Frankie’s under-16 football team is in action at their home pitch, and as per usual, I’m ‘running the line’, due to my failure to display an adequately obvious lack of interest when the black-clad referee proffered his yellow flag in search of this week’s volunteer assistant, and all the other parents instantaneously developed a sudden fascination in the contents of their shoes/ their mobile phone/the middle distance/the nearby Bramhall branch of Costa Coffee. ‘Go on John, you know you love it!’ shouts one as I acquiesce to the task. ‘He loves the power!’, adds another. ‘Should I see if I can get you a uniform for next Sunday?’, chips in a third, to general hilarity. ‘No you fucking shouldn’t!’ I shoot back, as the referee’s whistle gets the game underway and I clump off down the rain-sodden touchline in my hiking boots in the general direction of the morning’s first of many long balls to be hoofed surefootedly and unerringly into the bushes separating the municipal playing fields from the A555 dual carriageway.
It’s a good job I have got the hiking boots on, as the touchline, like a good quarter of the pitch, is more or less underwater following a week’s worth of rain, and I’m wading through puddles the size of small ponds just in order to keep up with play- a task which is, admittedly, made somewhat easier by the fact that, as 44 sets of football studs proceed to cut up an already-borderline-unplayable surface, the match comes to resemble a scene from the Battle of the Somme, with an indistinguishable mass of mud-encrusted youths engaged in a harum-scarum battle of attrition concentrated either side of the halfway line, their flailing limbs attempting in vain to propel the pudding-like matchball more than four yards in any direction. The trenchlike conditions are making a mockery of the game as any kind of sporting contest, and as half-time approaches, an apparently finely-weighted through pass by the visitors’ talented central midfielder squishes perhaps three foot in its intended direction before sinking without trace into a water-feature with the dimensions of a child’s paddling pool which has emerged on the edge of the centre circle. The referee sighs, and blows his whistle again, this time with an air of finality. Game Abandoned.
As one of the home team's starting substitutes this morning, Frankie has spent the abortive proceedings awaiting his introduction from the sidelines without kicking a ball in anger, Our football-mad boy is consequently more or less inconsolable in the car on the way home, and I don’t blame him. My own plan had been to get away down the allotment for the afternoon, but the sight of the boy slumped on the sofa in his still-pristine green and black number two shirt is too much for me to bear, so instead I gather him up and we head on the next available Peak-District-bound Northern train, to the town of New Mills where (I have it on the good authority of one of this morning’s touchline dads) there is a perennially playable full-size pitch which is laid on cinders and consequently ‘drains like you wouldn’t believe’.
The man is as good as his word, and the fabled 100 x 70 yards quadrangle, occupying a sheltered aspect in the shadows of the giant Sizzles factory which dominates the milltown’s skyline, proves the ideal setting for a strenuous two-hour workout for the two of us, during which we invent a variation on the 1970s Tyneside recreation-ground pastime of ‘headers and volleyers’ adapted to incorporate a super-complicated scoring system that neither of us can properly keep track of, but at which we are eventually agreed that Frankie, perhaps aided by the fact he is wearing football boots while I am still clobbering about in my hiking attire, beats me hands-down (fifteen points to minus seven, we think).
Suddenly it’s half past four, and we troop (well, I troop, he skips with his usual boundless energy) through the gathering gloom to the nearby Rock Tavern, where we order pints of Robinsons Unicorn and lime and soda, and settle down to take in the big Sunday Premiership action, in the form of Everton versus Tottenham Hotspur on one of this most welcoming establishment's several big screens. Seventy-five minutes in, with the North London outfit leading by the only goal of the encounter thanks to a breakaway strike from an otherwise anonymous Delle Ali, and with Everton midfielder Andre Gomes lying prone on the turf having sustained a horrific legbreak which will dominate the Monday morning backpage headlines, we have to abandon our viewing in order to sprint off into the now pitchblack Swizzles-district terracestreets and catch the 1816 train home to suburban Stockport. We make it, but only just, hotfooting it across the passenger bridge with thirty seconds to spare, to the amusement of the half-dozen local scallies smoking weed in the platform shelter. Which means- I reflect as I get my breath back, that the day may be reasonably considered a success, after all. That clearing of the leek bed can wait another week, can it not?
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