13- WHITE BEAR FC
“It is not whether you get knocked down, it is whether you get up.” Vince Lombardi
I’d always viewed the White Bear pub with a degree of fascination, a scruffy little outpost, perched on top of the hill overlooking Idle Village like an advanced warning post for the occasional lunatics coming up the hill in search of life.
It was the sort of place my Dad went to drink with not the slightest prospect of meeting women who owned their own teeth. Strangely though, and clearly demonstrating that my family lineage is probably devoid of any great explorers, since leaving home all three of my houses have been dominated by the almost gravitational and mystical pull of the White Bear.
Like many “villages” that make up the sprawling mass of Bradford Metropolitan District, many claim the name only loosely and Idle is no different. True we have a village green albeit concreted over many years ago though still retaining the horse trough, presumably for those falling out of the nearby White Swan.
Of course there are village “shops” with enough hairdressers to serve the British army and curry houses to feed Bangladesh. Strangely as well, the pubs remain almost recession proof suggesting that alcoholics thrive in Idle.
My earliest recollections of the Bear are as a pioneer, well ahead of New Labour, of twenty four hour drinking. You could hardly say that café culture was on the agenda simply because of a few rotting, wonky garden tables on the crumbling patio but 24/7 living had come to Idle.
By this time, John and Pearl had left the Swing Gate for a gastro pub across the other side of town and a sad, slow and ugly decline had set in; it was time to move on. We had effectively been institutionalised and turning us out on to the streets with nowhere to call home seemed rough justice after years of loyal and devoted drinking at the Swing. No longer would we gaze longingly at Angel Eyes as she pulled our pints and our emotions.
Bravely, for a while we decided to go “up market” on a Friday night and started to frequent the trendy Park, adjacent to Lister Park, which had just reopened and was getting a reputation as the place to be, certainly before most headed off to the bright lights of the city centre.
As my constant sparring partner during those days was my old pal John “The Gasman” Robinson, I had little chance of ever getting to town on several counts, skilfully orchestrated by his devoted wife Carol, otherwise known as “Our Lass”.
She had ensured that mischief and subsequent hangover damage to the oncoming family weekend would be limited by the imposition of a strict Friday night allowance for Gasman thereby limiting the prospect of the bright lights of town.
Not that this really mattered as, after a few hours drinking in his company, walking and talking became difficult and the comfort of a fish buttie and a stagger home had more allure than hopelessly chasing women down town. When we abandoned the Swing for the Park, it made sense to get closer to home for a final pint or two which, by this time, was about a hundred yards door to door from the chosen final destination of the Bear.
Our Lass, via the financial prudence exacted on her husband, probably put me on the path to bachelor life by ensuring that I returned with Gasman to the safety of the local each week rather than the twinkling lights of the Cloud Nine nightclub where it would all have ended in recklessness and financial ruin.
In those days the Bear was run by a lovely old Irish couple named Billy and Pat, both long since passed on in search of an nip or two of Jameson’s in the clouds above. Pat was a feisty little woman who ruled Billy with an iron rod, not that Billy seemed to notice as generally he was permanently “happy”, having discovered the secret of a happy life via the optics behind the bar.
Each time Pat was out of eyesight he could be seen having a secretive “nip” but she almost always caught him out eventually and some of the bollockings he got were comical although he was rarely deterred.
Whether Billy should have been driving towards the end of his tenure at the Bear is also a matter of doubt and not just down to his blood being close to neat alcohol. Billy’s eyesight was not great, so trips out in his Mini Metro were always fraught with danger – mainly for other motorists.
Outside the Bear is a very busy and tricky cross-roads, which Billy would take a very unique approach to and one nowhere to be seen in the Highway Code. Negotiating his drop down the hill into the village, basically he just revved hard and attacked it like a ski jumper, oblivious to oncoming traffic from either side or coming up the hill.
In effect, he was Idle’s first suicide bomber; cars would screech to a halt and pedestrians would duck out of the way as Billy, free from Pat and huge grin all over his face courtesy of Jameson’s, flew off down the hill.
As oblivious to fellow motorists as he was, Billy was equally oblivious to the concept of Licensing Laws; as I said this was back in olden times well before New Labour bent over for the drinks industry under the ruse of giving us all twenty four hour drinking and conveniently ignoring the gradual transformation of town centres into war zones.
Billy was clearly ahead of his time and so it was that we discovered that the Bear was “Open All Hours” as long as you made it in the door by 11pm, the official last orders during those days. With Our Lass’s rationing policy and the need to get back to the Bear, consequently my “pulling” time was limited to about the duration of a football match each Friday night.
Gasman was fond of remarking that “he’s got a free reign for the second half” but he always called me in before the final whistle.
Most pubs rang a bell to signify last orders but there was no need with Pat holding the fort; no man would dare to cross swords with her and order was always maintained. Indeed soon after Billy and Pat had left the Bear, the new landlady rang the bell for last orders only to shock the whole pub.
Many thought it was simply an ornament having never heard it ring at all, some thought its only use was for Pat to batter Billy with and the older ones thought it was an air raid warning.
Fridays began to follow a predictable pattern, beginning with a hopeful trip across to the Park, Our Lass having made the financial transfer, leaving a couple of hours of attempted pulling time and the inevitable, empty-handed trip back to the sanctuary and comfort of the Bear.
Amazingly though, the Bear had started to attract women as well; unimpressed by the bright lights of Bradford city centre and obviously as keen as us to simply get wrecked in peace, they had started to flock to the Bear. And, with Billy’s flourishing reputation as a night club promoter, there were times we left the Bear so late we may as well have stayed for breakfast.
It was obvious that we should end our association with the Swing and rebase ourselves at the Bear and so White Bear FC was born, although with far less ceremony than the founders of the Football League many years ago.
Pat welcomed us and the additional Sunday lunch trade with enthusiasm and we had no problem negotiating the terms of our new franchise; two trays of chips and a platter of bread and butter after every game. We politely declined her “Coddle”, a greasy mix of who knew what masquerading as a form of Irish stew.
One day when the game was called off early, I popped down to the Bear around 9am to tell Pat not to bother with the culinary fare of the day only to be amazed to find the pub full, the local Watmoughs print works, having just clocked off the night shift, were enjoying morning beers. Truly this was continental drinking at its finest and the Bear was busier than a Friday night in Soho; Bradford was again leading the way in European culture.
In the intervening years since those heady double-winning days at the Swing, despite having had several successful seasons, the team was starting to break up and we were desperately in need of new blood. Crucially, at least for the amusement factor, we had lost our keeper, Bagpuss, who had been sectioned at the local psychiatric unit.
Trotsky, nearing pensionable age and still plotting a Communist overthrow of the Town Hall, was now far too slow to perform his weekly knee-capping of the opposition left winger. Dayks had also left for pastures new as he had some spare space on his mantelpiece yet to fill and a tub of unused Brasso polish. The average age of the team was rapidly pushing north.
