I’m bearing down on goal, the wind ruffling my ginger mullet as I do.
I can see the keeper spreading himself as much as a twelve-year-old boy can in a full-sized goal. I know at that instant this is my moment. I don’t have the ball, if I had I suspect I would have fallen over a few yards back. Our strong centre-forward Adam Slingsby has it, but I smell blood. The defence are non-existent, it is probably the punishing 90 minutes of football in the drizzly rain that has taken its toll. I’m fresh, though, because I spent the last hour and a half wandering around looking lost. Adam pulls the trigger, opting not to slide it across to his inefficient strike partner.
Instead, he goes across the keeper towards the post I’m bearing down on. It beats the keeper. If it comes back off the post, it’s mine. I steady myself as it comes across the goal. Here we go.
It’s the early 1990’s and I’m describing the final seconds of Wragby Under 13s first match against Cranwell. It had been a while since Wragby had a kid’s team, but my Dad had recognised my enthusiasm for playing and decided to form a team.
Unfortunately, all the decent players in Wragby were under 12, so aside from myself two friends, the rest of the lads were all playing at a level too high. We’d given a good account of ourselves in that first game, Adam had grabbed an equaliser after we’d conceded early, and after that 22 boys who were far too small to play on a men’s pitch had chased shadows all afternoon. There was no finesse here, no eye for our development or short halves. This was a men’s game, and even at 11 and 12, we were playing by men’s rule.
Back to the action, and I stumble as I get a bit excited. The ball does indeed canon back towards me, and I rather uncomfortably slice it back at goal. Luckily, their keeper is nothing more than a mosquito against the huge backdrop of the men’s goal, and my slice goes too high for him to reach but drops below the crossbar and into the net.
Now I knew this goal wouldn’t stand because the ball hadn’t come back off the post at all. One of our substitutes was standing next to the post, and as the ball went wide, he kicked it back towards me. I hoped the referee hadn’t seen it, so I wheeled away to do my best Paul Smith impersonation. I had the ginger mullet; now I had the knack of grabbing crucial goals. The ref blew and disallowed the goal, and my Dad began shouting at me for even thinking of celebrating. Shortly after that, the game ended 1-1, and I cried. I’d imagined I would probably score the winning goal in my first-ever game, and I was gutted I’d let Paul Smith down, even though he didn’t know.
I played every game up front that season, and we lost every match bar one. The one we did win, though, was my crowning glory, the peak of my football career. Old Leake is a place down near Boston, stranded in the fens, and quite a drive on a Sunday morning for a car full of 12-year-old boys. Confidence wasn’t too high. We couldn’t beat an egg, and between Adam and me, we had just a solitary goal. The fledgling partnership had taken some time to settle. Old Leake rushed into a 1-0 lead courtesy of some awful defending, and against the run of play Adam bagged an equaliser, assisted by me staying as far away from play as I could.
The second half saw us press forward, not least due to their centre half coming off with a cold and them going down to ten men. Then, it happened. Adam broke clear, and I made one of my decoy runs away from the action. He let rip with a shot, and just as against Cranwell, it bounced back towards me, this time off the post. I lashed out wildly with my left foot and sliced the ball horribly over the four-foot keeper in a full-sized goal. I had scored, and I celebrated as if we’d won the cup. We won 2-1, and that became my only goal in Wragby colours. I even got some dirt on my kit celebrating.
My Mum was usually happy with me; mine was the only kit that never needed cleaning. I lost count of the number of times I protested that I had ‘got stuck in’ as I came off the pitch without a spot of dirt on me. To me football was a non-contact sport and I was waiting for my latent genius to develop. To my Dad’s credit, he stuck with me, even when Robert Bruce’s Mum turned up at the house demanding to know why he kept playing me and not her son.
I think my Dad chucked her son’s 50p subs back at her and said something like ‘I’m the manager’ to which I cheered. That was an ironic reaction, considering Robert was ‘sturdier’ than me and would perhaps have been better occupying the number 9 shirt I took as my own. Still, Dad was the manager, but those accusations of nepotism wouldn’t go away. He eventually dropped me off to visit Nortoft in Boston, although I only found out about it in the dressing room beforehand.
