As this was the last game of the regular season, I will begin with some (quite astonishing) goalscoring statisitics. In 24 games:
C. Mulvaney 59
Saynor 17
Sexton 15
Parry 12
Dance 4
Xanthoulis 1
Butler 1
A. Mulvaney 1
In the drizzle and resented frigidity of this April morning, a shadow was cast across our porch. The figure lingered, seemingly incapacitated by a deep dilemma, a wrangling of the soul. Could ‘Knock and the door will be opened to you’ – though a good aspiration – ever apply here, in the Central Berkshire lowlands, significantly in advance of 9am on a dank Saturday morning?
Evidently not, for Uncle Jack had to be relieved of his self-imposed porch-centred limbo by a frightened resident. Once his true identity was discovered, terror was transformed into unconditional welcome faster than you can say ‘Everything hung on a prayer, in the hanging dusk.’ Is there a harder hardness of core than that required to turn out for an Under 7’s game in the pouring rain at 8:30 in the morning?
If the vivid orange of Wokingham’s shirts were an insufficient burst of colour against the banks of brooding grey clouds above Bulmershe Water Tower, Connor offered more as he sauntered magisterially across the pitch in gloves which were…what colour exactly? An indeterminate shade of bluey-green. We settled on teal.
The sky also seemed to take on illogical hues: the mint sunrise and misty buff of Harry Enfield’s Dulux chart. Pat Butcher stood on the sideline with her little dog, waiting for things to commence, but the sky spat at us. The sun threatened to illuminate greater portions of the pitch, but managed only a grey and yellow mist between the clouds.
After a long and bumpy journey over from Burghfield in their Belarus 3022 from Minsk Tractor works, with 5 in the cabin and 2 in the ballast box, Burghfield were understandably slow to start and crocked of limb. But they worked with the methodical dignity of seasoned labourers, and it was nip and tuck until the deeper recesses of the first half when Evan hit the post from distance and Connor scored soon after the rebound. By half-time it was 3-0.
What the landowner from Burghfield said to his bedraggled charges in the break, we’ll never know. Perhaps he told them to forget about their carbon footprints, reminded them that there’s no organic top soil because it’s astro-turf: told them that it’s but a short step from crop rotation to squad rotation, that our attacks need to be mulched, that counter-attacks are essentially pesticide drift.
However he phrased it, they intensified and diversified in their approach. They put the ‘agro’ into ‘agroecology’ and showed goal drought resilience by scoring several in quick succession, incredibly making the scoreline 4-4 with 10 minutes to go.
At this point, the day threatened to break loose from its already tentative moorings as an unthinkable, unmentionable moment occurred for Evan which I can only allude to by offering a personal anecdote by way of parallel.
Yesterday, I took part in an 11-a-side match against a team at least half our age, most of whom were very good players. Can you think of anything more absurd than a manager issuing instructions to the team over a Tannoy? Well that’s what happened yesterday. We had contained them quite well until just after half-time when the manager belted out, over the loudspeaker: ‘Right, we’re going to go 3-5-2, that’s 3 5 2. Rob, you push up and Alex go to centre-back with Mark and Luke. We’re going for it.’
This seemed like a kamikaze move; surely the point of tactical changes is to offer an element of surprise? And they’d been overloading one flank all game, so we’d be even further exposed now. Anyway, no sooner had I moved to centre-back than a ball was floated over my head from midfield: except I couldn’t let it float over my head because they had 2 players running on to the ball, unmarked. So I decided to get my head to the ball in order to nod it back to the ‘keeper. Unfortunately, he read the ball as definitely going over my head and ran towards the attackers (without giving me a shout) in order to battle them for it. Where do you think the ball went?
5-4 to Burghfield. Evan kept his head up and moved on. Please don’t let this be the decisive moment. It was an unbelieveable comeback from Burghfield, but the story wasn’t over. Putting his Everton goalie shirt to one side, Connor re-entered the fray for one last teal-gloved lunge for the summit, and with Mark, Jack, Kiera and Thanasie’s help and wilfulness we finally got there: a remarkable final thrust at the culmination of an epic season.
Wilderspool Causeway 