We were extremely fortunate to be approached by three great lads who knew us from being in opposition and were all looking for a new challenge. We could assure them that playing for the White Bear was definitely going to be a challenge. Fortunately, they were almost direct replacements, certainly as far as Bagpuss and Trotsky were concerned.
In fact, we almost got like for like with our new keeper, Fat Sam, a slightly more rotund, if calmer and more genial version of Bagpuss. Colin “Shut That Gate” Dunne, our new right back, was a smaller, balder and much more vicious Trotsky and did not insist on addressing us as Comrade each week. Finally we got Alan “Twinkle Toes” Thackeray who had poise on the ball wasted on the Bear as we rarely had it in our possession; he was also that rare commodity, the left sided midfield player.
Fat Sam was simply great to have around and was almost like a favourite uncle even though he maintained the tradition of most Sunday morning keepers by regularly aiding and abetting the opposition. By “offering” them a goal start, although there was no suggestion of any bungs, he always looked crestfallen after yet another ball had found its way under his belly, through his legs or between outstretched arms and into the net. You simply could not get mad at him though, which was unlike Bagpuss as you dare not get mad at him.
Colin got his nickname simply because he was effectively a runaway train once he went on one of his favoured overlapping runs down the right wing, ball or no ball, unable to put the brakes on. One day, when playing at home, he flew off again, oblivious to the fact that the ball was the other side of the field and expecting his team mate to find him with a pin point sixty yard diagonal pass.
This was a touch hopeful as few of us could manage an accurate six yard pass and not many would have wasted the effort passing the ball to Colin. At the bottom of the field there was a gate, generally for the flow of ambulances each Sunday, and a voice was heard to pipe up “shut that gate, he’ll never come back!”
You could also always rely on Colin to encourage that other tradition of Sunday mornings which was the mass brawl, suffering as he did from the common ailment of little man’s syndrome, Colin needed to fight most weeks.
Twinkle Toes on the other hand, was a real gent and his arrival put an end to the aspirations for a regular berth for the lovable Andy “Tubbs” Taylor who had given our regular striker, “DJ” Boycey, a real good contest for the annual prize of WWF (World’s Worst Footballer).
This title had been held by Winky, largely uncontested, for many seasons until his recent retirement although he still occupied the right touchline devotedly each week from the other side of the white line, regularly goading the opposition and, often, taking the piss out of most of us.
I usually gave him good reason as my regular attempts at a cushion pass back to the deliverer of one of our hard won throw-ins rarely found the intended recipient and would fly off at all angles like cheap Chinese fireworks, threatening to decapitate the watching spectators.
Boycey had joined us back in the Swing days and started as Toppers understudy. If it was not bad enough being kept out of the team by a chain-smoking ghost, he bravely persisted and eventually we let him in the team, mainly because he had a gorgeous girlfriend called Ruth who livened up the touchline with her bizarre and unfailing devotion to Boycey.
As beautiful as she was you sensed God had traded some of those looks for a few brain cells. Fit as a fiddle, Boycey made my devotion to male beauty products look positively masculine as he regularly turned up to games with newly waxed and spray tanned physique. He may have liked the odd Clinique face pack but the same could not be said for his love of Sunday mud and, in truth, he was a headless chicken when it came to football.
Sure enough he could run forever, it was just that he rarely did this with the ball anywhere near. He also started to copy Dayks’ tactic of sulking on the halfway line just because we were under siege again in our own penalty box. As the sieges were most weeks we contemplated buying them nappies and a dummy each.
However, on the rare occasions we did attack, Boycey came into his own, as he had a monster long throw, regularly launching the ball from the touchline to the penalty area. Our tactic here was to move our two fat lads – Big Al and Dayks – like Sherman tanks into the six yard box as few defenders could get close enough to them to challenge for the ball.
It was our best, indeed, probably only offensive tactic and occasionally it worked.
Boycey rarely scored but one day typified him and us probably more than any other. Unbelievably, I had strolled out of defence with the ball still attached to my foot choosing to avoid the usual “lump it” approach and, like the Red Sea, the opposition parted as if in awe.
There I was, with only the keeper to beat, who promptly fell over as well, enabling me to move unchallenged to an open goal not even I could miss. And just as I was about to tap in my first strike of a long, hard season, I was brutally upended by Boycey for his first recorded tackle of the season.
He had run forty yards to tackle his own player from behind and claim the goal himself as if on some win bonus of free supplies of Clinique for a year.
Although often our substitute, Tubbs was worth his inclusion in the squad as a dressing room raconteur; his many tales contained considerable wit and imagination and rivalled Enid Blyton in fantasy. A strapping six-footer, he actually had a frail, injury-prone body and indeed he ran about on a football field like the Straw Man from the Wizard of Oz.
His career was effectively ended with a snap, crackle and pop of his hamstring as he attempted one mazy dribble too many, one Sunday morning and so it was off to an arranged marriage with the lively Julie and never to be seen or heard of again. The dressing room was much the worse off for no more Tales from the Great Man but at the same time another character was taking his place.
We had tried in vain to introduce a youth policy into the team but by this time it was becoming clear that younger generations did not seem to share our passions of freezing cold mud, the occasional Sunday morning brawl and Pat’s greasy chips.
Eventually, one young lad found the allure, at least of the chips, too hard to refuse and so we recruited another almost tailor made replacement, this time for Dayks. By tailor made, if only that Jarvo, as he put it himself “the token black in the team”, was the same size shirt. We only had one that size, it had No 9 on the back and there was no way Fat Sam would ever wear it so that’s where Jarvo played.
Chances are that if you have lived in Bradford then its unlikely you have not heard of Jarvo; capable of being very good company and extremely funny, that’s about as kind as I can get with him because he had a sublime and God given natural talent that should not have been wasted with us, simply because he was double the size he should have been.
For journeymen like me to see someone with that much talent waste it completely, is hard to stomach and he could have been very, very good at whatever sport he chose to take up. The lad had so much ability I often wondered why I was on the same pitch; but ability and talent are only a part of what you need.
So the White Bear days were the beginning of the end for some of the stalwarts of the Swing Gate days, especially as our youth policy had hardly unearthed a succession plan; at one point we did actually increase the average age by bringing Gasman out of retirement to cover for Big Al, hardly adding pace to an already pedestrian defensive line.
Now we had the slowest back line in the league and a black Mr Blobby to lead the front line. If Dayks had accused us of playing deep in the days of the Swing, by this time we were virtually forming a defensive line, camping out on Fat Sam’s goal line.
Those days were though, the very essence of amateur sport; it is not all about winning so perhaps that is just as well as one year we went a whole season without one, if many a laugh along the way.
We simply played for the camaraderie, the banter and the reliability of seeing Colin pick the biggest opposition player out to assault each week and start yet another war without the remotest chance of any of us running to assist him, preferring to await his body being thrown back mangled yet again.
Of course we all paid to play and, annually, the Council found a way to hike up the cost of the annual bag of grass seed they allegedly slung on our pitch as part of their progressive approach to sport in the community. Match fees barely paid for the referee and for a couple of years we did a summer 10km charity “fun” run in aid jointly of a local old people’s home.
