The Sharp End

Forget garden centres and country walks: the game needs you!

2010-04-08T14:02:00Z

Giving up playing football is one of those things that just sort of happens to you.

It’s a bit like giving up having even the vaguest idea who is No1 in the charts, or if the charts even still exist, or what “meow” is, or regularly spending evenings drinking huge amounts of strong imported lager in the company of a small group of men, or bothering to occasionally wash your clothes rather than simply rotating them cunningly (I am aware some of these may be personal rather than universal, but you get the idea).

The point is: it’s too easy to give up. By the time you reach your thirties you have the easy-come-easy-go mobility of a post-Bosman Premier League player.

You don’t need the game anymore, the game needs you. You know the ropes. Perhaps you even have an estate car with sat nav and a working stereo. Football will come to your door, often in the shape of slightly desperate Friday night phone calls.

And when it does it can wait in the hall, along with everything else that wants a piece of you like DIY warehouses, ironing, ever going to an art gallery or simply sitting staring emptily at Saturday Kitchen from the sofa.

There are also convincing reasons for giving up. Often these are physical.

Playing 11-a-side football is a matter of progressive physical agony as an adult, both impact and exertion based. It once took me about six months to work out that experiencing extreme shooting pains in your knee before during and after playing football was perhaps a sign that something properly wrong.

Stopping playing for a hit felt slightly naughty. Was this really allowed? Was it really this easy?

Second, there is the question of commitment. The number one killer of Sunday League and five a side careers is having something more important to do, usually involving garden centres, or nice walks in the country, or awkward and depressing in-laws-to-be lunches (which can be happily abandoned later in life once an official truce of un-duckable commitment is entered).

She may well complete you. She may be ‘The One’. But she is also unlikely to encourage regular weekend sodding-off combined with a mouldering, surly, exhausted, sofa-crashing return.

Finally, you may simply have lost your zing and your mojo. You may have fallen out of love with the game. This is often the result of close study of those who do the opposite and keep on keeping on right to the end.

Taciturn, grey-haired quantity surveyors called Bob, always the first to arrive and last to leave, powerfully doe-eyed with silent neediness.

The pre-divorce male, with his constant wife-grumbles and his dramatically unannounced appearance on your doorstep carrying a holdall and a duvet one Saturday afternoon.

And of course the man who has nothing else, often the skipper, usually a 30-somehting parental lodger, perhaps this is even you (yes, you).

These must all be fought off. Giving up is only ever a final resort. We must not give up, for good reasons.

Firstly there is the keeping of the flame. Official figures suggest amateur football is thriving, and people a playing more than ever before. This is a lie.

Pitches are going. Teams are falling away. People are, amazingly, doing other things instead. Twenty years from now amateur football will be a strange, crushed, officially pigeon-holed thing played under a motorway underpass in a lycra boiler suit and a crash helmet. We must stop this, or at least put it off as long as possible.

And finally, in the end, football is what you’ve got. Nothing else comes connects you umbilically to that first perfect childhood ball-hoofing crush, the experience of running out into all that green chasing a plastic ball, all possibilities perfectly open.

This feeling never quite dies. Even when, against all odds, you look less like a footballer and more like a particularly red-faced and jowly newsreader shoehorned into a small nylon shirt, fly-hacking at passing football, chased by teenagers constantly on the verge of some form of sudden collapse.

Inside your head nothing changes. You’re simply playing football, just like you always have. So don’t give up. You mustn’t give up.

But then, you weren’t ever going to anyway, were you?

Previously on The Sharp End:
Respecting football's hierarchy of talent
Football: fighting minus the fists (mostly)
Why tactics say a lot about humanity
What your kit says about you (and others)
Why shouting and swearing is park football's birdsong
Why winning means nothing and everything
The manager – parent, pastor, secretary, dictator

Do you love Sunday League? Have you got the photos to prove it?
You could appear in a Puma ad on Sky Sports TV.
Go to SkySports.com/lovefootball and start uploading now.

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Respecting football's hierarchy of talent

2010-04-01T15:03:00Z

One of the big things about playing football is that you instantly take your place in an unarguable hierarchy of talent.

People often say football is all about opinions. This is only half true.

Watching football, shouting at football, sitting in a North London tapas bar in a Lionel Messi shirt talking about “Barca” in a braying voice: these things are all matters of opinion.

Playing football is a rare absolute in a confusing world. When you play, you really aren’t kidding anyone.

Everyone has a private ranking of the best player they have ever played with or against.

For me it was the captain of our university team. He was awesome: a strolling, ball-playing centre half; quick on the turn, a perfect touch, hugely powerful and quick-footed. You couldn’t get near him.

It was like playing against a different species. The word was always that he was going to go pro at some point. There seemed to be no question of this. Moves were already being made. Vaguely, you kept expecting to hear something.

