To Put Away Childish Things #14

For anyone who knows anything at all about me the next sentence will be quite startling.

In World Cup spirit, let's get nostalgic about football.

OK, I'm sorry, I'm misleading you. In my whole life the only thing I've disliked more than watching football is playing football but it is playing - or rather not playing - football that I want to remember right now. Somewhere else in this blog there is a set of three poems about games lessons at school. They accurately reflect my experience of the horror.

Back in my school days I went to Bilston Boys' Grammar School - an establishment that disappeared at around the time I was leaving to be replaced with a Comprehensive School. I was a decent enough student academically but when it came to sports I was about as useless as it's possible to be without  being dead. Put a javelin in my hand and I was as likely to kill someone accidentally as I was to throw it where it was supposed to go. Similarly with the discus, the direction was unpredictable although your safety was more or less guaranteed if you stood more than about ten feet away. I don't think I ever managed to clear the bar in the high jump even if it was lying on the ground. On the long jump I could, when pressed, very nearly reach the start of the sand pit with a massive leap of almost a foot. On cross country runs I was one a select group who jogged the dozen or so yards that got us out of sight of the school then strolled up to sit among the trees until it was time to go back. At a pinch I could play a reasonable game of badminton, but that was the limit of my athletic prowess.

Where I really failed to excel though was in football (for US readers this is of course soccer that I am talking about). We had three football pitches. On the first, and largest, of them the players who were in the school team played against the players who stood a pretty good chance of getting into the school team. On the middle pitch the players who had less skill but great dollops of enthusiasm played.

I played on the little pitch, a corner tucked away at the far end of the playing fields, where those of us who had neither skill nor enthusiasm were sent to while away the games periods. We would stand around, occasionally making a desultory attempt to kick the ball but otherwise not even trying to look as if we were playing. The north end had a grassy bank where sometimes we sunbathed. Once, when we did try, I recall Bhogul, whose athletic skills were every bit the equal of mine, being in goal. He attempted to drop kick the ball, missed it and back-heeled it into his own goal. Not being at the end with a bank, it rolled away rather than bouncing back and none of us had the inclination to fetch it back.

The only times this blissfully incompetent idyll was ever disturbed were the times when someone was send down from the second pitch to join us, which could happen if everybody was present and fit for the lesson. Then, they would inevitably try, unsuccessfully, to whip up some effort but the result was always that whichever team they were on would win about ninety-nil.

All of this may go some way towards explaining away my apathy, make that antipathy, towards the game. Yesterday, at work, I was roundly criticised because I refused to take part in their World Cup sweepstake. I neither know nor care who is in it or who wins it. I can say that it only started yesterday but even before a ball was kicked I was heartily sick of it. It's just about impossible to find anything on television at the moment that isn't either football or connected in some way with football. And, so I am told, it lasts for a month. 

Oh, joy.

I expect that I'm going to be making a dent in the very large pile of unwatched DVDs I have accumulated. Of course when it's all over you can expect me to be expressing similar joy at the prospect of Wimbledon. Or do they overlap? I do hope so. It would at least reduce the duration of the pain.