Tag: Football

Westwood Wanderers Colts U7s 1 Wokingham and Emmbrook U7s 2 (Dance, Mulvaney)

n.b. This was a cup game with a later kick-off time of 10:30

Sometimes a seemingly innocuous moment or conversation at training can prefigure what’s to come on Saturday. On Thursday evening, Evan and Mark ran out onto the dark and uneven surfaces of Forest School’s car park. As he turned a corner, I yelled ‘EVAN!’, but Mark’s mum was sanguine. She said “Well Mark is the George Best of the team, you know.”
I wasn’t so sure. “Really?”
“Yes, we had Amelia (the coach’s daughter) round the other day and Mark gave her a Fanta. Her dad told me that she normally only has water.”
It seems that Amelia benefitted from the sugar rush because her commitment to Cruyff turns and drag backs paid off in style and when I mentioned to Mark’s mum that the team were playing well, she said “Yes, it’s probably because of the lie in.” A lie in for a six-year-old? Again, that’s news to me, but Mark’s maverick, Fanta-driven worldview seems to have its benefits when the kick-off is pushed back. He was committed, effective and demonstrated a (hitherto undetectable) mental alertness which made him a vital component of the team.

Another important conversation was one conducted by text message with Marjie Walker, hardened supporter and the Wokingham and Emmbrook firm’s ‘top boy’, as it were, along with the sartorially elegant Joe Walker. As you may know, Marjie is ultra-conversant with the ways of the iphone, and when arranging a ‘meet’ is able to baffle and befuddle even the most proficient of emoji users and linguists, of which I am not. On this occasion she outwitted both the Westwood Wanderers crew and Woodley Cyber Crime Squad in just a few words by opting for French: ‘Tu veux un cafe a Costa a demain? Je t’emporterai un grande latte si tu veux?! Sucre ou non? A bientot’ (accents included). So having managed to outwit the authorities by a variety of means to gain entrance to the facility, the support they offered, at the peak of Woodley’s monsoon season, genuinely buoyed the team as they sought to contend with Westwood Wanderers’ niggly and ill-timed challenges.

Against the run of play, Wanderers took the lead in the first half, but the second half belonged to Wokingham. From one free-kick, Evan shot from well inside his own half (a cleaner strike you will not see), but it was saved as it dipped towards the top corner. An equaliser wasn’t long in coming though, with Josh Dance calmly finishing from close range sfter sustained pressure. When it looked as if we were heading for extra time, another free kick was awarded and this time it was star man Connor Mulvaney’s turn. There seemed to be something curious about the angle he approached the ball at, but what do I know? As his left foot connected, well…he pinged it unstoppably into the far corner, sending Wokingham and Emmbrook through to the next round. As Evan was excitedly speaking through the fence after the game, he was taken out, ambushed by our resident George Best’s exuberant embrace. Evan got up, clipped his heels and they were off running again.

This was a victory for spirit and creativity, both on and off the pitch, so it was fitting that fans left the ground singing both ‘Autumn Almanac’ by The Kinks and Ray Davies’ ‘Next Door Neighbour.’

‘Friday evenings, peeeeeeople get together,
Hiiiiiiiiding from the weather.
Tea and toasted, buttered currant buns
Can’t compensate for lack of sun,
Because the summer’s all gawn.’

‘Mr. Smith, another story
I wonder what became of him?
They say he threw the telly through the window
He went berserk and jacked the whole world in
They say he may have hit rock bottom
Still, he went out with a BANG and so he is not forgotten.’

Woodley Wanderers Scorpions U7s 4 Wokingham and Emmbrook Oranges U7s 3 (Mulvaney 2, Saynor) 

According to one of the strangest charts I’ve ever seen, published in The Daily Telegraph, today’s teams represent the best two postcodes in the country in which to enjoy a high quality of life. Apparently, average earnings are high, the schools are OK and nothing else really matters. You certainly wouldn’t think it possible to drive on the Reading Road or any of its tributaries and think ‘this is a nice place.’ Nobody would do that, surely. Last week, though, I chatted to a grandmother from Worcestershire. She said ‘they don’t have facilities like this in Worcester.’ So there you go.

Today the teams took a break from The Amsterdam Arena and the Olympiastadion and played at the damningly named Camp Nou. There was an element of confusion before the game because one of the parents (the type who has seen enough before they’ve even woken up) arrived in an orange tracksuit and conducted a training drill with the waiting Wokingham and Emmbrook players, also dressed in orange. He was dressed appropriately for the task he had set himself. The ref said ‘Excuse me coach, we’re going to start the game’ to which the orangeman replied ‘I’m not the coach’ and carried on with the drill.

Sometimes people take action. They get involved and they get mobile, however ill-advisedly. They thrust themselves into a zone of animation. They bark and cajole or speak quietly if they deem that to be a more soothing and therapeutic coaching pathway. Unfortunately, as we know, at least 99.9% of instructions to 6 year-olds are redundant. If you tell them to do one thing, they’ll forget to do lots of things. If you tell them to do lots of things, increasing the inputs, you just increase the randomness of the output.