He eventually played two games as a sub for Colchester. I heard about it years later. This seemed impossible. Suddenly the world seemed very big and football like a bewilderingly difficult game.

We all hear the talk about the unguessable gap between even the best park amateur and the lowliest professional. But like walking in space or catching a violent case of Indian dengue fever, you probably have to actually experience it yourself to have any idea of its sheer terrible scale.

I have a friend who was a decent schoolboy footballer, good enough to make it into the Blackburn youth system.

Everything went well until he finally came up against the young Damien Duff in a practice match. It was, he says, a defining experience.

There was no going any further forward after that. But he does also know certain things: he understands class-gulf and ability-rationing in a way that that even Duff himself is probably unaware of.

This works in other ways too. There is an unexpressed – and pretty much inexpressible – sense of restrained admiration for those who belong to a higher football caste than you.

Your team’s best midfielder who can actually run fast and control the ball properly and deliver a dead ball and even “see” a pass. He has a halo of righteousness about him.

You give him space in the changing Portakabin and – even if he also happens to be a semi-mute or a gurning sociopath – you give him a kind of respect.

It must be nice - so nice - to actually be good at this. You really can’t fake it.

What you can do is judge how good someone is instantly. There is an implicitly grasped pecking order.

All it takes is one pass, one muffed ball trap, one round of keep-ups. This is information unique to the football player. You have a new way of judging humanity.

Tony Blair may be many things: but anybody who has ever played football will have had their opinion of him unavoidably tweaked by watching him play head tennis with Kevin Keegan or doing one-twos with Glenn Hoddle. Blair could play.

Similarly, John Major was dead to me the moment I witnessed his frankly toddler-level attempts to control a rolling all at a photo shoot. This was simply not going to work out.

Also, try as I might I could never quite maintain my absolute reverence for the West Indian fast bowler Curtly Ambrose after having a kick about with him in a local park and discovering he had absolutely no ball skill.

He toe-poked the thing. It was shattering. Courtney Walsh, on the other hand, was useful. Still got a lot of time for Courtney Walsh.

Around the same time as this encounter I started an ongoing discussion with some friends about which professional player have the most devastating effect playing at our bog bound park football level.

We discounted the delicate skills of a Giggs or a Joe Cole. We weren’t satisfied with an out and out midfield enforcer, like a Patrick Vieira. We already had muscle and heft.

For a long time it was Les Ferdinand who really hit the spot. You could imagine him scoring 23 goals in a game: unstoppable power headers, the pitch-length gallop, the shot from halfway.

These days it’s obviously Wayne Rooney. Just imagine it. In fact this is probably why Rooney is so popular, and so tenderly cherished, tribal loyalties aside.

He looks like the best Sunday league, park kick about-based, Astroturf-galloping amateur footballer ever conceived. He’s like you - only really, impossibly good – which isn’t something you could ever say about Glenn Hoddle or Teddy Sheringham.

In a way it’s the ultimate compliment.

Previously on The Sharp End:
Football: fighting minus the fists (mostly)
Why tactics say a lot about humanity
What your kit says about you (and others)
Why shouting and swearing is park football's birdsong
Why winning means nothing and everything
The manager – parent, pastor, secretary, dictator

Do you love Sunday League? Have you got the photos to prove it?
You could appear in a Puma ad on Sky Sports TV.
Go to SkySports.com/lovefootball and start uploading now.

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Football: fighting minus the fists (mostly)

2010-03-25T12:57:00Z

In one very specific way, playing amateur football is a lot like travelling on the London Tube network: it’s a miracle the whole thing goes off as peacefully as it does.

Playing football may never involve you in anything as enervating as a busy Monday morning on the Northern Line – one of those days when people no longer bother shouting “Can you move right down inside please?” in a braying self-righteous voice but instead simply push, tutting, into the overcoated crush with a short-arm scythe of the attaché case, shouldering an extra 4cm of floor-footprint in order to frown at a freesheet newspaper while, with the other hand, aggressively asserting control of the yellow pole.

But, like commuting, football also has its own distinct set of rules, an etiquette of concussive self-restraint.

This is a good thing, because the potential for violence is high. In fact, football and fighting have many common elements. Very few activities involve the same wary, cold-eyed calculations of an opponent’s muscle mass and general health.

Who cares if the man next to you can run quickly over 20 metres, if he’s been working out or letting himself go, if he has an appetite for confrontation, if his elbows are sharp and his thighs are unusually powerful? Very few people, in fact, outside of the pub brawler and the footballer (and possibly the sexually active urban homosexual).

Football requires you to make all these judgements. It asks that you enter a world of untutored collisions with other human beings that might, in the normal world, amount to a variety of serious assaults.

