Advice to Fellow Leisure-Seekers
Just be nice, OK, and try to enjoy yourself.
When you step out of the cool breeze-blocks sanctuary Field AFC have built on the hill next to their pitch you're reminded why people play cricket, not football, in August. It's balmy, close, and the sun is shouting 'YOU'VE FORGOTTEN YOUR HAT'.
You feel a right noob warming up with a cap on, on the Sundays when you remember to bring it, but at the very start of pre-season, when your energy levels sink fast after the eager first ten minutes have elapsed, you need to conserve every last bean you've got.
It's the first game of a new season, for which preparations just seem to start earlier and earlier year on year. I was just getting used to having my Sundays back and going 'ah, well' each time a small thought of exercise entered my head. We're back, and it's hot, and my lungs hurt.
What I have missed over the last six weeks, though, is the sheer fucking charm of grassroots football. Exhibit A, the door to the toilet in the away dressing room at Field AFC or Field Olympic, to give the club their proper title. Just off the cavernous shower room is a PVC door with one of those handles that you have to pull up to lock. So far, so normal? Inlaid in the glazing panels, though, are an attractive roses pattern to optimise the door's visual appeal when it was once attached to the front of someone's house, one imagines. When you enter the toilet and shut the door behind you, you see the house which the door formerly made secure was 'no. 39'.
This is so random and quaint as well as a lovely example of how the fabric of clubs is often a composite of whatever bits and bobs the people who love it have lying around. As I squeeze in one last piss before running out for kick off, I imagine the club secretary speaking up at the Field Olympic AGM to raise the matter of his wife insisting on replacing their front door in the new year, and how happily he would make his existing one available to replace the bead curtain which is currently doing a job in the away dressing room. It makes me smile.
Something else I missed, and perhaps was made more sentimental in the wake of England's EURO 2025 win: players' earnest encouragement of each other. Field AFC were of a standard which I was accustomed to seeing regularly a couple of seasons ago when I played in the 8th tier. Week on week, one of the most mouth-watering moments you'd get as a number 9 would be watching a 'keeper prepare to take a goal kick. Often opportunities to score would follow a soft mis-cue and, sometimes teams would watch the same 'keeper suffer over and over, doing nothing to protect her by way of marking me or letting someone with a better kick take the dead ball. Baffling, but I never complained.
Just as Field's 'keeper was setting herself to take the first goal kick of the game, I heard her centre back shout 'Believe in yourself!' and I was then caught between wanting her to fail miserably and for me to get my pre-season goal count off the mark and also wanting her to believe in herself. Un/fortunately this particular 'keeper had every reason to believe in herself because her distribution was quite good, and I didn't begrudge it her much because she wasn't a total prick.
I'd say from my experience in the lower leagues of the women's pyramid, the goalkeepers are probably the most dependable not-pricks of the team. Always, they bear the heftiest brunt of a dire back line or an over-zealous centre forward but they usually do it with a chuckle.
What's funny about hearing players raise each other up like this is that it melts my heart but I seriously despise them at the same time, and not because I'm a freak who sees every opponent I come across as a threat to be squashed down, but because so many of them are freaks who see every opponent as someone to be squashed down as opposed to a fellow leisure-seeking human who is playing a different role to you in the make-believe that is this game of sport we dedicate more than a seventh of our week to, most weeks of the year.
Ideally, no one should be late into a tackle, and especially not in pre-season — but I'll hold my hands up and say I was trying to make up for having lost the ball moments earlier, and got a bit rash with it midway through the first half. However, when I arrived a second after the ball was kicked, the biggest loser was me, who admires a purple and green shin-egg as she writes four days later.
Usually, in these situations I try and make amends both because I am a people pleaser and because I like to own my mistakes. I suppose, in part, also because I don't want anyone to get the idea that I'm intentionally careless and then hit me back harder out of spite... Yes, ok, maybe some of my sportsmanship is motivated by fear.
On this occasion, I turned to the player who got the ball away to a teammate in spite of my wayward challenge, and I catch her raising her eyebrows as if to say 'well, that was a bit naughty wasn't it'. When I tapped her on the shoulder in apology, she didn't acknowledge it and then I thought of her self-righteous face again and I thought, 'now, let's not be being self-righteous when on another week you'd have done exactly that' and it properly wound me up.
ALRIGHT IT WAS ONLY AN ACCIDENT, I blurted out before I could think. You don't not accept someone's apology, it's impolite.
"I know," she said, smug and calm, "I was just letting the ref know."
The ref in question, the doddery kind who gives offsides when the defence stops running because he wasn't looking — and to give him his dues he can't fucking look in five different places at once without any linos, it's all a bit of a farce anyway. Point being, this is not the hotshot who's going to be keeping count of each knock and tap with a view to controlling the game carefully with stern words and cards-if-he-needs-to.
"What, with a raised eyebrow?" I scoffed, because frankly if he can't see the five yards between Meg and their right back he's not going to spot the twitching brow of a player who's nowhere near the ball, just now, is he?
I think that while this was happening I was cursing my involvement in all this, feeling fed up of how easily rattled everyone is when it's supposed to be a bit of fun, anyway. But as I relate this to you now, I see that perhaps in fact it was me, who was rattled.
So, as we look ahead to the 2025/2026, this is my advice to anyone thinking of getting involved in their local grassroots team: Just be nice, ok, get over it when things go slightly awry (seriously), try and enjoy yourself and always donate your garage odds and sods to the Frankenstein passion project of ninth-tier women's football.
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