Football, Football, and more Football
This weekend was dominated from start to finish by football matches for our youngest daughter. She played with the newly formed under 11 girls team on Saturday for the first time, and then for the under 11 town team today.
The girls team has undoubtedly come about because of the England women's football team performance at the World Cup last yearwhile our youngest has been playing football for the last 18 months, suddenly a few more faces have been turning up at practiceenough for the coaches to realise they might have enough for a team. The huge problem so fargiven the number of after-school activities everybody seems to be involved inis that until the game on Saturday the team had never met before.
For half an hour before kick off, the warm-up exercises were more about learning names than practicing skills.
The girls match was interestingyou could immediately see who the talented kids were, but given the lack of Dad driven focus that most young boys get forced through, they had little or no idea about keeping any sort of shape, playing positionally, or use of space. Most of the match was a moving pinball machine, which somehow netted five goals for our team to one for the opposition.
I felt sorry for the parents of the other teamencouraging shouts in the first half turned into very personal criticisms as the score mounted. One mother in particular pulled no punchesshouting repeatedly at her daughter;“Stop standing there like a sack of spuds!Get your hand off your hip!What do you think you are, a TEAPOT!“At the end of the match the coach got all of our girls together, and picked out a positive aspect of each player, making them all feel like they were ten feet tall. As our youngest met me on the sidelines, the first words from her mouth were almost predictable:“Can we go to Wimpy for lunch?”(Wimpy is a fast food place in towna notch up from McDonalds, but not much betterthere's actually a really interesting story behind the Wimpy restaurants, but I'll save it for another day)Given the score, I could hardly say no.
Today's match was an entirely different proposition, given that we woke to discover it had snowed overnight. We immediately checked email, and discovered that rugby training had been cancelledso the newly crowned Miss 12 immediately elected to stay in her pyjamas and watch TV at home, rather than wrap up like an eskimo to stand on the sideline with myself and my better half at the football ground.
Today's match with the boys was on a real pitch (the girls match had been on the astro-turf, across town), which began the morning lightly covered in snow. By the end of the game it more resembled a scene from the first world war battlefields; I imagine it will be out of commission for several weeks to give the grass a chance to grow back.
One of the conditions of Miss 10 getting drafted straight into the girls team was that she kept playing for the boys team. She's a hard worker. What she lacks in skill she more than makes up for in speed, determination, and flat-out work rate. Several times today she cleared the ball from defence, and turned the opposing team inside out. Her time with the boys has also resulted in her having a football brainclosing people down, and denying space.
When the opposing team arrived this morning we couldn't quite believe what we were seeingtwo of their players towered over our team -I'm guess they had started to hit puberty. In the end it didn't matter; the coaches advice to get to the ball first no matter what workedthey never saw the ball. We won 4-0.
In the team talk at the end, the coaches talked a lot about confidence, and belief. The boys team had not won a competitive match for some timethey are often thought of as the third string teamthe “leftovers”but today they won because they played as a team -they fought for each otherworked hardthey played the game. The other team never looked like having a chance, even though they towered over many of our players.
We won't talk about Miss 10 and Miss 11 going straight out after lunch to play football again this afternoon on the green outside our house, and coming home like they actually hadfought at the Somme. Given that the washing machine and tumble dryer had already been running non-stop for 72 hours, I was not best pleased with them.