There was some forward planning here just in case a few of us ended up there and the team split the proceeds with the home. The first year had been notable for several of us being passed on the final mile by an octogenarian who, risking life and limb if we could have caught him, turned around to run backwards and encourage us to “keep going lads you can do it”.
We looked for him at the finishing line to take him round the back and batter him to save the nursing home fees but we were told he had set off to do the course again.
Humbled by this I decided that I would train hard for the following year’s run, usually in June, and so for three months I ran to the gym, did a circuit training class and ran back the two miles. I was confident that this year I would not be passed by any old fossil including Big Al, indeed if that occurred I would have shot myself on the spot.
I had not factored in scoring a century at cricket the previous day necessitating a gallon of ale at the Bear and a Khyber “special” down the village. If it could get any worse well it did as I awoke to a beer and curry stained pillow and my bedroom window being battered by a raging hot sun.
Stood on the starting line, surrounded by dozens of bright and perky athletes I looked around for somewhere to throw up. It was the longest 10km of my life but there was no sign of the octogenarian.
14 – MAD MEN 2: HOW TO START A WAR
“I’ve had fourteen bookings this season; eight of which were my fault, but seven of
which were disputable.” Paul Gascoigne
The thing that makes team sport stand out above all else is that glorious mix of characters often found within each and every dressing room; that eclectic group of people brought together from so many contrasting backgrounds in pursuit of a common cause.
When you survey any dressing room you might see an accountant changing next to a brickie who may be alongside some poor young lad yet to enter the big bad world of full-time work; this would have been me right up until the age of 22, so skilfully did I avoid the looming threat for so long.
My feat seemed impregnable until the Lawrence brothers came along and blasted it from the record books; I had coached them far too well.
During the working week most of us are generally banded together, in a vocational sense at least, with people from broadly the same backgrounds but come the weekend the rich tapestry of the dressing room is there for all to see. I might never have ever met the likes of Barry “Hawkeye” Hawksworth were it not for cricket, but I have to say I am so glad I did.
Hawkeye, a welder by day, would often turn up to games straight from a few extra hours on a Saturday morning shift, mucked up to the eyeballs which was just as well as those were probably glazed over from the night before. He was the only guy I ever saw take a shower before a game started but was a fiercely competitive spirit and also our best player for many years.
He may have looked like Compo from Last of the Summer Wine with his battered, squashed, green Undercliffe cap and whites that rarely were white, but on the field he was as focused as anybody. Although he was a key player he was never likely to get a job in diplomacy and, the odd game he stood in as skipper, something was always likely to spark.
One long and pointless afternoon at Skipton in the cup, when only the ducks on the outfield had any sense of purpose, offered a clue to a lack of a potential future in the Foreign Office.
We had hung around for hours on the insistence of the opposing skipper with little chance of play the following day let alone that afternoon, presumably because his wife had made the teas and he did not fancy chocolate cake all the following week.
Eventually he agreed to a “bowl out” (cricket’s version of a penalty shoot out) with both sides trying to avoid the Second round and another Sunday match. When the farce was completed, Hawkeye, who stayed in the dressing room with me watching the mud sliding contest, finally shook the obnoxious opposing skipper’s hand after removing his own from his backside. He was better for knowing!
In every team there is a rich mix of contrasting temperaments ranging from the sanguine to the downright pessimistic; the placid to the volatile; the diplomat to the aggressor. It is the latter character who can always be guaranteed to turn a quiet sporting contest into an all out battle and whilst cricket can have its fair share of volatile characters it is often the more contact-based sports where things can really kick off.
Take one character I played with towards the end of my football life, Paul “Porkas” Gartland who had “signed” me after the demise of the White Bear.
The term “signed” may be using some poetic licence. In reality, I went to his house to beg for a team to play for and he was generous enough to allow me to join and was taken in by my claims that I was a midfield player, although not for too long.
Bizarrely, well into my late thirties, I had found a new career under Porkas, that of the wide midfield player a la David Beckham. God knows why he thought I could play there or maybe he simply had nobody else but of all the key requirements for that position, those of pace, dribbling skills and the ability to cross a ball with accuracy, I had none.
I was slow as a snail, needed three touches to control a ball and had spent my football career required to simply boot it as far as possible into touch, preferably the River Aire, to give Big Al time to recover.
Porkas was manager of Undercliffe Cricket Club FC and at last I had been picked by UCC, although some twenty five years after our neighbour Fred had passed me his old bat across the garden fence albeit at the wrong sport.
Porkas, as with Dayks, had again narrowly missed out on a professional career due to an unlucky injury when a junior with Huddersfield Town FC, then of the old Fourth Division. He had though, gone on to play a very good standard of semi-professional football, the highlight most probably being with Emley Town AFC and an appearance at the old Wembley Stadium in the FA Vase Final in 1988.
Somehow Porkas had found himself at the end of his footballing life as player-manager of UCCFC. Still supremely fit and built like a truck he had that competitive edge that separates the men from the boys but whilst he still had control and poise on the ball, pace had started to desert him as it does all of those who had it in the first place unlike me, who never had it at all.
So he resorted as most old pros do to meting out GBH most Sunday mornings to any opposition player that passed him with the ball and sometimes without.
Although more than good enough to walk into the team each week, as manager he tended to favour the subs bench in fairness to those less able more than anything else. Or maybe that, as Dayks was also playing for UCCFC alongside Rob Adamson aka The Warthog, we already had two fat lads in the team so a third would have given us the impression of a rugby league team.
Rob must have been the most frustrating player ever to come up against , despite being built like a hippo, running like one and with even less footballing ability than said hippo, he was always a shoo-in every week on the team sheet.
The muddier it got the more delirious Rob became at the prospect of another Sunday wallowing in local authority shit and whacking several bells out of the opposition. It did not matter if they were faster and more skilful, most were, once that centre circle mud got them there was no escape from The Warthog who generally mauled them like a starving lion with a wildebeest.
If all else failed he would just collapse on some protesting opponent to stop any chance of any further movement. Most referees simply found it far too funny to do anything other than laugh.
Weekly, Porkas would brood on the touchline ever impatient to peel off the tracksuit and make his appearance. One morning stands out vividly as we were fairly comfortable at 2-0 up when, with only around twenty minutes to go, he signalled to our left back to make the change.
Most managers tend to view the substitute as an impact player be it for an injection of pace or a different tactical approach to the game. I think Porkas was definitely an impact payer but of the wrecking ball type and nothing else.
Up until this point the opposition had been almost docile and although we had not played well the result was never in doubt. Soon though, there was a fifty-fifty ball to challenge for and Porkas, never likely to shirk a tackle, went straight through this guy who was giving some ten stones to our player manager and sent him almost into orbit.
Bedlam ensued as Porkas, a clean living, white collar worker and respected family man, simply smiled and held his hands up as if awaiting the return to Earth of the dismembered opponent. The opposition went ballistic, a massed ruck ensued involving all bar The Warthog, who took the chance to have a free wallow in the centre circle mud as a body returned to Earth with a thud.