I have never really been involved in a proper fight; not a fight that lasts longer than one decisive blow (always received, never delivered) and a few minutes of bewildered after-fight. But I have regularly launched myself at other men feet first from a running start on the football field.

I’ve been involved in a leg-breaking. I’ve been put in hospital and knocked unconscious. I’ve had my nose bloodied and my shin cut open. It’s amazing, really, how much approved violence you can still get through without ever having had a proper fight - but with football in your corner.

Happily all this is held together by a stringently enforced code of on-field conduct that includes the following:

1. Be nice.
 Because everyone knows when you’re not. No need to freeze-frame here: it’s already in slow motion. A bow-legged 14-stone 30-something man going “a bit high at the ball”? You’re going to spot it 200 yards away. And so amateur football is still surprisingly well-behaved and unusually tender in its collisions.

2. Only small men ever actually fight.
 Always watch for the short-*rse. Beware the wiry titch. He is angry. He cannot be laughed out of it. Stay away. Or simply nullify him by hiding behind his much taller team-mate, whose job it is to say repeatedly “Lionel, no. No. Lionel, no,” while you pretend to be just about holding yourself back, but, you know, if this goes on, well...

3. It all stays on the pitch.
 You may go briefly forehead to forehead, or paunch to paunch. Team-mates may intercede, making peaceable hand gestures and perhaps saying “Leave it, Dave” or “Easy, easy”. But at the final whistle this will be settled, not with a stern, hollow-cheeked finger-crushing handshake, but with a droopingly apologetic arm around the shoulder and a sense of self-ironising absurdity. It’s a bit like sumo: staggeringly, burpingly collision-based within the white lines – but outside of them, an exaggerate dance of courtly respect.

4. The best fights are in-fights.
 I’ve only ever seen two full-on, Western-style mass brawls, the kind that see grown men actually sprinting in order to jostle and wave their arms and launch flabby kung-fu kicks. Both were on adjoining pitches. And both had nothing to do with the opposition. These were team-mate on team-mate fights which, in truth, are the only ones that ever really kick off.
What’s the point in wanting to beat up the oppo anyway? You hardly know them. Team-mates are different. This is the real dark heart of amateur football. As the police are prone to pointing out in the kind of Friday night ITV mini-series that often star a baggy-faced family-friendly actor previously seen in a long-running comedy series, most of the time it’s a domestic.

This isn’t meant to downplay the importance of violence. In truth, one of the best things about playing amateur football is still its controlled, almost-non-existent, but still oddly attractive sheen of hidden violence.

There are few things better in life than launching a full-on, properly sliding, sliding tackle. When do you ever get to do this, ever, except in football? Football’s violence is still uniquely exciting, and not in a funny way either; instead it’s orderly, disciplined, and even quite old-fashioned.

Previously on The Sharp End:
Why tactics say a lot about humanity
What your kit says about you (and others)
Why shouting and swearing is park football's birdsong
Why winning means nothing and everything
The manager – parent, pastor, secretary, dictator

Do you love Sunday League? Have you got the photos to prove it?
You could appear in a Puma ad on Sky Sports TV.
Go to SkySports.com/lovefootball and start uploading now.

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Why tactics say a lot about humanity

2010-03-18T16:31:00Z

In theory there are no tactics when you play Sunday league football, or five-a-side, or any type of football that involves normal men for whom the basic nuts and bolts of being able to run and kick and occasionally even head a football are usually enough.

This is because of the nature of tactics. Tactics are something you do when you have already achieved physical and technical parity. They presuppose a certain level of reliability; patterns of play that can be predicted and rearranged.

Basically, tactics happen when the problem is that there aren’t enough mistakes happening. So really there is no need for tactical refinement in amateur football because of the huge acreage of physical and organisational slack that still needs to be taken up.

There is a flaw in this theory. Mainly, nobody seems to have told amateur footballers. Because tactics are everywhere. Team talks abound. Coaches and captains frown and point on the touchline.

I have witnessed stand-up arguments about tactics, deep theory stuff about the precise manner in which a team of 11 overweight and fearful men should approach falling over, getting a stitch, hacking at the ball and eventually losing 11-3.

I played in a team with an ex-captain who constantly shouted “on the carpet” and “Keep it!" and “Time!” whenever anybody punted the ball in the air. He saw himself as waging a lone crusade against insufficiently Barcelona-like football in the park leagues of south-east London: an aesthete, a scholar, a bit of a nob.

NATIONAL STANDARDS

This is the real meat of amateur tactics. Anybody who has grown up playing organised football will understand why the game is played the way it is in this country, or any other country where it’s cold and it often drizzles shamelessly for days at a time.

