Passion for the Park

Stephen Wade

Description

Passion for the Park is a celebration of the ordinary lover of the beautiful game, the dedicated lads who turn out week after week in the hope of beating another works or pub team. In Park Football the kit is never washed, there is no spare ball, studs are never inspected, there are holes in the goal-netting, the referee is always looking the wrong way, and the only spectators are an old man and his dog. This funny and irreverent memoir charts the author's own undistinguished football career, playing for two Sunday League teams and idolising Don Revie's Leeds United, and his attempts to inspire steelworks apprentices with a love for English literature.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Condado de Yorkshire (Reino Unido)
• Memoir
• Yorkshire

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781909183025
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Title Page
PASSION FOR THE PARK
A LEEDS EDUCATION
by
Stephen Wade



Publisher Information
First published in 2012 by Chaplin Books
Chaplin Books
1 Eliza Place
Gosport PO12 4UN
Tel: [phone]
www.chaplinbooks.co.uk
Digital edition converted and distributed in 2012 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright 2012 Stephen Wade
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder for which application should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers. No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder or the publishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result of reliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publication or any errors or omissions in its contents.



Note
My Sunday team in the following pages is very loosely based on a real team, with names changed, but could be any Sunday league outfit in the country. Hopefully, you will recognise yourself here if you grace the park before Sunday lunch. The team is any team, and every team. Any seeming insults or derogatory comments in my book are meant in the spirit of traditional changing-room banter. With that in mind, I would have given anything to be a fly on the wall at Elland Road in the home-side changing room, particularly if we were losing at half time and the Scots contingent were letting loose their vocabulary of insults.



Prologue
The Passion for the Park
Maybe you drive past them on a Sunday morning on the way to the supermarket or the church: a knot of rain-soaked men, hung-over, beer-bellied and melancholy, sitting grimly outside the door of a pub, bags around them, waiting for a battered old Dormobile to take them to the park. The day could be a September Indian summer, but is more likely to be a bitingly cold November morning when all sensible folk are wrapped in several layers and keep near a fire. But that gaggle of dedicated park footballers are the backbone of the national game. You might not think so, but you are driving past poets, dreamers, visionaries.
My dreams of football began in my Leeds childhood in the Fifties. My dad took me to see Leeds United, but before the sleek skills of Johnny Giles and the goal-grabbing wonder of John Charles, I had seen my dad play - as right back for Churwell FC. If you don’t know the village, it’s between Leeds and Morley, and a mile from Elland Road. They played on the old tanhouse, an expanse of grass bordered at one end by a heap of wrecked cars and the other by a field of cows. My dad was considered hard but fair; he parted his greased hair down the middle, as if done with a machete. He enjoyed several post-match pints, after giving everything he had, all his mental and physical resources, to that team. I was smitten with the Passion at that point. Don Revie and Billy Bremner confirmed the view that football was about winning, of course, but also that it was more about letting your body do something for a purpose, along with other men also striving for the same thing - a purpose which to onlookers must seem trivial, but in fact is wonderfully absurd.
At school I realised it was a sort of test, all this sport business, and I never bothered. But the real meaning of football was revealed to me when I first signed up to play for a works team. I played outside right for Rose Forgrove and I began to know the true depth of penance and suffering involved in the game. The idea, if I had to explain this to those unlucky people who have never played in a league, is to create an atmosphere somewhere between a battle and a playground. Everybody knows, deep down, that the yellow and red strip is ridiculous; that the shin-pads give you no protection; that there is likely to be dog-muck in the goal-mouth, and that someone is bound to call you a wanker before a ball has been kicked.