Porkas, retaining his generosity of selection, restricted his appearances most seasons and, credit to him, when we went to the war zones of the Buttershaw or Holme Wood estates he was always a “tactical” selection as he clearly relished visits to these tougher parts of the city. Not that we did not have some other big lads in the team, discounting the fat lads who were gentle giants really.
One cup tie necessitated a trip to nearby Keighley, a cowboy town on the outskirts of Bradford, still ruled by a Sheriff and under martial law most weekends. It was not something we were looking forward to in all honesty and the game was ugly to say the least, before it all kicked off midway through the second half.
One good thing for a civilised lad like me was that the team had a number of firemen, not good for a team night out given the female weakness for anybody who could get past six rungs on a ladder in a uniform, but with real benefits when in a jam as these lads were handy. In those days our subs all wore ridiculous padded green suits, bought by Pete the unofficial CEO of the team, which made them look a cross between the Jolly Green Giant and Michelin Man.
As the fracas broke out one of our subs, Andy “AC” Clague, who tragically is no longer with us, decided to take the matter into his own hands. Suddenly there was a booming voice as AC called out “who wants a piece of me then?”
And then we saw him striding across the pitch arms wafting out at a forty-five degree angle to his body because that’s as close as the suits allowed post inflation with legs similarly spread. Walking with the purpose of a moon-walker, there he was striding across the pitch about to sort out a few Keighley lads into the bargain.
Whether it was fear, shock or just sheer disbelief the brawl was diffused in seconds. To the end AC had this larger than life persona and with little time left, he still insisted his colleagues wheel him down on a fire service stretcher to the White Bear so he could share another pint or two. Larger than life, a massive character in the dressing room and braver than most, he was simply taken far too soon.
People asked me many times over the years why I played Sunday football on the assumption that it was a licence to break bones and played by thugs. In truth, over all the years I played I did not see that many bad injuries, the worst of all being maybe a couple of broken legs which were not always the result of malice and more of bad luck.
Some of the away fixtures would be challenging and I remember playing Cap & Bells in the middle of Buttershaw estate with more on the touchline than I had ever seen wearing the best collection of sheepskin coats this side of Kabul. Each time you went to take a throw in the abuse was unbelievable but it was definitely not time for any clever, witty retorts.
We once had a game stopped mid-flow on Holme Wood estate as a quad bike ran from corner flag to corner flag although it did little to ruin the playing surface which was normal Bradford Council fare anyway. A Prospect game was postponed one Sunday morning due to wild horses roaming the pitch up at Bierley on the outskirts of Bradford, which, as a few seemed to be raging in my head after the previous night out, was a stroke of pure good fortune.
It was always more likely that the spectators were going to kick something off more than the players; if we were dumb enough for playing at this appalling standard, why on Earth could you not find something better to do than watch it? All you needed was a misplaced clearance to take out a pram or two, saving social services a fortune in later years, and there was every chance of a touchline riot.
There were a few regular watchers who saw the humour in Sundays like Winky, who turned up regularly in later life to see if my ball “control” was still appalling with passes often missing the intended recipient by yards. Quite often though we could all be guilty of pre-judging and never more so than when we first played away at The De Lacy, renowned to be one of the toughest pubs in Bradford, on the edge of Bierley estate.
We changed in the pub cellar, avoided the broken glass, viewed the bucket on the floor, giving up on the prospect of a warm shower after the game and hopped across the busy Tong Street to watch the horses being led from the pitch, fresh manure readily available. I lashed on another layer of baby oil and hoped for the best.
Managed in his own inimitable style by a hugely likeable nutcase called Keenan, their side also contained a character by the nickname of Chewbacca, named after the Star Wars character as he was a spitting image of in looks and size.
I spent all game avoiding Chewbacca as I was secretly seeing his cousin and did not want to become part of the family. After a competitive and lively game, notable for Dayks playing an ambassadorial role, similarly tormenting their team and placating the voluble supporters, we had as good a post match bit of hospitality ever with warm hearted, high spirited, generous lads.
That’s sport for you in a nutshell, even though we honestly expected our cars to be gone by the time we left the pub.
15 – GOING THROUGH THE CHANGE
“Geez, I just played cricket because I loved the game. I never thought about it much, never really had any formal coaching.” Steve Waugh
It was gloomy outside and my hands were trembling with the spring chill; I was stood there clueless as to what I should do or say next and I still had no idea how I had got into such a compromising position with seemingly no escape for many, many years.
Had I been drugged, kidnapped and abandoned by all at this bleak outpost? No, voluntarily there I was, in “control” of my very first game as a junior cricket coach, on a freezing cold April evening at a place called Adwalton Moor CC, with eleven almost unknown but clearly very expectant kids. Under the steely gaze of a variety of parents and guardians, all hoping I would turn Little Johnny into the next England superstar, it was here it all began.
What had convinced me, in the “prime” of my playing career, to volunteer for this? A lifetime spent avoiding kids, commitment and especially excitable, hormonal and volatile mums but here I was in April 1999, starting out as a volunteer junior coach knowing absolutely nothing about kids and not much more about coaching.
Although I still considered myself a youngish lad then in my mid thirties, you could tell the kids had instantly categorised me as a dinosaur, being some three times their age, as they smirked away at the latest idealistic idiot simply trying to “put something back” into sport. How long would these worldly good intentions last?
I remember vividly the committee meeting that resulted in me volunteering to “help out” not ever suspecting that some fifteen seasons on I would still be at it, still be spending working afternoons lining up cones, concocting training drills albeit remaining trophy free.
The committee meeting where our “crisis” unfolded was so typical of those up and down the country with the late withdrawal of our junior coach in typical pattern: last minute, no succession plan and therefore chaos. In this case it was John “The Bodger” Lee, coach to the juniors for several years, largely due to son Andrew’s participation, who had obviously had enough, and given Andy was twenty five by then this was understandable.
Most “bad news” these days is often delivered either in absentia or more often by the dreaded text as it is generally easier than fronting up. Bodger did not do this but by the lateness of the announcement, all he had done was inflict maximum chaos on a bunch of people not designed to cope with chaos.
No committee is as most are only there for a quiet pint and so, with the new season barely a month away, Chairman Haighy attempted to restore order at the meeting and wake a few of the other members up. Looking around for volunteers, he prayed nobody would ask him, and awaited signs of interest for this unforgiving position.
Given that most of the committee had no idea we actually ran junior teams and some actually had no idea we played cricket, this looked troublesome and, instantly heads fell in unison. The usual carpet gazing began until the problem was hopefully resolved and all could go home peacefully.
As if possessed by some uncontrollable inner spirit, I felt my hand starting to rise above my head and my mouth utter words enough to suggest I would be the man to volunteer to take over these kids. What was I thinking?
I suppose, in an altruistic sense, I felt that it was important to put something back into a club and a sport that I had gained so much personally from and I wish more thought the same but everybody has a personal choice to make here and a different set of circumstances to juggle.