The tactics that have flourished in British football – the punt, the chase, the jostle, the push – get a bad press. But every park footballer knows these are first tactics, site-specific tactics based around weather and pitch quality and early-years height disparities. They make sense.

You do win at kids' football, and later in full-size park football, by relying on strength and the big kid/bloke/21-year-old mate of a mate who once had trials with Gillingham and is now only a little bit of an alcoholic. Hoofing it long and chasing the ball downfield like the park-based final scene in a George Romero zombie film does still count as a tactic.

It only starts to look silly when you get into proper football, and the pitches become hard and smooth, and when tournaments are played in hot places where less weather-based tactics are required.

"Switch! Switch! SWIIIIIIIITChohforgetit"

That the park football tactic is innate becomes clear when you play with people from another countries. In the cosmopolitan amateur kickabout, all the clichés are true. It just works out like this. Mexican accountants favour short sideways passes. Norwegian exchange students play it long and early. Brazilian waiters have a sublime touch and like to overlap. Uruguayan primary school teachers are cloggers.

I once spent six months playing football on a kibbutz in a shifting team of up to 20 different nationalities. The tactical melting pot was a fascinating thing, but over time the distinctions did break down. Our Peruvian central defender would look for the head of our Scottish centre-forward. The Danes, who fancied themselves a bit, developed into a version of the current Spain midfield, all nifty touches and sharp ball rotation.

This is often the nature of tactics in amateur football. They are instinctive and unspoken. You might spray the same toe-poked long diagonal pass out to your left-winger at least five times every game, but only in the first half, because you know he’s likely to be dry-retching or pretending to be injured within the next half hour or so.

I once played a few games up front and discovered I was weirdly good at headed flick-ons. I could flick on. Who knew? There I was, flicking on as though I’d always flicked on. Abruptly and without explanation I stopped being good at flick-ons. Suddenly, I couldn’t flick on to save my life. And that was that. But we had had a tactic for a while.

EVERYONE'S AN EXPERT

Sometimes amateur tactics are more considered. I once watched a women’s match where the coach had drilled three formidable American centre-halves to hold a position 10 metres apart and march up and down the pitch as though they were manacled together in a set of over-sized stocks. It was awesome. The other team simply couldn’t cope.

Of course, television has had an effect too. Football tactics are now “out there”. They exist in the public domain as something to be debated hotly, in the way left-wing politics might once have been, or the doctrinal niceties of the Lutheran church. The new vocabulary of banks of four, third men runs, pressing people all over the pitch and “parking the bus” has trickled down.

Men will discuss their formation in all earnestness, as though anyone actually keeps to a formation, or there is any meaningful distinction between 4-4-2 and 4-1-3-1-1, or playing “on the counter-attack” when your centre forward wears a scarf for most of the game and spends the half time interval eating a sausage bap from the van.

Really the existence of tactics is an example of how amateur football is, above all, a game of the imagination, a grown-up version of pretending to be Spiderman, or a cowboy. Of course we have tactics, and lots of them, because tactics are a cerebral business. And the game we play, or imagine we might one day play, exists mainly inside our heads.

Elsewhere on The Sharp End:
Football: fighting minus the fists (mostly)
What your kit says about you (and others)
Why shouting and swearing is park football's birdsong
Why winning means nothing and everything
The manager – parent, pastor, secretary, dictator

Do you love Sunday League? Have you got the photos to prove it?
You could appear in a Puma ad on Sky Sports TV.
Go to SkySports.com/lovefootball and start uploading now.

Club news * Features * News * Interviews * Home
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What your kit says about you (and others)

2010-03-12T10:55:00Z

When you play amateur football, your gear really shouldn’t matter.

What is your kit, after all, but a fig leaf with which you mask the flubbering, triple-bellied nudity of your basic technical deficiencies, declining fitness, marzipan-strength mental toughness, tactical naivety, non-existent leadership qualities, bad sportsmanship and inability to do a stepover while the ball is moving without falling over and then having to pretend you’ve actually hurt yourself so no one laughs too much?

This is an interesting question, because in some ways your kit is everything. It’s all you’ve got out there. These are your props, your inadequate inflatable life vest, and your something to cling to.

Kit is undoubtedly more important to the amateur than the professional, with his glistening armoury of super-boots and non-cling muscle vests. Your kit is your only friend out there. It’s the only thing you can control. And while you hate it, and always treat it bad, you sort of love it too.

THE BOOT TREE

Mainly you love your boots. Everyone has a personal family tree of boots, a wonky, zigzagging chain of succession that links right back to their first pair. I still remember very clearly my first proper boots.

Growing up in the 1980s, there was a period when, briefly, the brand of choice, the real primary school envy-magnet wasn’t any of the big names, but Patrick. This wasn’t a coincidence. Patrick had spent a huge amount of money persuading Kevin Keegan to wear their boots and front up their ad campaigns, in the days before kit manufacturers did this as a matter of course.