When the game started, Wokingham reassuringly conceded a soft goal in an extremely short space of time indeed. The game then sort of degenerated into niggly nothingness. There were more free kicks than in any of the previous games put together and you wondered whether the players were battling for the Telegraph summit, cognisant of their rival status as top towns in Britain. The Woodley players seemed to commit more fouls, but the Oranges committed the more decisive ones. Evan started the game on the bench and then played in goal until half time, making a couple of good saves before handling outside the area and conceding Woodley’s second.
After the break he played up front, and quickly latched on to a through ball, hammering it into the corner to make it 2-1. In Woodley’s next attack, one of their strikers was felled just outside the box and scored from the resulting free kick. Connor Mulvaney then put an extraordinary shift in, scoring two goals to wrestle the game back again before a ridiculous rugby tackle right at the end resulted in Woodley scoring a penalty (taken twice due to incursion) to win the game. The Woodley fans were jubilant, but were cryptically targeted by the Wokingham faithful with an adapted version of Love etc by The Pet Shop Boys:

DON’T HAVE TO BE
a big bucks Hollywood star
DON’T HAVE TO DRIVE
a super car to get far
DON’T HAVE TO WEAR
a smile much colder than ice
DON’T HAVE TO BE
beautiful but it’s nice

YOU NEED MORE than the Gerhard Richter hanging on your wall,
a gulf stream jet to take you door to door
somewhere chic near The Bulmershe School
You need more, you need more, you need more, you need more,
YOU NEED LOVE.

Theale Tigers U7s Undisclosed Wokingham and Emmbrook U7s 2 

Every hot streak comes to an end. One day, the sun will turn into a red giant, oceans will be brought to the boil and Earth will cop the big one as the sun dips out of hydrogen and burns in enlarged form for a further billion years before the final Student Loans Company statement is extinguished and their officials throw in the towel, watching on like honorary pagans. As Solomon is said to have noted, ‘There’s a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to fuck up against Theale’ (hopefully a time to do them over too). This was all about the breaking down and the plucking up. Without being too specific, it is hard to find words to capture the ineptitude of the performance. 

A goal was conceded after 1.3 seconds, as usual. And they just kept on coming. My mood darkened irretrievably after the 6th in 5 minutes while other parents were of the persuasion that ‘it’s just a bit of fun, though, isn’t it?’ They are entitled to their opinion. I ventured into the Theale area to gauge the mood of their usually vociferous fans and all I heard was a sheepish ‘I hate to see a team get battered like this.’ That summed up the feeling that lingered and which one tried desperately not to project on to the youngster at the end as we headed straight for the vending machines.

Woodley Wanderers (U7s) 8 Wokingham and Emmbrook (U7s) 1 (Saynor)

With parents looking about as fresh as The Happy Mondays emerging from the Hacienda on a Sunday in 1990, the Wokingham and Woodley players had a lot to do by way of marshalling their seniors towards wakefulness. Woodley were set up in a disconcertingly coherent formation and immediately set about doing the simple things well, namely kicking the ball in the right direction towards a player which the kicker had identified as wearing an exact replica of the repugnant green shirt he himself was wearing. This playing of the ‘simple ball’ thereby contrived to destroy what I can only describe as an ‘aesthetically deluded’ Wokingham line-up. Careful observers will identify the root of this problem as originating in a misinterpretation of Thursday evening’s training seesion in which the skill focus was on the correct execution of a Cruyff Turn. Thus Connor Mulvaney, last week’s 5 goal wizard, was so beset by the false imperatives of Mr Cruyff that he came to resemble Mr Cholmondely-Warner on an empty wing, a static Cruyff machine which spun and spun until Woodley got bored and nonchalantly poked the ball from its pointless cycle. The sooner we leave the spectre of this conceited Dutchman behind, the better. 

A two goal lead was quickly achieved before Evan opportunistically hit a loose ball from outside the box to pull one back, sparking false hope among the Satsuma ultras congregated behind the Burgemeester Stramanweg end of the ground. Hope was false because Johan continued to exert his moronic spell on the Wokingham team throughout the game, allowing Woodley to amble through a Wokingham & Emmbrook defence which possessed about as much conviction as Mike Gatting in the face of apartheid. To lighten the atmosphere, as if to atone for the transgressive elements of last week’s song, the Wokingham contingent opted for a much more environmentally friendly effort this week, spontaneously breaking into a chorus of ‘King of the Road’, complete with gendered parts: (men) ‘No car, no pool, no pets’: (women) ‘WE AIN’T GOT NO CIGARETTES! THIRD BOXCAR, MIDNIGHT TRAIN, DESTINATION BANGOR, MAINE. OLD WORN OUT CLOTHES AND SHOES, I DON’T PAY NO UNION DUES!’

The final score was, of course, immaterial and the Satsumas thankfully left the pitch in relative ignorance of its truth and implications. Mesmerised by the shambles, our drive home then took a turn for the worse and resulted in a three-point turn near the railway line in Earley. Evan remarked: ‘You are driving mad. This is not how we get home. Where the HELL are we going?’

