara Butler – a great defender but not by any means a common goal scorer – bounding up the pitch for a one on one with the keeper to settle the match: Could she? As the Twyford keeper assessed his options, Ciara just calmly tucked it underneath him to make the final score 7-5, undermining what would surely have been the greatest resurgence in the history of Twyford.

After the game, it was off to the Dog and Duck for a mid season convocation of coaches and assorted parents prior to a trip to the garden centre for another glimpse of a parallel dimension. ‘Oh, it’s Tom the Woodman’, they said. Eh? ‘Well you look exactly like Tom the Woodman, a man who works on site – we’d asked to see him.’

 

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.

Wokingham & Emmbrook Oranges’ performances are usually as predictable as the reports delivered by bleary-eyed traffic correspondents on a Saturday morning: ‘Expect delays in and around Floyd Road prior to Charlton Atheltic’s game this afternoon. Traffic is also likely to be slow on the North Circular as the day unfolds. Lots of comings and goings at Heathrow Airport today, so avoid the area if you want to. As for other parts of the country, the M6 through Birmingham is looking like it’s ready for traffic and it’s advisable to avoid the pedestrianised areas of Manchester if you’re travelling by car this afternoon.  Back ‘in town’, Brentford Fountain Leisure Centre remains inaccessible from the Chiswick Flyover other than to particularly skilled parcourt practitioners…’

In Wokingham’s case, the ebb and flow of the game is characterised by the concession of at least one early goal followed by either a successful or unsuccessful revival. Having watched 70 games or so, I can’t recall one in which the team faded away in the second half; they tend to start the game having already faded away, gradually mobilising as the first half progresses. As I happened to be caretaker manager for the game, perhaps I have to look inwards and take stock. Coach Peter had given me carte blanche to dispense with his rotational wisdom and form the team and tactics in my own image, a permission made easier to accept given the fact that we had no substitutes because they were away in North Wales.

I therefore decided to loosen up the Christmas tree a bit, allowing players to attack or defend as they saw fit rather than to feel they have to keep doggedly to their shape. I felt a bit like Mark Hughes taking Dickson Etuhu for a walk in the Great Park, ambling up to the Copper Horse and climbing on the stones at the base to show him horizons he couldn’t see from down in the centre of the town. I didn’t mind if they were defensive players: they could get forward when we were in possession, as long as they got back when needed. The left and right midfielders had free rein to get up and down as they saw fit – the right to roam: our lone striker had to chase and press, giving no time or space to the Purley defence. With Evan at right-back, and free to get forward, he scored two goals, one of which was a free-kick and the other resulted from a hitherto unauthorised run forward in which he sidestepped a defender and smashed the ball on the half volley into the top corner. The adrenaline from the goal helped him attack and defend in equal measure. At 2-0 up, it was possible to feel like a whelk-stall owner in a ‘high demand for whelks’ area.

At half-time, though, one of our best midfielders had a monumental, unforeseeable breakdown. He screamed, collapsing under the force of his sobs because he hadn’t scored a goal. To make matters worse, he was due to be goalkeeper in the second half. The Purley manager, meanwhile, must have been giving it the full Pacino: ‘I made every wrong choice a middle aged man can make. I uh…pissed away all my money, believe it or not. I chased off anyone who has ever loved me. And lately, I can’t even stand the face I see in the mirror…We are in hell right now, gentlemen. Believe me. And we can stay  here and get the shit kicked out of us or we can fight our way back into the light. We can climb out of hell. We can CLAW with our fingernails…I CAN’T DO IT FOR YOU. I’m too old…’

Anyway, in the second half Purley blew us out of the water completely, shattering the efforts of the first half as we finally let go of the semblance of shape I’d encouraged them to keep at arms length in the first place. I could make excuses: the unexpected wobbly, the tiredness of a team which played at a high tempo with no subs to rely on, the ruthlessness of the opposition’s physical long-ball game, the inability of our players to adapt to new instructions. A famous bank collapsed due to unauthorised trading on the Osaka Securities Exchange; we lost it due to unauthorised defending in Woodford Park.

I was willing the team to get back on the front foot and not sit too deep once we’d conceded. Unfortunately, the players’ logic was ‘Can’t you see? We’ve just conceded! We need to defend!’ In the final analysis, I couldn’t get a clear message through to the players from half-time onwards and they therefore lacked direction. I’d go abroad and coach, but Woodley Interpol would track me down. I felt like a novitiate tyre fitter in the absence of  Chris ‘the saviour’ Edmunds, Wokingham’s finest, who would one day return to find the locking wheel nut, apply the sealant and fit the tyre. As Clive, Mark’s uncle, said at the end: ‘Come back Michael: all is forgiven.’

 

 

P.S. Evan then played for Wokingham Cougars in their cup match. I was so disillusioned that I didn’t watch, returning only near the end of the game to find out that Evan had scored the Cougars’ only goal against Caversham Trents and the game was heading for penalties. He then scored in the penalty shoot-out, but alas: the Trents won.

Another day ends,
another dollar made was spent,
cycle unloaded, passage cleared
and coffee passed across the chairs.
We wash our face

and move at a slowworm’s pace
across the foothills of our hopes,
spinning so fast we stay in one place;
losing breath, questioning our reach,
emerging from Arctic tundra sleep
beneath clouds on an alpine massif
or aloft above Greenland,
crossing the sea for humidity,
palm trees and beaches.

Climbing mountains, not conquering them,
as living ellipses in black hole slippage
measuring space between luminescences,
camping and cooking wherever the purchase,
the co-ordinate on the continuum.