Match of the Day
The youth football team I coach are impossibly good. They are the short-stuff equivalent of the all-star team you unlock at the end of video games, the End-Game Boss of under 13’s football. This, it is to be emphasised, is more or less causally unconnected to me and my coaching. Most everything they do is. All I really do is stand at pitchside trying to anticipate what they’re going to try next so that I can make it look like I told them to do it, tucking my thumbs behind my lapels with a smile of quiet satisfaction as yet another passage of play ends with the ball quietly teleporting from left-back to right-back to centre-back to the back of the net. An expressionless nod, a single hand-clap, and perhaps a thumbs-up to the goalscorer and on with the game. Cool.
Not true. I am like the Evil Coach in one of those kids’ sports movies. An emotionally honest highlights reel of our games would cut to me after every goal, roaring with incrementally more obnoxious laughter whilst exchanging high-fives with my subs bench, and conclude with me in the centre circle leading the entire squad in ecstatically dancing around to “99 Luftballons” whilst pointing at myself with my own thumbs.
I want to say that I am ashamed of my own vulgar grandstanding, the orgasmic air-pounding which follows every goal. I want to say that, but I can’t, and here’s why. Every time I switch on Match of the Day to watch the best footballers and coaches in the world mystifyingly mutate into po-faced, tautology-talking potato heads the minute a microphone is thrust under their nostrils, well, my stomach starts to hurt.
I mean, it’s, it’s just that, if I could play like Steven Gerrard can, why, I’d never shut the fuck up about it, all my life would be spent spouting ever more effervescent love letters to the Beautiful Game. But stick Stevie G in front of a TV camera and it’s like some Scouse reworking of Hamlet, a melancholy bundle of joyless cliché, the oratorial equivalent of a half-hit passback.
But I suppose it’s everywhere, right back to the baleful, half-bored stare of the man in the stands. I sit down amongst them at New Douglas Park or the Warwick Road End and silently pray that in amongst all the noise and shouting, the hateful, hate-filled songs and chanting, spilt beer, spilt Bovril and all the rest, that no-one will realise that I alone am happy, I’m content, I love football.