Wokingham and Emmbrook Black (I’m not a Mathematician) Wokingham and Emmbrook Orange 1 (Mulvaney)

Armed with pre-match instructions and a squad rotation policy which makes Rafa Benitez seem like a relatively linear-minded fellow, we arrived at the Olympiastadion of Berlin without a clear mandate to impose the ultra-pragmatic and attritional tactics which might have kept the scoreline within quantifiable parameters. Instead, when quizzed in the pre-match team talk as to which skills they would need to use in the game, 3 hands went up: ‘Cruyff turn’, ‘drag back’ and ‘rainbow flick.’ Oh dear. Our mentions of passing, tackling, shooting and Catenaccio were met with squints of incomprehension. In no way do I wish to denigrate the work of the usual coaches, though. Leading this team to victories and near misses while emphasising flair and creativity is an almost miraculous achievement, and not something I or my co-manager could come anywhere near to replicating. In fact, the temporary partnership got off to a catastrophic start with a blazing row after training on Thursday, and never quite recovered:

Andrew: ‘Do you want to take the stuff then?’
Me: ‘Ok’
Andrew: ‘Well I could take it if you want?’
Me: ‘No it’s Ok, I’ll do it. See you on Saturday.’

See, you never know what’s going on behind the scenes. Everyone you meet is engaged in a battle you’re not aware of, and all that, sometimes by text message or e-mail. Just in case you think I’m running out of caveats and excuses, the final nail in the pre-match coffin was the farce of the anthems. As Wokingham and Emmbrook Black were the nominal home team, they kept the Wokingham club anthem of ‘Never Forget’ by Take That and therefore went into the match fairly buoyant and not at all forgetting where they were coming from. The Oranges, proud to be a mixed team, were unaccountably left with an English adaptation of Cardiff City’s ‘Men of Harlech’, called ‘Men of Trowbridge.’ This went on for 6 and a half minutes with Ciara, Amelia and the boys dutifully trying their best with the lyrics sheet:

Loud the martial pipes are sounding
every manly heart is bounding
As our trusted chief surrounding,
march we Trowbridge men.

Frightened steeds are wildly neighing
Brazen trumpets loudly braying
Wounded men for mercy praying
With their parting breath.

See they’re in disorder,
Comrades, keep close order
Ever they shall rue the day,
They ventured o’er the Wiltshire border.

Once the game was under way, we conceded a goal within 1.3 seconds but then managed to steady the ship for 3 or 4 minutes before an avalanche of goals began and didn’t cease until the final whistle. After the first quarter we were heartened to observe a significant contingent of Oranges fans from the Milton Road area of Wokingham arrive with Costa coffees. Influenced by Newcastle fans leaving J.D. Wetherspoon’s in Shepherd’s Bush 5 minutes after kick-off, they launched into a chorus of ‘Never seen a kick-off, never seen a kick-off, never seen a kick-off in me life’ and maintained an absolute racket throughout the game, pogoing unwaveringly despite the catastrophic manner in which the match unravelled. It would have been nice if they refrained from joining in with ‘You’re getting sacked in the morning!’ while we were trying to deliver the half-time team talk though.

Every time the Blacks got the ball, they were either preparing to score or scoring (often brilliantly): every time we got the ball, we were either trying to execute an exotic skill or an ill-advised lunge. Some of the goals, such as a lob into the far corner when the keeper wasn’t even off the line, were truly outrageous and there’s no possible way to begrudge them the victory. After the game, Evan said ‘Can we go to Tokyo soon?’, summing up the mood nicely. Further salt was rubbed into the wound when we parked on Norrey’s Avenue to prepare for a restorative sojourn in town only to discover that Evan had left his Star Wars hoodie on the pitch. After initial panic, this turned into a much needed false sense of catharsis as young Jamel was able to go back to Berlin on our behalf to find it.

Woodley Zebras 11 Wokingham & Emmbrook 2

This was a painful watch at the home of Woodley Zebras, the Stade de France pitch at the Bulmershe Goals Centre. We arrived with seconds to spare having inexplicably lost Evan’s registration form on the way. No questions were asked, however, and he ran straight into the action, facing up to an extremely well-drilled and immaculately shorn Zebras team who lined up in a rigid diamond formation against a somewhat raw blend of hairstyles, genders and philosophies on the Wokingham side. Woodley raced into an early lead before Evan picked up the ball in his own half and lofted it Beckham-style into their goal to equalise. However, something went badly wrong during the remainder of the half and Wokingham went in 9-1 down at the break. Woodley tore through the defence as if it was Harriet Harman’s shadow cabinet. The halftime team talk, if it was audible, would have brought a tear to the eye, I’m sure, as after the break Wokingham attacked the ball with venom, hunting in packs to nullify the Woodley attack by any means necessary, resulting in a much narrower second half deficit of 2-1. A punishing morning’s football but they never gave up the fight, emerging with egos at least one stop short of total annihilation. A humbling lesson.