There hasn’t been a time during the past forty years or so
when I’ve been able to state, hand on heart that my abiding, defining passion
is football, as opposed to literature, drink or music. Hearing the Spiral Scratch EP by The Buzzcocks on my
older cousin John’s DER music centre on my thirteenth birthday in August 1977
changed my musical tastes forever. As a lifelong atheist, the only profoundly
spiritual experience I’ve ever had was hearing Teenage Fanclub, the greatest
band in the history of the Universe, performing Everything Flows at Newcastle Riverside in 1991. Until I die, I’ll
remember being a 15-year-old schoolboy gaping, transfixed in disbelief at the
opening lines of Metamorphosis by
Kafka. Any Philip Larkin poem, but preferably The Whitsun Weddings or The
Old Fools creates an all-encompassing feeling of private euphoria that I
have struggled, in two and a half decades of teaching English Literature, to
adequately convey.
Yet if I’m honest with myself, none of those experiences outweigh
the euphoria and glimpses of the perfect Universe that football has given me:
my son Ben saving a penalty against Longbenton Juniors for Newcastle East End,
Alu Bangura’s winning goal for Benfield in the Northern League Cup final in May
2007, David Kelly sealing promotion for Newcastle at Grimsby in May 1993. Best
of all, playing as an emergency striker on account of a massive injury list,
seeing the Hearts of Oak right full back trying to run the clock down by
throwing the ball back to his keeper, remembering the poor touches the keeper
displayed when fielding backpasses previously, anticipating the ball bouncing
slightly higher than normal because of the hard pitch, feeling it hit the top
of my right thigh and squirming free as the keeper fails to get it under
control, taking a steadying touch with my right foot to take it away from him,
then rolling it in to an empty net with my left instep from the angle of the
six yard box, before running off behind the goal and punching the air with my
left hand. February 3rd 2007: just going into injury time and my first goal in
competitive 11-a-side football since June 2001 meant that we were now losing
only 5-2.
Saturday 17th May was Cup Final day; on a
glorious Saturday, a large and expectant crowd, bathed in warm sunshine, saw
the favourites overcome nerves and the occasional setback before securing the
trophy their sublime football deserved. To clarify, this game wasn’t played at
Wembley but at Herrington Burn YMCA, the trophy in question wasn’t the FA Cup
but the Billy Lorraine Cup and the victors in this Mill View Working Men’s Club
North East Over 40s Fourth Division final were not Wenger’s Arsenal but my team
Wallsend Winstons, who saw off Horden Tin Pot Veterans 4-1 to complete a league
and cup double. Vince Williams the league secretary presented our captain Aidan
with the cup; a great honour, up there with being presented with the league
trophy by Alan Shearer live on Football Focus in early April, when
the programme came from Wallsend Boys’ Club, whose colours we share and whose
pitches we use.
By the time next season kicks off on August 16th,
I will have reached 50 years of age (Monday 11th if you want to buy
me a card) and though I’ll miss our opening game by being away on holiday, I
have no intention of retiring just yet; why should I when one of my team mates,
Rod, turns 65 in November? When I look back upon my life, I have to say that my
40s have been my favourite decade so far and completing 9 seasons with Wallsend
(formerly Heaton) Winstons has been a great part of that, even if my career
with them began inauspiciously on 20th August 2005 with a 6-0 hiding
(I’m a goalkeeper incidentally) in the insalubrious East End of Sunderland at
the hands of the inappropriately named Welcome Inn. That morning (our games
kick off at 10.30 on a Saturday), having been drafted in to play by a work
colleague Hezza who played centre back, as our regular keeper was on his
holidays, I was introduced to my team mates while we got ready by the side of
the pitch as the changing rooms had been vandalised the night before. Fail to
prepare; prepare to fail and our boys took a hell of a beating.
I wasn’t to know it then, as I gloomily reflected on a dire
performance where 2 of the goals were my fault, 2 others similar defensive
calamities and the final pair, a brace of outrageous refereeing blunders, from
my seat in the Gallowgate while Newcastle played out a sterile 0-0 with West
Ham, but I had seen my future for the next 8 seasons concertinaed and parcelled
up in one morning’s sporting incompetence. However, that was nothing new; there’s several
of our lads, good mates like Rod, Bryan and Trevor, who have played for the
team for upwards of 15 years who regarded finishing in the top half of the
bottom division as a great moral victory. This is why our 2013/2014 league record of P26
W23 D1 L2 F110 A30 and a 17 point league winning margin, not to mention the
Billy Lorraine Cup, is so impossibly special and the best possible way to end
my 40s. After 9 years in Division 4, I am fascinated to learn just what
Division 3 has to offer us. In all those years, I’ve never played against
Houghton Cricketers, Seaham Deneside, Shildon Grey Horse or Newton Aycliffe
Cobblers Hall, so I’ve got to test myself against such redoubtable opposition.
