There’s a game going on somewhere.
It’s the biggest game of the year.
For us.
It’s derby day. It’s away. It’s going to be a battle. Blood will be spilled. And I’m not there.
I’m not even close.
I’m watching spuds boil in the kitchen instead.
I’m watching my phone for updates. Brief, interrupted updates that will give me some kind of a picture of what’s going on.
We were three up. We’ve lost the lead. We’re going point for point. We don’t usually win these games.
Whatever updates I’m getting are nervous. Tense. There’s hostility – that’s expected – but we haven’t played this team in two years and that wasn’t exactly the friendliest of encounters either. We won by a point that day, ground it out in a dirty duel. They missed a last minute penalty, it sparked another skirmish. But we stood strong. Held on. Together.
That was at our pitch though. They’ve been waiting to welcome us there for a while now and they’re letting us know just where we are this time.
One of my team mates, one of my best friends, has had to come off at half time. Broken jaw.
The spuds are soaking up the water now.
I can’t help out, I can’t fight back. All I can do is boil the kettle and top up the pot.
All I can do is watch my phone.
I’m pacing the kitchen. We score a free. I have no idea why he’s hitting the frees. Something must be wrong.
Four bloody minutes pass before I hear anything else and, right now, the only man on this God-forsaken island who is keeping me in the loop with all that really matters in this moment in time is pissing me off because he has gotten sloppy.
Nothing probably happened. He might’ve just lost signal but the silence is killing me. The not knowing is breaking me.
There’s another fight. The umpires are arguing. The referee overrules a wide. Everything – every single thing – counts right now.
The chicken’s ready before the spuds. The oven heat has to be turned right down. I have to take action.
Three minutes left and it’s all square. We score. They score. We score.
They have an 18-yard free. We’re not going to get out of this one.
It’s over.
We win. I don’t know how. Someone’s ballsed up. The information is missing something. I don’t really give two monkeys. We’ve won.
This is huge. Massive result. We lost one we shouldn’t have last week – apparently. It made this clash even more important. It made it even less likely that we would bounce back. But we have.
I can imagine the scenes. The hugs. The back slaps. The huddle. I can imagine the dressing room cheer as victorious men in blue filter in one by one. The showers, the smiles, the buzz. The trip home. I can imagine the high.
It’s a bank holiday, they’ll definitely all head out tonight. Together.
I can see it all. Staring at a plate of beans circling the microwave, I can see it all.
I can see what I’m missing.
You know, when you move away from home, you don’t just leave behind the place you have left. You leave behind that life, too.
This time last year, I was right in the middle of it. I was right on that front line with my club men. Away from home, shit day, a game we weren’t expected to win after we had lost one we should’ve.
We only had 17 players that day. For one reason or another, we were down to the absolute bare bones but we managed to sucker punch them with three first half goals. I’ve never been in a changing room like that at half time. Every man bouncing around. Every man looking to get straight back out the door and finish the job. Every one of us knowing that we were on the brink of doing something special. 17 of us against the world. Every one of us refusing to bow our heads.
We got pelted in the second period. Absolutely pelted. Score after score was sailing over our crossbar with the help of a gale force wind. We had a three-goal buffer though and we hung onto it for dear life. We held out. No skill, no ploy, no moment of magic. Just pure grit. Heart. We held out and won 0-18 to 3-10. Those bloody hilarious scorelines are the best.
We were relegated that year but you don’t forget those moments. You don’t forget those battles or what you experience during them. Even if you lose the war in the end, you don’t lose the memory of a group of men rising above themselves and fighting ’til the last.
You get up on a Monday, tight as hell, but you’re already planning a gym session before yoga. Working your balls off is easy when you’re winning. You’re already assembling a group to go watch the minor match because, when you’re on a high, you just can’t stay away from a pitch.
Tuesday was the same old Tuesday. Get down to the field early, practice the shooting that I’d rarely use and lay out the cones for the U16s who needed to know how important Thursday’s game was.
Wednesday mornings were special. Waking up at six, carrying a ready-made shake out the door en route to the club. In the distance you could see the lights turned on in the little school hut of a gym behind the pitch. You could see the cars in the car park with the rest of the town asleep and you could see that you were apart of something bigger than you.
It was a wasted day in work too if we enjoyed a bit of success at the weekend. The papers needed to know all about it. If we lost, they didn’t need to know anything. No-one wants to read that crap. I just had to make sure I was out in time for training.
Thursday was simple. It consisted of pestering everyone I had a number for to see if they were free to help with lifts for the U16 game that night. They weren’t as simple standing on the sideline unable to affect anything on the field. Nearly worse than cooking an average dinner, watching your phone, feeling completely and utterly useless.
Friday was training. Friday night was poker. Eight of us sitting around the table, crying about a session, whinging about a game, dissecting every facet of our season as if it was the only thing in the world that mattered.
Saturday was U16s, helping out with U8s if I was feeling generous, and Sunday was business time.
You fast forward a year and a game of five-a-side has become your source of competitive release. A text message is your only connection to what’s really going on back home. Tim Sherwood is in charge of how you feel for all of that week.
There’s probably only a hundred people on this earth who really care about those games that go on all over the place at the weekend. Only a few more even know about them in the first place. Less actually go to them.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter one bit.
When you’ve thrown yourself so wholly into a way of living, when you’re committed so fiercely to achieving something, to building something, you would do anything to preserve that.
It’s nearly magical to think of an idea becoming a club; a club becoming a bona fide empire; and that empire becoming someone’s whole life.
It gets taken away in an instant and everything changes.
Young men and women the world over have soon discovered how they took it all for granted when they went off in search of pastures new.
They’ve soon found that, when they left, they left a part of them behind.
When you’re exiled from that existence, you have to find another way to somehow begin again.
But you won’t find it at the bottom of a pot of spuds and you won’t find it by staring at your phone.
But, sometimes, it’s just hard to let go.