As I have got older I realise that is not that easy to dump the kids with the wife and go look after somebody else’s kids, they having been similarly dumped at the ground by gleeful parents, whizzing off without so much as a backward glance. For a match fee of a quid we must be the cheapest child-minders in town.
Either way, overnight I became a junior coach and also long before the explosion of the child welfare “industry” so it really was a much simpler affair. At the same time I exposed myself (poor choice of word perhaps) to the awful reality of the state of the nation’s kids, the alarming decline of standards in junior sport and the ignorance of the elite at Lords as regards grass roots cricket.
Over the years I would begin to discover the numerous publicly funded idiots, clearly incapable of meaningful employment. Many administer vast sums of money intended to improve sport for kids but waste it ticking boxes and creating paper chases providing equally half-witted politicians and civil servants with reams of meaningless statistics designed to prove all is well.
Whilst Team GB was rightly lauded for its achievements at London 2012, there can be no comparison with the funding of the elite to that of grass roots sport; it is simply far too skewed nowadays to have any long term impact on the majority.
As long as television continues to be fed its “stars” and future ‘C’ list celebrities little else seems to matter. What became apparent so quickly was that since I began as a kid, around the same age of those that I was now in charge of, standards had clearly plummeted and the volunteer coach is almost powerless to do anything other than simply try to slow the decline.
Of course, there are plenty of books out there about coaching but, frankly, the majority are a load of bollocks and not one contains guidance as to how to cope with being assaulted by some nutty mother mid-pitch just because her kid has had another “off-day”.
It would be great to focus exclusively on coaching pure cricket skills but most kids these days can barely cope with moving let alone catching, throwing and running. True, throw them a Nintendo or a Big Mac and they will probably catch it, but try teaching a forward defensive shot.
The coach has to become the classic Jack of All Trades: a skills-coach, mentor, taxi-driver, child minder, therapist, and diplomat for frank discussions with endless mums who want to know why their pride and joy is so totally and utterly useless. So, for roughly two hours a week, spanning four months of the summer, you get tasked with turning Nintendo Kid into the next England cricketer.
Break that down into the time spent controlling around twenty kids and, by the time the summer ends you may have had one hour in total, one-to-one, with even the most talented. That is why the absence of school sport is so damaging; the club coach is merely plugging holes in a big, leaky dam overlooked by the television funded monolith at Lords.
Very occasionally there are naturally talented kids and so, inevitably, you also have to prepare for the day when that same kid is now steaming in to bowl at you, trying to knock your head off with a hard, shiny new ball on a Sunday morning, made worse by a steaming hangover, as winter nets hit you again.
The reality is despite the fact that you have put hours into coaching this lad, desperate to impress on him the rights and wrongs of life and sport, for now you are his play thing. Let target practice begin, this is Darwinism in a cricket net.
There you are, with more padding than a bomb disposal expert, literally bricking it because the kid is now seriously quick and was tucked up in bed the previous night well before the time you had that “one last pint”.
So there’s no time to pat yourself on the back for helping with his development, just enough to get ready to be put on your backside yet again as the gold foil lettering sails by with a threatening “whoosh” hopefully minus any of your skin and bones attached to it. Yes, you could have stayed in bed and could now be tucking into a bacon butty rather than trying to avoid a broken bone or two but, as a committed coach, here you are fighting for your life.
I remember being regularly “peppered” by Jimmy Lee, son of my old mate Steve, who I had known since he was about eight and, by that time was now sixteen and playing a few games for our midweek juniors on the way to securing a professional contract with Yorkshire.
Often Jimmy would ring me, now into my forties, to ask if I would let him bowl at me for some extra practice and, stupidly, I always agreed. To compound this young Sam Lawrence, at six foot plus and almost as quick, was always keen to show his coach how good he was too. It was akin to volunteering for a firing squad.
I do think that kids seem to grow up much quicker these days and I saw an early example of this first hand when umpiring an early game for my Under Thirteen team. Young Sam Stockill, my captain and star man looked a bit drained so I asked what was wrong.
“Women problems, too many on the go, can’t concentrate on my batting Coach.”
“But Sam, you’re only 11.”
Sweet irony of ironies as even at that tender age I had Sam down to be an exceptional player and then he went off and trained as a priest. I hope Sam will not mind an extended mention here because he was a great example of the joys and frustrations that coaching provides in almost equal measures.
He was a hugely likeable and supremely gifted young sportsman with exceptional talents at both rugby and cricket and even at that age you could not help but wonder just how far he could go. Life is never that simple and a decade or more later, sadly those talents are not on show anymore save for the back garden with the kids.
It is not for anybody to judge but it does show the folly of many coaches when they see a talented youngster and focus far too much on the Gifted One than the rest of the pack. I hope we have never been guilty of that at the Villas but it is true that, as a coach, working with talent is more appealing than, in many cases, simply child minding.
Coaching becomes very addictive as well because, once committed, you want to do as good a job as possible. However, it is very hard to avoid the frustration most of us feel as to why so much responsibility lies with volunteers nowadays largely because school sport is almost extinct.
This is especially harder to fathom given that sport at the highest levels is awash with grotesque amounts of cash. How do you maintain a national sport like cricket when only around seven percent of kids have access to it at school, via the private school system?
The burden on the clubs is immense and they need support but more often than not it is spread thinly, often attainable only at the end of a monster paper-trail of compliance and regulations. Only those clubs with the most number of volunteers prepared and able to tackle this bureaucracy can hope to prosper.
Undoubtedly the game is becoming more elitist as a result and I strongly believe the responsibility here lies with the game’s ultimate custodians, the English Cricket Board (ECB). Funding is a serious issue for all grass roots clubs but its allocation is skewed badly and often towards high-profile, high value schemes.
I can take you to several locally that have been a complete folly and a waste of valuable funds, demonstrating the lack of knowledge of those charged with allocating this valuable and scarce funding.
Should your club wish to get any level of meaningful financial support you really have to become ECB Clubmark accredited, an accreditation generally viewed by most volunteers as a prime example of bureaucracy gone mad.
We have a limited number of volunteers trying to keep the game alive and the powers that be enforce a classic box-ticking, paper chasing exercise which has been proven to be absolutely no guarantee of the right clubs getting appropriate funding. In short, it is a total load of bollocks.
Without Clubmark you cannot hope to become an ECB Focus Club, which is where access to the real financial big-bucks are nor can a club participate in the national Chance to Shine Scheme and without a small army of administrators you can do neither. So the game gets ever more elitist and more often than not, postcode social engineering and political correctness also win funding over pure sporting necessity.
We blunder on regardless doing the best we can, filling in the plethora of forms that land on us annually, most notably regarding the self-promoting industry of child welfare; did anybody mention coach welfare?
Surely we deserve protection from frostbite, moronic ECB policies, apathetic parents and endless, pointless “development” meetings. If Henry Ford had relied on cricket “development” meetings to invent the car we would still be riding horseback.
Traditionally, winter is the pantomime season and the ECB, not seeking to deviate, will always have an offering for us around the villainous theme of child welfare.