The North East Over 40s League has 5 divisions containing,
72 clubs, with a constitution that allows for 80 clubs in total. Currently, this means that, accounting for
substitutes, management and the odd spectator, upwards of 1,000 blokes in their
40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, in the case of 73 year old Freddy Wilkinson of Trimdon
Vets, turn out every Saturday morning from August to May for the sake of
prolonging our sporting dreams and expressing our love of the game, albeit in a
way which is often ugly, crass and brutal, especially when one considers some
of the more intransigent outfits from Wearside, which is unavoidable as the demographics
of the league show it to be dominated by teams from County Durham and
Sunderland in particular. The only recognition of our age is that games are 40
minutes each way and the 5 permitted substitutes, from 7 named, can roll on and
roll off.
The most northerly team are Woodhorn Lane Veterans from
Ashington in Northumberland, who are the only other team from our side of the
Tyne we’ve faced in the season just ended (won 3-1 home and away), while the
outfit from the furthest south are Richmond Town, from Yorkshire rather than
Surrey thankfully, but still a 129 mile round trip for the Woodhorn lads. One
of the rewards we have for promotion is the chance to play Richmond; let’s just
hope it is a Saturday and not a midweek game.
On the flip side, we will have a local derby as Darsley Park, one of
only 10 sides under the jurisdiction of the Northumberland FA, are in our
division next year, giving us a chance to play on the immaculate bowling green
at County FA headquarters that they share with Northern League D1 side West
Allotment Celtic. It isn’t the same pitch of course, but it’s still an honour
to play on such a surface, especially when you save a last minute penalty in a
cup tie to help your side win 2-1 as I did.
On the flip side, we are often forced to travel to remote
and desolate former Durham pit villages and use the facilities of semi derelict
Miners’ Welfare pitches, such as Thornley or Bobby Robson’s home ground at
Langley Park, many without running water or electricity, often for reasons of
vandalism, where the pitches are scoured by the tyre tracks of trails bikes or
scarred by the remnants of fires. Wrecked, torched car bodies abandoned on
muddy tracks in West Durham are an all too familiar reminder that the sons and
grandsons of players in our league have found themselves so dissociated from
society and sport that the league will continue to be played by older and older
men as the youngsters take no interest in the chance to find oneself in
organised team games. It’s impossibly sad to see pitches and pubs that were
once the hub of communities fall into disrepair; neglected and forgotten, soon
they’ll fall into disuse.
Then again, places like Marley Potts in Sunderland,
nicknamed Fallujah or the adjacent King George V Playing Fields, known uniformly
as Dogshit Park, won’t be missed if a tactical nuclear weapon obliterates them.
However, they do have the benefit of being familiar locations; in the dream
time before sat navs, the Winstons’ Saturday morning caravan, all radios tuned
to Brian Matthews’ Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2, set off from Newcastle for many
points south west with only a vague idea of where we were going. A 7-0 loss to
Premier Division Darlington Croft in the Villa Real Cup saw the convoy of cars
become hopelessly detached and eventually lost, with vehicles serendipitously
meeting up at the correct location after endless detours through villages
athwart the A68. Even worse, a trip to West Cornforth saw us risk prosecution
under child protection laws as 16 of us, already late for kick off, went
charging into the changing rooms somewhere near the correct location, only to
be told this was the South West Durham Boys’ Brigade Under 11s championship. By the team we got to West Cornforth, the
referee was practising his golf swing in the centre circle and the opposition
were lounging around on the grass, playing keepy-ups. Somehow we sheepishly
beat them 2-0, when our late arrival had allowed them to claim the game, if
they’d so desired. A foggy morning away in Stanley saw us draw 1-1 with Beamish
Ball Alley when I couldn’t even see the edge of the penalty area, but it was
almost Christmas and both teams were keen to play. The post-match food saw us
given meat pies and in one of them, our midfielder Adrian detected an aorta.
Great memories of ridiculous times off the pitch that I’ll
remember forever, as our mediocrity on it held less and less to recommend it. Then,
last summer, a seismic shift occured; simply by changing our name from Heaton
Winstons to Wallsend Winstons, to reflect our change of home pitch from Paddy
Freeman’s Park in High Heaton to Bigges Main in Wallsend, we gained some really
top quality players. Chris , aged 40 and 2 months, still playing for Wallsend
Labour Club on a Sunday morning, arrived to score 46 goals, while never being
on the losing side. Mickey, the Yaya Toure of our division and top quality
local non-league player, who won Man of the Match in every game he played. Tom,
a striker I used to pay money to watch at Benfield and Percy Main in the
Northern Alliance, arrived and also scored 46 goals, including a chipped finish
in the Billy Lorraine Final that deserved to win the World Cup. Most crucially
of all; Hallsy, a proper goalkeeper with 20 years’ experience of the Northern
Alliance, who I watched play with such distinction at Percy Main. I was
honoured to spend two thirds of the season on the sidelines watching him
showing how it should be done. Best of all, whenever we got 3-0 up, he’d signal
to come off so I could get some time on the pitch. Coming on for the last 15
minutes of the cup final after Tom’s wonder goal, with the shattered opposition
staring bleakly at the ground as the realisation of inevitable defeat struck
home, was definitely the most emotional I’ve felt on a football field.
The French Algerian novelist Albert Camus is credited with
the quotation; all that I know most
surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football. I’d often thought
it a trite and clichéd expression, but reflecting on the 9 years I’ve spent
with Winstons, I have to agree with the sentiments, especially as Camus was a
keeper himself, but probably not a shit one like me…
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