Tag: Burghfield Reds

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.

There isn’t the virtual acreage to cover today’s events in full, so like a man or woman condemned to do their weekly shop at the basket checkout (Harry Enfield’s ‘Here’s another 10 items or less, here’s another 10 items or less, here’s another 10 items or less), I’ll try to cover what I can and make economies where possible.

Friday evening was spent discussing pipes which are visible from the M1. Apparently, ‘when you spend 2 years of your life on the M1, you run out of things to speculate about.’ Nevertheless, there is a ‘Purple Pipes Online Forum’ on which people do precisely that, bantering about plumbing anomalies and the significance of colour. Marginal trivia, perhaps, but who could honestly demean those who make it their business to seriously consider the infrastructure of this country, to split the infinitive of a journey to the Lake District?

So Burghfield Reds arrived from the West Country in all their village finery: a blue kit, head to foot. I’m not sure what the significance of this is. Cardiff are called the Bluebirds and played in red for a few years, but that decision had a nationalistic thrust to it which I’m not sure Burghfield share.

The village member who corralled his team into the Estadio da Luz did so public spiritedly, railing his charges in with a squint and some amiable stubble. With the game underway, Evan played as a Libero, a deep lying defender who outwitted the Burghfield attack with nonchalant vision. Lead wolf Connor Mulvaney was on the bench, the Soccer Roster was in full rotation and Jack Parry punished witlessness, firing us into a 2-0 lead early doors.

Soon, the Kaiser was on and two near-identical goals were scored from outrageous angles, yet Burghfield rallied. They scored from a goal kick and an unholy mess in the goalmouth as Amelia back-peddled, mis-coordinating her feet as she tumbled backwards into the goal: she was later to score after a brilliant doppelpass on the konter, liaising with cousin Connor the Kaiser to devastating effect. Yes!

So at half-time, it was quite literally 4-3.

The bestubbled veteran of Burghfield mewed his team together with hope: hope, pride, optimism, self-awareness and more than a smattering of mental health. His assistant was less scrutable: a bald-headed fellow with correct carriage.

Evan was back on the pitch. We were cooped in a rectangle of self-expression. Too many einwurfs (the throw-in, scourge of junior 5-a-side) and so much good play to warm the senior Mulvaney cockles: dragbacks, passing, Cruyff turns, tackles and goals. No elfmeters; limited foul play.

The zweite halfte was less of a football festival, though my highlight was ‘in this moment’ as Pellegrini would say. Evan picked up the ball deep and spied a chasm in the Burghfield mandeckung.

‘Run Evan, Go!’ He was on the ball, never mind the danger, cut loose, bearing down on Burghfield and their goalkeeper: ‘Shoot! GOAL!’ 8-3. Vindication, gegners crushed, a Bombenschuss on the Bolzplatz .

A phenomenal win for Wokingham against our favourite Mannschaft from the countryside.

We were euphoric Satsumas and they, of course, were Burghfield Reds: blue.

You have one of the biggest military arsenals in the world, an army of 690,000 and a logistics labour force of up to 12.6 million people, none of whom can particularly leave the country. What’s the next step for the loopy autocrat with the dodgy Barnet? A leaflet drop. South Korea. Pop down to Prontaprint. You can imagine the song going around in Kim’s head:

Monday left me broken,
Tuesday I was through with hoping,
Wednesday I popped down to the printers,
Thursday we’re pam-ph-let-ing.
Thank the stars it’s Friday,
Dropping a hydrogen bomb on Saturday,
Guess it’s to the barbers again on Sunday.
I’ll be shaving my rug.

Today’s game was all about preparation. Not exactly inspired by Kim Jong Un, but in his wake, a group of us thought ‘F it. Let’s leaflet Burghfield.’ Let’s absolutely flood them with pamphlets about Wokingham. Let’s overwhelm them with tracts. Let’s extol the virtues of Winnersh, the stagnant ponds of Emmbrook. Tell them about Crockhamwell Road in Woodley: the traffic calming measures of Arborfield. Let’s become New Wave Tractarians of Central Berkshire, befuddling minds with inventories of Molly Millars Lane warehouses and the iron curtain of the mind which separates Lower Earley from civilisation.

This game was won, if not entirely on the doorsteps of Burghfield and Burghfield Common, then certainly on the Forest School training pitch. After last week’s (frankly woeful) performance, coaches Michael and Peter spent most of the session subverting FA directives in their attempt to toughen the team up. You are not allowed to explicitly teach 6-year-olds how to tackle, but you are allowed to model how to ‘press’ and ‘close down’ the opposition.

The team followed this plan to the letter, proving my beanie hat theory to be a bit of a red herring. The problem with not being able to tackle, though, is that you end up fouling. After Connor guided us to a 2 goal lead, Jack Parry received a STRAIGHT RED CARD for felling a country bumpkin who was through on goal. Except he didn’t get a red card because just as you’re not allowed to tackle, you’re also not allowed to be punished for fouling. This leads to an absurd situation in which almost anything goes, with players lunging in ‘all over the shop’, as my dad would say. So Jack lived on, and went on to score 2 goals of his own. Their bedraggled manager seemed upset before the game had even started (misfiring tractor? Udder problems?) and left the sanctuary of his urban technical area to prowl around the pitch in justified disgust. Fittingly, they scored from the resulting free kick. The foul was an accident, but maybe a sin bin should be introduced: 5 minutes out as a balm for the aggrieved.

Wokingham and Emmbrook were relentless. Evan- off colour with asthma and shinpad deprivation- did enough Cruyff turns and Jenas jinks to win the Skills Trophy, but it was really the drive and all-consuming passion of Connor, Mark, Ciara, Jack and Amelia which won the day: Amelia even managed to successfully execute a backheel pass across our own six yard line to get the keeper out of trouble at one point. Everything they tried seemed to work. A lot of credit has to go to coaches Michael and Peter Mulvaney for identifying last week’s problems and arriving at training with a clear strategy that the players were able to understand and then execute in the game. Sorry Burghfield, but that’s life in the metropolis. As Neil Hannon once recommended: ‘Wise up little souls. Join the doomed army. Fight the good fight. Wage the unwinnable war. Elegance against ignorance. Difference against indifference. Wit against shit.’

Coach Michael’s Man of the Match speech was slightly puzzling though. He said ‘Mark, you reminded me of yourself.’ Deep, but maybe a little cryptic, a little backhanded for a six-year-old?