It was a brilliant move: briefly Patrick were It-boots. Green and black and with schoolboy-heaven aluminium studs, my Patricks were by a distance my most prized possession. I used to clean them with a tooth brush and a butter knife. I’d unscrew each stud and dry it individually.

"Mum! Where's the butter knife?!"

I also became quietly fixated with Kevin Keegan, who by this stage was a shaggy-permed veteran. So much so that I still felt the lash of betrayal reading Keegan’s autobiography years later and discovering that (a) he thought Patrick boots were crap and only did it for the money; and (b) Patrick were in fact a small French sportswear company who went bust within 12 months of signing him up.

After Patrick I moved on to bigger-name boots. I had some classic mushy-leather late-80s affairs with tongues that lolled out over the laces creating a tassled-loafers effect, a type of boot I associate with Glenn Hoddle in his wedge haircut pomp.

I had a pair of purple-striped boots that eventually split in half, the lower section coming flapping off during a match, an event that was strangely humiliating, like having your trousers disintegrate, or finding yourself unexpectedly nude in a public place.

For the last few years I’ve had two pairs, both crushed, wrinkled, all flapping inners and crusty laces. I wish they’d die. I wish some fissure would appear in their impermeable scuffed rhino-hide. I wish I could get some new, rejuvenating boots, boots with technology behind them, super-light, super-sticky, super-intelligent, maybe in puce or terracotta or Pacific Sky.

This is of course an aspirational dream. I’ve never had a pair of boots that stayed anything other than damp and baggy beyond the first wear. All boots tend towards a central boot identity of bedraggled off-black lumpiness. This is how they want to be and you can’t fight it.

OI, KITBAG

Similarly, there is no point in ever trying to do anything about the team kitbag. All teams have a kitbag and all kitbags are essentially the same, albeit with nuances of smell and unwieldiness. The kitbag contains the kit, either in moist and soiled form, or reeking of fabric conditioner and surprisingly clingy with nylon static. It also contains a lifetime of oddments.

The kitbag is like a mobile shed. Nothing is ever thrown away. Misshapen plastic shinpads, ancient ointments, rolls of tape, gloves, socks, pants, pens, whistles, notebooks, sprays and unguents. There is no end to the kitbag’s riches.

Warning: The world lies within

And no one will ever dismantle the kitbag. It will always be there, agony to carry, but able to be wrestled into any car boot space. The kitbag is the spiritual centre of any team. This is where its beating, bloody heart lies, not to mention 14 separate unmatched grubby grey shoelaces and an old bottle of Diet Sprite.

Some other rules of football team gear:

1. All goalie kits are instantly out of date and horribly, pointy-collared unfashionable. This happens instantly. There is no point in buying a newer, flasher one. This is the goalie’s lot. He is essentially a comic figure. 

2. All newcomers to the team automatically draw out the tiniest shorts, the most strangulating shirt and the socks with hole in. For this they are rightly mocked. This is also no accident. Everyone knows about the “good” bits of kit. No one admits to knowing this. 

3. It is impossible to look good in football kit. Not even people who would otherwise look good look good. The point of amateur football kit is to emphasise the extreme variety of the human species, and to re-state the dizzying physical prowess of the professional, who looks sleek and loose and quite natural in a pair of small shorts and T-shirts. As opposed to you. Never look in the mirror. Don’t look too closely at your team-mates (spare them this). And never invite any kind of borderline romantic interest along to watch. You will not come out of it well.  

4. Kit can still help you “read” your opposition. Beware the white-booted winger: you’ve got to be good. Watch out for ancient, greying knee bandages. They suggest immunity to pain. And above all beware teams where not a single player has turned out in apologetic fill-in Hawaiian beach shorts, grey work socks or some kind of hopeless plimsoll. These are the ones you’ve got to watch. They don’t just have kit. They have proper kit. They cannot be trusted.

Elsewhere on The Sharp End:
Football: fighting minus the fists (mostly)
Why tactics say a lot about humanity
Why shouting and swearing is park football's birdsong
Why winning means nothing and everything
The manager – parent, pastor, secretary, dictator

Do you love Sunday League? Have you got the photos to prove it?
You could appear in a Puma ad on Sky Sports TV.
Go to SkySports.com/lovefootball and start uploading now.

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Why shouting and swearing is park football's birdsong

2010-03-05T09:48:00Z

If you’re in any way serious about it, playing football usually turns out to be a surprisingly intense business.

Sunday league, five-a-side or even a pick-up park match - they all engage your senses aggressively. This might not be a high-speed experience, or a demonstration of minutely-honed skills. But it is usually very loud. This is pretty much guaranteed. There will be shouting. Amateur football is noisy football: the noisier the better; and the more successful, the noisier.

