A First Year of Football Comes to a Close
After finishing work this evening I cycled home from the office, and stopped off along the way to pick up dinner for our eldest daughter and myself. The rest of the house were in a playpark across town, attending the “end of year barbecue” for the youth team that our youngest plays for.
Just after handing our eldest her curry, and sitting down with her to watch TV, a text arrived in my phone from my other half.
“Do you fancy coming to the football barbecue? Feel like a bit of a spare part”
I talked to my TV buddy, and almost didn't go. She rolled her eyes, and did that defeated look that teenagers are so good at.
“Go. I'll be fine. No – seriously. Just go
So I went.
After a particularly swift return into town aboard my long suffering mountain bike, aided by the absence of a backpack and the assistance of a tailwind, I appeared as if by magic alongside my other half in a field full of children dressed as various “countries” in a pretend world cup tournament, and parents dotted around drinking beer, and eating food from the barbecue.
“Would you like a beer?”
And that's how I ended up standing in a field for the next two hours, drinking beer, and catching up with friends I haven't seen for ages. The tournament finally wound down at about the same time the barbecue ran out of food – and suddenly all the children started behaving themselves, on account of a table appearing filled with medals and trophies.
As luck would have it, I had been speaking to the head coach for a bit earlier in the evening, and had told him our story about the Women's World Cup.Rather then recount her story, let's just say the first ten minutes of his end of year speech tothe assembled crowd told the story of a little girl – the only one left in the club – that ran from her house after watching England play, shouting “I'm going to be Fran Kirby!”, and the tweet her Dad sent, and the response it got from the player in question, her internationalteam mates, coaches, and theirfamilies.
He then recounted his proudest moment of the year – when a certain little girl chopped down a huge lad in a tournament game that the rest of the team were scared of – turned him inside out in the middle of the pitch, took the ball, and left him in tears. She was the talk of the team for days.
She's not the best footballer, and she probably never will be. She can run like the wind blows though, and doesn't know fear. Football was her idea. We have always been keen for her to do anything physical because she had so many developmental delays early in her life (another story for another day), and by and large it has worked. Watching the Women's World Cup has thrown some kind of switch inside her head though. Before she was just “the girl in that team”. Now she knows that a team of girls just like her got to the World Cup Semi-Final earlier this week. Fine, they didn't win the tournament, but then nobody expected them to get anywhere, and they did better than the men's team have done in a quarter of a century.
Now she has heros, and aspires to be something greater. This is starting to sound like the voice-over for the Man of Steel trailer. There is some truth to it though. Everybody needs a hero. Ah crap... now it's Aunt May's speech from Spiderman.
Maybe I'll shut up.