I cried a bit; we lost 3-0, and he reinstated me to the side as he’d proven he didn’t favour me. His reasoning was he had dropped me; we’d still lost by nil, so I wasn’t the problem. I suspect some mothers decided their kids weren’t coming anymore after that, but I didn’t care as I was back in the side. I imagined my talent would now develop after this setback, and I’d rise like a phoenix from the flames.
As it turned out, my talent did develop, but not with a ball at my feet. I’d written a report of the match while sitting on the sidelines in Boston, using a good old-fashioned pen and paper. It included lots of references to our ineffective strike force, of course, but I sent it off to the Horncastle News, and they printed it.
As the season wound down, my old man decided he had a decent team in front of him, but only if he stayed at under 13 level and lost just Adam and me. Adam didn’t really care; he was too good for Wragby anyway, so the only loser was me, in more ways than one. My final match was a friendly match against the newly-formed Market Rasen boys, and by that point, our team had gotten to know each other well. After only winning once all season, we turned the newcomers over 14-0, and I took a lead role up front.
I say ‘lead role’; I once again failed to score in a match in which even our reserve keeper, on as a sub, bagged a late brace. Not for the first time that season I cried after the game, stark realisation hit me that perhaps I wouldn’t make a footballer after all.
Let that sink in, by the way. My dad formed a team so I could play football, and a year later, I was effectively the only one released, as Adam went on to play for Horncastle. At the end of season awards, I unsurprisingly missed out on the Player of the Year. I did get an award though, I walked away with Clubman of the Year which meant I tried hard despite a complete lack of tangible ability.
To comfort me, my Dad told me I could write the match reports to submit to the local paper, and as I wanted to be involved, that is what I did. It turns out I wasn’t too bad either, and over the next six or seven years, I wrote all the match reports for my Dad’s teams. I was there every match, putting up the nets and putting out the corner posts, and I was secretly thankful I didn’t have to stand out in the cold November rain, having that heavy leather ball whacked into my sensitive and stinging thighs.
My Dad had gotten a taste for managing a kid’s team, though, and despite my no longer being available, he continued to manage until I was too old even to bother going. He tried to include me as much as possible, running team selection by me as if my opinion mattered. How could my opinion matter? I thought Udo Onwere was a top-flight quality footballer. Nonetheless, every Tuesday, I’d go along and train the lads, which consisted of me lining up cones mindlessly whilst they stood around looking disinterested. On a match day, I’d go to the games and prowl the touch-line like a real manager, although as the weather set in over winter, I bitterly regretted it.
Eventually, I packed in my role with Wragby Juniors, and shortly after, one of the players, just two years younger than me, pulled my girlfriend at a club presentation evening. I had picked up another Clubman of the Year award for putting the corner flags out and being willing to get cold and wet helping my Dad. Said cheating player had won Player of the Year for a series of swashbuckling midfield performances. He was better at football than me, better looking than me and apparently, despite being two years younger, a far better proposition. I couldn’t even give him a slap to the chops because I was in a ‘position of trust’, and besides, he was probably harder than me, too. I went home distraught, not least because I now had two trophies to hide whenever I had girls up to my bedroom.
I jacked in everything to do with Wragby Juniors and started throwing myself into Lincoln City. I wrote a few letters to the Sports Echo, and when nobody replied to my points, I wrote under pseudonyms, arguing against myself. When I realised arguing with myself in a newspaper was the first sign of madness, I took up the role of Poacher the Imp at Lincoln City because if I was going to be a good club man, at least nobody would see my face,
The point of this article isn’t to tell you how I became a writer, nor is it a self-deprecating piece about my lack of talent. It’s more a celebration, if you like, a celebration of every one of those eager kids who, deep down, know they’re not good enough. We kept trying, we kept crying, and on cold winter days, we kept wishing we hadn’t been picked.