It's pretty much compulsory to shout things, or at the very least to bark or mutter or urgently harangue. Not shouting at all can have the opposite effect it would do in other areas of your life. Not shouting can even seem a little creepy, a little bit exhibitionist. So go ahead and shout something and remember also that there is a way of doing this properly. You need to shout. But you also need to shout right.

Mainly shouting is all about a clannish sense of belonging. There is a great accumulated oral history of Things To Shout. The jobbing player, the stand-in or the new recruit can gain instant acceptance by running through his own repertoire. It’s like birdsong.

To the outsider these might sound like aimless noises, primal blurts of man-snarl. But for those involved they have great depth of meaning. Or at least some meaning. Or at least a meaning that comes to life in context.

Where else would someone shout, in all seriousness: “Big red head on this come on got to want it!” Or “Switch it switch it switch it switch it no!! No! NO!!”. Or “John’s on! Send it! John’s on! Send it! John’s on! Send it!” These are words of comfort and words of welcome. They tell you exactly where you are.

While the classics are always out there, playing on an endless loop (“Get rid!” “Send it!” “Tight!” “Looking!”), this is an ever-evolving language. Television has had an influence in recent years and it is now common to hear new kinds of shouts.

Often these tend to be more self-consciously learned and zingy, the language of the new TV cliché: “Tempo!”, “Quality ball!” “Movement!”, “Options!” Not so long ago I heard someone shout “Pressurise the ball-carrier!”, as though quoting from a Trevor Brooking-approved coaching manual.

I’ve also heard “Man in the hole!”, “Find space!” and “Two banks of four!” This is a more European-leaning, tactically literate school of shouting. It doesn’t, strictly, make any difference to what’s happening on the pitch. But I think we all feel a little better hearing some of these thrown into the mix.

There is of course a dark side to shouting. There are murky elements. There is, mainly, a lot of swearing. This is a place where swearing is accepted, tolerated, and even encouraged.

You might not normally be the kind of person who’s given to screaming “FOR F**K’S SAKE F**KING DON’T F**K ABOUT” in an otherwise very quiet place surrounded by strangers – such as a supermarket checkout queue, or the brief hush before the curtain goes up at your five-year-old daughter’s primary school nativity play.

But football does give you this freedom, particularly park football where there is no need to observe the niceties of leisure centre etiquette, or to tone down your on-field persona for the benefit of the yogalates ladies who are already hanging around holding rolled-up mats and looking offensively serene.

It’s in the early morning park environment that swearing reaches its full expression, a natural background timpani like crickets chirruping in the pampas or tinny mobile-phone R'n'B on the night bus. We’re not just talking any old swearing. This isn’t a free-for-all. There are rules. Mainly it’s all about use of the word “f**k”.

“For f**k’s sake.”
“F**king yes.”
“F**king now.”
“F**king send it.”
“F**king hold it.”
“F**king f**k!!
“F**k no.”
“F**k off.”
“F**k’s sake.”
“Watch the f**king... F**k!”

It’s important to note that this isn’t really swearing. It’s not really “f**k”. It’s punctuation more than anything else. F**k just fits the rhythm of the game. It stretches a sentence and fills a space where your brain is temporarily disengaged. It’s like taking a breath. You can spit it out. You can scream it. F**k is very football.

There can still be misunderstandings. I used to play with a Scottish winger called Johnny. During one game he was called for a foul throw by the referee and reacted by screaming “F**K OFF!!!”. He was sent off as the ref, quite logically, assumed he was being violently insulted.

Except that, in parts of Scotland, “F**k off” means “F**king hell”. It’s a curse, not an insult. We had quite a long discussion about this before Johnny actually left the field and eventually there was a grudging acceptance that he was the victim of a cultural misunderstanding. The f**king idiot.

But this is the nature of football shouting. It’s a huge part of the game and a culturally rich oral tradition. It’s a chance for men – who often get a bad rap on this kind of thing – to really express how they’re feeling deep down inside. Even if, it turns out, they’re often just feeling quite cross or let down, or simply in need of a proper, peer-group approved, tribally significant shout.

Elsewhere on The Sharp End:
Football: fighting minus the fists (mostly)
Why tactics say a lot about humanity
What your kit says about you (and others)
Why winning means nothing and everything
The manager – parent, pastor, secretary, dictator

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Why winning means nothing and everything

2010-02-25T12:04:00Z

In September 2009 Harraby Athletic of the Cumbrian junior amateur leagues beat Edenvale Hawks 3-2, ending a three-year losing streak. By this point Harraby were already being talked up by some as Britain’s worst football team – perhaps even the worst football team ever.