We are invited to sit there for hours listening to endless tales claiming that just around the next corner is the Boogie Man who will kidnap our kids if we don’t fill in these next ten forms to get the certificate that says we all agree that there really is a Boogie Man. I guarantee you some of the kids I have coached would have frightened the crap out of the Boogie Man.
You can also expect that the fallout from the Jimmy Saville fiasco will result in ever more glossy brochures and pointless three-hour courses just so the elite can tick their corporate responsibility boxes. This is a self serving industry and we are all paying for it.
Unbelievably, over the years we have had guidelines covering the number of kids you are allowed to be in a car with: a guideline requiring you to check individual car insurances before away games: and a requirement to get the tea ladies CRB checked. It has been political correctness gone mad and a total absence of common sense.
All we want to do is share with kids our passion for sport and teach them skills that we hope they will enjoy for many years and maybe even pass on to others just like we are trying to do. For the vast majority of kids, school facilities and opportunities are dire and cricket suffers more than most because it is a technically challenging skill to learn.
Please don’t blame computer games; I believe kids only resort to these because there’s nothing else to do.
Teachers these days seem to have neither the time nor the inclination to get involved. It is probable that they have to fill in a dossier style risk assessment before even going outside if it is raining. God forbid any game that uses a hard ball and big wooden bats.
At primary level, the national curriculum has knocked all competition out of schools, everyone has to win at sports day, no one is better than anyone else, and nobody can be told they are any better than the rest.
Those who come last get just as much attention and praise as the really talented kids and everything is a “team” effort. Nothing is ever down to the individual who happens to be simply better than the rest and may have carried all the others along; it is as if we are either ashamed or fearful of real talent.
This is the same kind of utter, totally useless rubbish that perpetuates much of modern life today and all it does is breed mediocrity. If you doubt this just look at the politicians we are saddled with for evidence.
To end on a lighter note though, perhaps one of the more entertaining aspects of coaching and volunteering over the years has been the variety of mums, who I have had to deal with.
I have revised my initial observations, first published in A Critics’ Corner, with the benefit of a few more seasons under my belt and a few more of those “heart to heart” conversations involving some mum threatening my comfortable existence on the planet.
I can summarise as follows, without fear of litigation, as I swear most of what follows is true:
• The Gaggle – a group of mums allegedly there in support of their offspring but would not know the result of the game unless told as the wine has kicked in already. Generally, all are as equally hacked off with their husbands, as their husbands are of them, hence regular attendances at junior cricket matches under the pretence of supporting the team. Their kids will never make it as cricketers until Red Rum flies to Mars, but it is a good excuse to get pissed over a bottle of wine or two even if it is Sunday morning. The occasional cry of “good shot” gives the game away as it’s the opposition batting.
• The Flirt – the last days of youth have long since passed her by and memories of raunchy Sunday mornings in bed are now distant dreams with three kids, two dogs and next door’s cat all vying for her attention. Night club canapés and champagne have been replaced by high cholesterol, varicose veins and Mellow Birds at Molly’s café at the club. Husband number three has just fled so she turns up at the game trying to look twenty again instead of pushing fifty, as worried wives nudge husbands inside the clubhouse, out of danger from the wafts of Rive Gauche 1985. Molly wipes his spatula on his apron before a timely clip around the ear from wife Carol and the Coach makes a silent promise to himself never to put her mobile number in his phone just in case the Bear gets really dull one Saturday night.
• The Dreamer – lives in hope that life holds more in later life for her prized one than the game of cricket seems to offer. Despite you gently suggesting her kid is totally and utterly useless and, as long as the sun keeps rising, is likely to remain so, she insists on buying him more new gear each year than the local primary school’s annual sports budget. You hope that he will stick at it long enough for his annual hand me downs to fit you eventually as you always wanted one of those fancy bats. She’s tried football, rugby, golf, tennis and now its cricket’s turn and you are her last chance to try and save the day and find something her kid may be half decent at before that job at ASDA comes calling.
• The Highly Strung One – as common as the changing of the seasons, indeed, almost the best bit of every cricket season is trying to guess which mother will assault you at some point in the summer blaming you for everything from world famine to the inability of her kid to hit a straight ball. Generally needs an outlet for lots of stored up tension and, because there’s nothing better on offer, the coach will do. The tightening of her grip around your neck clearly evidences signs of tension as you ask yourself was I responsible for her offspring missing what looked like a straight ball which has left all three stumps totally splattered. She clearly needs help, as you gaze into those bloodshot, manic eyes, unable to even remotely work your charms on this one.
• The MILF – a mythical term as realistic as a cricket playing Dodo bird.
16 – BIKE RIDES
“Life is like a ten speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.” Charles M. Schulz
Apparently cycling is the new craze for middle-aged blokes all seemingly desperate to emulate Bradley Wiggins’ exploits and avoid the recently turned sex-crazed wife, having just completed the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Most times I set off for a road-trip, emulating Bradley Wiggins is the last thing on my mind and avoiding the onset of a massive heart attack or ending my days in a ditch are far more likely.
There is evidence though of a huge boom in recreational cycling, with men especially, desperate to spend fortunes on an amazing array of hi-tech contraptions and kit. My old pal Patch lavishes so much attention on his bike I am sure wife Paula must secretly be insanely jealous.
I am sure she would appreciate the tender foaming scrub that the bike gets after every outing as she contents herself with her mild green Fairy Liquid. White forks, white wheels and even white walled tyres, this bike should have been ridden by Al Capone.
Instead, a little fat lad generating a pall of steam skywards with the faint sound of a stream of expletives as the next hill comes into view, pedals away in the distance. I can see the day he eventually keels over and the paramedics arrive only to gaze adoringly at this sleek machine ignoring its prostrate owner, foaming at the mouth.
Cycling attracts all shapes and sizes and appeals to man’s basic instincts of exploration and survival although searching out a tea shop and a big cream scone en route is hardly from the Bear Grylls’ guide. I would bet that most of us had bikes as kids, crashed a few times, lost a few teeth and had barely sat in the saddle as a result for another twenty years.
However, the attraction of cycling to the average middle-aged bloke is due to a variety of factors not least that many of us will have played competitive sport and still have the urge to compete; and we always loved a new toy.
One dark winter’s night, many moons ago, three old pals & I decided to take on a new challenge in the form of the coast-to-coast cycle run. Most of you will know these guys but to the uninitiated a brief introduction will suffice beginning with the oldest, Brent Shackleton.
A very good league cricketer capable of bowling long, stamina sapping spells of hostile, fast bowling but who could not have imagined the agonies to come.
Lifelong friend and counsel, Rick Lawrence, had been a very good amateur rugby player but a failing body in later years meant that he now had to contend with the regular poppings and pullings of various muscles.
Finally, John “JB” Brennan, a contender for the most disorganised man on the planet and somebody you should never ever seek to share a room with unless you are either homeless or want to experience what it would be like to live in a squat.