The Churwell WMC team. My dad is on the back row, fourth from the right. The smiles cover the dread of heading the old laced-up bladder called a ball which was really like a sphere of granite
But for 90 minutes the park footballer is beyond reality - the kind of reality embodied in the foreman, the wife and the clock. He has a cause: primarily himself, and his esteem. Just the sheer satisfaction of clearing a ball and hoofing it towards the nearest roof can give that elation of the complete farewell to reality. Time stops on a Sunday in that sense and in that place. Of course, it means that the creeping sadness you feel when the ref looks at his watch with three minutes to go and you’re two-nil down is the hardest thing in the world. Yet that is not the sort of time that gets you up for the six o’clock shift or the school taxi-run.
Rose Forgrove FC lacked a game-plan. They lacked the skills necessary for success, but they had the two completely indispensable qualities for park football: humour and pack-mentality.
So your centre-half is slow and his run reminds you of a rhino-charge rather than a Linford Christie sprint? So what? And the keeper tends to retch for the first ten minutes of the game, still suffering the effects of a Saturday night binge. There to be cherished is the yelling of the defence at the forwards to ‘Get their fucking finger out’ and the desperate screaming of the forwards at the defence to ‘Clear the fucking ball!’ This, together with the high comedy of the ‘manager’ on the touchline giving dodgy advice such as ‘Chop him’ or ‘You’re dropped, Wade!’ provides the real substance.
The humour is the real pull, though. I’ve known players who only seem to be there on a Sunday to provide laughter, in any way they can. Typical example might be the fart in the changing room (giving rise to curry jokes and eviction of the offending party); the goal celebration (no kisses or dance, but often a punch in the ribs or a rub of mud to the nose). Most exuberant of all has to be the Teaser. This guy is merciless to anyone who shows even a hint of not being altogether ready to die for the team. Prime victim here is the Married Man. In Park Passion you have to prove that, though married, you are alive and a thorough nuisance. The Married Man must not arrive tired, or there will be marital bed jokes throughout the game. The Married Man must not be first to go home after the game, and must join in the drinking, either for misery or celebration.
The changing room has to be a slum. Preferably an old leaky hut, but other details of accommodation are useful too, such as a dripping corrugated iron roof, evidence of vermin in the floorboards and wainscot, and most of all a shower unit with patches of orange rust, leaking pipes and loose fittings.
The language is also the centre of the Park Passion. The expletives need not be varied, but they must be plentiful and directed at the defenceless. Example: the opposition striker is notably off-target and lacks speed. He is fairly entitled to be a ‘Fat Bastard’ for the 90 minutes. Also, the adept and successful player must learn to mime this rich Anglo Saxon, particularly when addressing the referee. There is also the question of pitch-names. These can be affectionate, manly or abusive:
Affectionate - Wadey
Manly - Well in, good tackle, Wadey
Abusive - Stroll on, wanker.
Yet, despite these handicaps, the basic absurdity of the game co-exists, if uneasily, with its beauty and grace. Every team I’ve played in has had its Mr Skill and its player who once had trials with someone or other. Often, there is the star who had the awful injury when young and should have been the new George Best. Maybe the most informative case study here is the Hard Man. In later life, in the Regional League, I found myself placed in that comical category. But I realised early in my career, particularly when playing for Leeds Inland Revenue against East End Park (rumoured to have Leeds United juniors in the line-up) that you can do without the Hard Man, and that he is there as a sort of bone in the corset. We lost 10-1 and the Hard Man couldn’t get within three feet of their forwards.
***
Dad on the Touchline
A more terrible prospect than the best opposition can be your mates - or even your family - on the touchline. My first game as a league-player was like that. My Dad and a crowd of old-timers came along. They never came a second time. I remember a high ball coming down at me from a height of seemingly a hundred feet, and my failed attempt to trap it. My dad said, “Nice effort” but a chorus of other voices called me a wassock and hinted I was ‘like a lass.’ Also, dads on touchlines tend to talk about the days gone by when men were men, balls were heavy as rocks, and you could gouge an eye out with a football-lace. They love to remind you that goalies could be shouldered into the net, that a good tackler gets in first and never backs out, and that every decent player should know how to put a dislocated finger back in its proper place when the goalie’s tried to stop a pile-driver.
Dads on touchlines have a bad press, and this is down to foul language, and a tendency for them to forget that this is just a game, not a place of therapy for their fractured sense of identity to be repaired by scream therapy.
Criticism is something you have to live with. There is a breed of drongo who waits for every Sunday with relish. His aim is to unsettle you and his tactics are immoral. He chooses a particular player and tries to destroy the joy in the game by creating a will to murder in the selected victim. Early in the game, his cry will be, ‘Shape up number five.’ Then you slip before a clearing attempt and you hear ‘Cl