Their inaugural fixture in 2006 ended in a 19-0 defeat. Over the next three years they conceded more than 400 goals. Prior to their victory they had picked up just a single league point (the opposition, perhaps understandably, had forgotten to turn up).

“The boys have been prepared to stick at it and been willing to learn,” their coach said after Harraby's first win - in the process striking a bit of a false note. What had Harraby really “learned” from losing 90 matches in a row? That they were very, very bad at football? How to kick off expertly?

One of the greatest things about the greatest TV sitcom, Seinfeld, was its “no hugging, no learning" rule. No lessons learned, no progress. This is also the basic experience of the amateur footballer. There is no onwards and upwards here, and no winners either.

"YOU'RE NOT VERY GOOD"

The main reason you don’t play to win is that you aren’t very good. You really aren’t. The best player on your team isn’t very good. The best player on the team that always beats you isn’t very good.

The once-a-season stand-out ringer on the team that always beats them: he isn’t very good either. The bloke he went to school with who is still miles better than him and who once got taken to pieces by Damien Duff in a school game: he might just be starting to get somewhere.

Not only are you not very good: you’re also getting worse. This is the fate of all amateur players, an accelerated parabola of decline that sets in early and just keeps on coming.

At 18 you can stretch and leap and fall over and still get up quickly: there seems to be some point in wanting to win. At 25 you can still run but you’ve lost too may times to care too deeply. At 30 you’ve already got the fear. Eleven-a-side is now synonymous with extreme physical pain. Five-a-side is a matter of lung-busting, cheek-flushing perspiration. You don’t care if you’re winning. You just want to sit down.

Plod, plod, gasp, cough, choke

And by 35 you’ve become a gurgling passenger, well-disposed, slightly goofy, entirely divorced from a world where people win or lose, and instead simply happy to go out for a nice drive or have a bit of a walk about outside.

Of course there are always people in your team who do actually still care about winning. In amateur football to care about winning is to feel continually let down by others. Every team has its angry and disappointed keeper of the flame. He feels your failings deeply and personally.

I've played with centre backs – they're usually centre-backs – who spend every moment of every match engaged in a shouted commentary that sounds like “NO!... NOOO!!... F**KING NO!!!... TURN!!!.... MAN ON!!!... NO!!!... WHAT THE... OI!!! OI!!! NO!!!”.

This can be a strange experience on a Sunday morning in some isolated semi-rural spot where there is no other noise apart from the distant whisper of traffic, the squelch of boots and maybe some birds singing.

THE WILL TO WIN

I played in a team that disbanded suddenly after our captain, who in real life was a dentist, chased one of our subs out of the changing rooms and down the road past a small parade of shops with a boot in his hands, for appearing not to want to win enough, and for seeming to find it funny (funny!) that you might. After which the team just sort of died, from a mixture of confusion and embarrassment.

I also played in a team that lost so often, and so comprehensively, that it was only in our final season that we suddenly realised there was nowhere left to be relegated to and we were about to wink out of existence. We started trying to win after that. It didn’t work out. We couldn't remember how. And it just didn’t seem right somehow.

Winning isn’t entirely irrelevant though. In fact, winning is still central to why we continue to play, because everyone was almost good once. At some point you did win something. I won the Crofton Park Five-a-Side with Metronote Under-11s.

We were brilliant. Seriously. We overwhelmed teams, with our perfectly-pitched combination of having some big kids in defence and some quite good fast kids in attack. I still have the black plastic trophy with a generic small-shorted footballer on the front.

It is, I don’t exaggerate, one of my only really prized possessions and I still can’t comprehend, even now, my wife’s lingering reluctance to have it prominently on display at all times in our house, maybe in the hallway when you come in.

Keep trying, keep reaching for the stars...

The real problem is: even though you don’t win, and you don’t even really want to win, you still never get over having won once. It’s a part of what hooks you in for life: the purity of the moment, the sense of clear blue sky and endless possibility.

And in many ways carrying on playing when you really should be doing other things, like exploring the cultural treasures of the National Trust or mooching around a garden centre pretending to be interested in plant pots and weed-suppressant gravel membranes, has a lot to do with an insoluble urge to preserve some connection to that feeling.

So you play for your moments. The one beautifully-timed sliding tackle in an otherwise dispiriting 7-2 defeat. The pass that skims perfectly into the path of your trundling left-winger.

Or that moment, very occasionally, when you actually do that clever turn away from two players, and it actually works, and suddenly you feel – you are briefly convinced about his – maybe for half a second you looked exactly like Joe Cole.

Perhaps this is what Harraby’s coach was on about. They won’t be playing to win from now on. But they won’t forget it.