Only JB had experienced anything longer on a bike than the canal path to Shipley, indeed Brent had not ridden a bike since his stabilisers came off when he was three and the fear and suspicion had never left him. Each of my cycling partners had spent fortunes on all sorts of new gear ahead of our inaugural 140 miles of torture.
Clearly dubious about investing heavily in what I viewed as a passing fad before my older mates opted for their armchairs, I placed my faith in my trusted Raleigh, nicknamed for the trip as The Bedstead, largely as it appeared to be forged out of solid iron.
I had won it in a raffle at the Villas for a quid and so, whilst the other members of Team Villas had front and rear suspension, disc brakes and lightweight frames, I was sat on the cycling equivalent of a used Lada.
The initial trip, a spectacular route from Whitehaven to Sunderland, was notable for the very first day when we very nearly lost both Brent to exhaustion and me to a broken neck in the woods, which would have been an inauspicious way to go as I will explain.
We set off to Keswick after a train ride from Shipley to Whitehaven. Arriving at Whitehaven, JB somehow managed to get his foot stuck in his fancy cycling cleats (a clip on cycling shoe attached to the bike) resulting in him jiggling around the platform like a dancing bear trying to free his leg. This fascinated the locals as they had clearly never had such an entertaining free show and out came the hat for an impromptu collection and shouts of “encore!”
That first day was sheer torture in extreme heat with murderous climbs in and out of the numerous valleys and late in the day, as Keswick finally loomed, disaster struck. After yet another lung-busting climb, at the summit JB flew off down the hill with a crazed yell and, as Rick decided to follow on so we could tell the rescue services where to find the body, I stayed with Brent who was groaning more than usual.
Suddenly, he collapsed in a heap and we were genuinely concerned for the big man, especially as we had not named a reserve for the forthcoming Saturday game; he may have been fat and fifty but he was still our best bowler by a street.
Fortunately we found an angel in the form of a lovely lady at a nearby guesthouse; so with Rick escorting Brent, now full up on cakes, safely into Keswick, JB and I decided to complete the “official” route.
I should have known that following cycling’s equivalent of Eddie the Eagle was not sensible at all. Flying through some woods at a breakneck pace, with The Bedstead vibrating violently beneath me, I hit a huge brick and was launched through the air, landing with a thud in the undergrowth. Was I dead?
Not quite although with two flat tyres, a bent wheel, blood over my fancy new outfit and, rather bizarrely, the tie cord on my new sixty quid shorts popping, leaving them around my knees, I looked like the victim of some violent sex attacker.
I trudged along alone, dragging The Bedstead behind me trying to hold my shorts up, searching for JB. When I found him it was clear that neither of us really had a clue how to mend a puncture but eventually we cycled into Keswick, half-bitten to death by midgies and several hours late.
We spent the rest of the remaining 100 miles waiting for either Brent to collapse, JB to get lost courtesy of his totally useless GPS gizmo, Rick to twang a muscle or The Bedstead’s one remaining good wheel to fall off. Singing the old The New Christy Minstrels’ hit “Three Wheels on my Wagon” seemed appropriate. If you don’t know the song, and you youngsters out there probably don’t, you won’t see the relevance… but the song ends when there is only ONE wheel left on said wagon.
When eventually we reached the coast-to-coast offices in Sunderland sunburnt, covered in flies and stinking like tramps, our bodies aching, we were dreaming only of a comfortable bed. Sat astride The Bedstead I dipped a front wheel in the North Sea and wondered if I would ever sit down without the aid of a cushion ever again.
It took a lot more persuading Brent to make another trip and I thought it was a miracle we did eventually cajole him to do it “one more time”. Sadly, The Bedstead was not to make this one and was consigned to the back of the garage for an uncertain and rusty future.
Thinking that another week on a bike with JB would surely lead to a broken neck, I had decided to borrow a bike from Rick’s eldest son, Sam, who omitted to tell me that only three of the twenty-one available gears actually worked.
More worryingly, since our last ride JB had found “love” and had become even more disorganised and chaotic than ever although she had bought him some new skinny underwear.
This trip was a circular route around the Yorkshire Dales starting with a gentle few miles on the canal past the same swans that had attacked Molly several years ago on a sponsored walk for the Villas. In truth you could hardly blame the swans for being aggressive towards a twenty stone bloke wearing a matron’s outfit, NHS glasses and hobnail boots; needless to say we passed by unchallenged.
Although the route was far less signposted, we felt confident as Rick was a geography graduate and JB had again brought more navigational aids than Ellen Macarthur took sailing around the world.
Once again on our very first day, although we’d all been ignoring his grunting, wailing and wheezing, barely ten miles into the trip Brent howled “You’ll have to leave me, I can’t go on…I’ve had it…tell Sue I love her!”
The big man was blowing harder than the local steam railway and an antidote was called for in the form of a wedge of chocolate cake that had him sprinting off like Mark Cavendish to our first stop at the Marton Arms in Thornton-in Lonsdale.
The owner here was a manic-depressive suffering from OCD and an addiction to laminate notices all beginning with “Don’t” which failed to deter JB and by the time we’d left I could have offered several more along the lines of:
• Don’t turn the bathroom into a lake every time you shower.
• Don’t make your room resemble a squat in two minutes.
• Don’t sit texting like a twelve year old
Of course cycling is great as a way of getting fit and, for some, losing weight but during that trip I lost about two stones that I could ill afford, due to my waterproofs being little more than a glorified boil in a bag suit. Four days of full English breakfasts, several cream scones a day and many beers, yet I was destined to arrive back looking like Posh Spice.
The scenery was magnificent though, even if some of the mountain climbs were torture; some of the sheep looked bewildered at four old guys gasping for air as we crawled passed them up hill after hill and it was here disaster struck.
The first major mechanical failure as my chain came off and they left me..alone…at the top of a mountain with no Swarfega or running hot water, wondering where Team Sky was when you needed them.
The best thing though about this trip – apart from the glorious cakes – was the Rose & Crown in Bainbridge, which was really an Eastern European lap dancing academy in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales.
As I clocked eyes on the gorgeous young thing on the check in desk, Kosovo Kate, my legs buckled as she fluttered her eyes and offered to show me to my room in a voice I would have signed my house over for in an instant. As for the room, ours had a four-poster bed and I won the toss consigning JB to the single and dreaming of possibilities with Kosovo Kate.
Noticing there were no towels in the bathroom I rang down to reception and hoped for Kate; a knock at the door and with sweaty palms I opened it only to find Big Bettie of Bainbridge wheezing and coughing at the door, stinking of lager and fags, with arms full of towels and a mop for JB as advance warnings had travelled down the Dales.
An early dinner was booked as this was England versus Sweden night in Euro 2006. Sociable as ever, we shunned the filthy locals and retired to the resident’s bar. Before turning in, I decided to show Rick what the Lawrence family were missing by still not having Sky TV.
I promptly flicked on to the adult channel “Babecast” and although we heard a cheer in the background we assumed the football highlights were on. “Red Hot 40+ Wives” was followed by another cheer; just as I flicked over to “The Nordic Channel” with no sign of Rick wavering, the roof nearly came off with chants of “Engerland, Engerland….”