And they won’t stop, either; even when they haven’t actually played for two years and can see the whole thing is perhaps a bit silly even though they still think quite often about that goal or that tackle or that save when suddenly football felt just right.

They’re in it for life, one way or the other, just like the rest of us.

Elsewhere on The Sharp End:
Football: fighting minus the fists (mostly)
Why tactics say a lot about humanity
What your kit says about you (and others)
Why shouting and swearing is park football's birdsong
The manager – parent, pastor, secretary, dictator

Do you love Sunday League? Have you got the photos to prove it?
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The manager: parent, pastor, secretary, dictator

2010-02-18T21:37:00Z

Kicking off a brand new series on amateur football, Barney Ronay starts with the gaffer

Managing an amateur football team is a bit like being the despotic leader of a very small and turbulent rogue state.

It demands absolute authority; a powerful, even doomed, sense of being right at all times; a skilful manipulation of communications; and - no doubt in common with overseeing the plutonium programme in a south Asian basket-case nation - it quite often involves spending the whole of Thursday on the phone and a lot of worrying about who’s got the kitbag.

"What do you mean, it's your girlfriend's birthday?"

The manager/captain is a composite figure, bowed by competing responsibilities. For a start you’re the club secretary, charged with all administrative and clerical duties, including fixture-list finagling, pitch booking, and stewardship of the unexpectedly violent and bad-tempered end of season Balti house social.

You’re the board of directors. You manage bad news, you plan for the long term, and you smile and wave and make a run for the car park at the first sign of grass roots unrest.

You’re the ashen-faced administrators charged with mitigating the potentially fatal £170 black hole in the kit purchase slush fund.

You’re physio and club doctor, keeper of the first aid satchel with its long-dead cold spray and miserable Elastoplast selection, and official dispenser of the touchline bucket of water, panacea for all kinds of flesh and internal wounds, usually combined with some muttered advice about “just running it off”.

TACTICAL GURU

The manager is also in charge of tactics. This is of course an illusion. There are no tactics.

Not accidentally shin-volleying an inswinging corner into your own goal from an unmarked position six yards out and then turning around and shouting “Who's on the f***ing POST?” a few times just as it starts to snow; not lining up with nine men, one of whom is wearing tennis shoes: these are the closest thing to “tactics”.

"I don't know why I bother"

But the manager is always indulged, so expect to listen to some pre-kick-off talk about “two banks of four” and “switching the point of attack”.

I once had a captain who would sit everyone down and give proper motivational speeches before a Sunday morning potter-about. He used to say things like “be strong”. “Be strong. Be proud. Be alive”. It was a bit like a heart-warming British Gas advert involving an animated family of koala bears.

The manager is also a pastoral figure. There are delicate issues of motivation and personal growth to be fostered. Different qualities need to be cherished.

What to do with the player who basically can’t run anymore and whose paunch has now spread south to his ankles and north out through the V-neck of his tortured nylon jersey into a chin collection that jounces and flubbers alarmingly whenever he attempts an ambling pursuit of some white-booted teenage left-winger?

But what if that player is dangerously attached to turning up every Sunday, often up to an hour before anyone else, mainly because he doesn’t seem to have anything else to do at the weekends?

The manager alone must judge whether continued selection can be justified by other attributes, such as ownership of a six-seat Volvo estate with leather seats and sat-nav, or having a really fit sister.

SEVEN DAYS A WEEK

These are the human responsibilities of managing an amateur football team. It’s a job that spills out across the touchline and into the rest of your week.

The actual game will pass in a blur of net-taping, team sheet-scrawling, goalie-glove de-moulding and referee glad-handing (a major part of managing any team: all referees must be personally greeted in the car park and if possible “turned” with the help of comments like “had these lot before? No? Well good luck... No. No reason”).

Dispute management and general admin take up the next couple of days. And by midweek it’s all on again. The round-robin email must be circulated, players sourced, threatened, cajoled and flattered, and incomplete directions to The Old Artillery Ground Egham (North) Recreation Ground circulated.

"Who said take the ring road?!"

This is a full-time preoccupation. And a position of some responsibility too. For a disparate group of once-sprightly men you are the keeper, the arbitrator and the continued guarantee of a footballing existence.

You alone nourish the small kernel of hopeful new-booted schoolboy that still lives on in every Drambuie-stinking, unshaven five-a-side ball-hog or sulking Sunday morning utility midfielder. You carry their hopes.

It’s a commitment too: there is no easy way out, beyond personal physical collapse or unstoppable team-implosion. You might hate the manager. You might hate being the manager. But without the manager and his zealot’s commitment amateur football would be unworkable.

Like the ball, itself the manager might be frustrating and even slightly painful at times. But he is as essential an ingredient as the chipped and rusting goal-frame and that enduring, galvanising thrill of playing the game.

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