Brent burst in to say that the remote I was using controlled the TV in the public bar and there was a busty beauty in an England thong on screen.
It was three long years before we were to ride again in the summer of 2011 this time taking on the Morecambe to Bridlington coast to coast route. Although longer, it is a much flatter route so, rather dismissively, I prepared diligently with a night at the Idle Beer Festival and felt far from Olympian as I sat in the sun the next morning awaiting the 08.53 to Morecambe.
Our first day was supposed to be the easiest day but soon we were having to indulge in motivational soothing “that’s the last hill today Brent” as he huffed and he puffed cursing us all for convincing him to do this yet again.
In keeping with tradition, by the time we reached a pretty village called Clapham still with 10 miles to go, Paul the Weatherman’s forecast of bright sunny skies was looking a complete load of bollocks as rain lashed down.
When we reached our B&B it was time to reflect on the wisdom of only bringing a single pair of cycling shorts and two shirts. The next day would be hot, never mind what Paul the Weatherman said, and we had a monster climb with a one in five gradient that stretched for almost 3 miles to start the day. Brent looked ashen faced at the prospect.
I peeled my shorts from the hanger over the window the next morning, wafting away the flies and contemplated 42 miles of pain.
Although we survived without incident, tragedy was never ever far away and as we began another tortuous climb out of Burnsall, heading for a distant Pateley Bridge the heat had reached its peak and Brent’s helmet was hot enough to fry eggs on it. A few miles short of the summit and Brent had his “Captain Oates moment”; rather dramatically, off he came from the bike and started to trudge into the distance.
He could easily have uttered those famously tragic words from the historic Scott of the Antarctic trip when right-hand man, Oates, sensing the futility of it all, simply upped and left the tent walking into the arctic wilderness to his death with the words “I am just going outside and may be some time”.
Clip-clop into the distance and up the hill marched Brent, bike dragged along, oblivious to cars whizzing by and with a sunny horizon in the distance perhaps having downed his last scone. Fortunately in the big man’s case, there’s always another tea shop.
Without doubt it had been a very long day and we were in need of some rest and recuperation and not, in Brent and Rick’s case, lodgings under a joiners shop. Located in a stable block in the centre of Ripon, they had drawn the short straw and an early morning call courtesy of the chain saw above was assured; no AA rosette for this one.
At this point I had begun to suffer from nappy rash and peeling off my ingrained shorts trying hard not to disturb the skin, I was grateful for the range of cures afforded by Brent and Rick, both seemingly regular sufferers. It was almost like having a mobile Boots across the courtyard.
The journey door to door was made somewhat hazardous by the patrolling guard dogs, Scooby Doo Snr. and Scooby Doo Jnr. Resting on the bed waiting for the creams to take effect I thought I was hallucinating as, with JB in the shower, Scooby Do Snr popped his drooling head in the door, causing me to almost foul my clean boxers. When JB came out of the bathroom he took one look and promptly locked himself back in; all for one, one for all?
Mercifully the rest of the trip was as flat as the map but as we mounted for the final 44 miles and a train in Bridlington our directional senses failed us adding almost 20 miles to the day. On the outskirts of Driffield we passed an elderly gent, almost a corpse on wheels, but when first he caught and then passed by Brent, the big man was heard to utter “that just about sums it up!”
We made it just in time for the heavens to open and a mad dash to the train station. Tired, sweaty and hungry the last thing any of us needed now was a ticket office employee clearly with a remit of hacking off all who came before him.
“Four tickets for the Leeds train please” said JB, cap perched sideways and a sun block mark going from ear to ear like an Apache brave.
“Ah!!! I see you’ve got four bikes” said the idiot in the glass cage. “We can only get two on the train… it is the rules y’know… and there’s eight bikes already in the station…I’ve counted them all” demonstrating educational standards in the UK were really on the up and that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary of State, was wrong all along.
“So what’s the problem?” asked JB, amazingly patient for a proven, volatile, little man.
“Well we can only get two on the train… it is the rules y’know…and I don’t want a fight between you all!”
“Well just sell us the tickets and we’ll sort it” soothed JB now beginning to tick.
“No can do” he tutted “if you don’t get on I can’t give you a refund… it is the rules y’know”
“So we have to wait till we get on in twos? What if that’s midnight?”
“Company policy… the rules….”
At which point Rick sensed that JB should be wearing a helmet for the first time on the trip as he prepared to launch himself head first through the plate glass.
“If there are so many bikes don’t you think there’s something wrong with your policy?” enquired HMRC’s finest, well used to the complex world of the public sector by now.
“Not my policy mate”
“So can we make a complaint?”
“All there on the leaflet”
We were tired, smelly and hungry and getting nowhere with the caged idiot so we simply got on the train ably assisted by the guard and driver who clearly had a refreshing approach to Company Policy by simply ignoring it, affording therefore, a much better notion of serving the customer.
We let both into their respective cubby holes with one to drive, hopefully, and the other to sleep, peacefully, costing Northern Rail four fares in the process.
It was all over until the next time and for all the foreign holidays there is no doubt in my mind that these were three of the best weeks of my life.
It was sport that had given all four of us over the years the desire, determination and sheer bloody-mindedness to conceive and carry out all three trips; that sport is indeed character forming can be in no doubt. I cannot imagine that we have cycled our last trip even if the “team” may need new recruits and maybe we will ride again soon?
17 – THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE
“It was like the ref had a brand new yellow card and wanted to see if
it worked.” Richard Rufus
Being an accountant, my old friend Rick is fond of order and procedures, insisting in his belief that the majority of people need rules, that many personal freedoms are overrated and rarely ever properly understood. I think he has a point and today’s society would be much better for a throwback to a few old-fashioned values of yester-year.
Maybe this view is one of a grumpy old man getting gingerly onto his high horse in his dotage? Manners, respect for another person, humility and a lot less greed to name but a few would be a good start. Sport also cannot function without rules and with rules you need an enforcer of those rules; the referee, the umpire, the match official.
Whilst it appears that you can base a world financial system on “soft touch” regulation, you cannot have a sporting contest without rules, whether administered by a nominated official or self-administered by a form of mutual consent, albeit far more effectively than the banks managed.
Even the Great Milk Crate Test Matches, whilst being unable to secure the services of Dickie Bird to umpire or even the far cheaper Harry Medley, to the relief of the bowlers, relied on honesty, mutual respect and, at least until Stevie Dunwell smashed the crate to pieces.
There was a belief that the game must go on whatever perceived injustices took place.
As if to prove the need for some form of regulation, I played several seasons for Barclays in the bizarrely named Leeds Law League, which was a generally lawless five-a-side soccer tournament run during the winter months. Games were played largely at South Leeds Sports Stadium, an outdoor arena with a number of AstroTurf courts.
There were a few matches staged at various outposts around Leeds masquerading as sports centres, places where you fully expected to return to your car and find it on fire and resting on bricks. If you really think Leeds is a such a cut above the rest then try a night at Belle Isle or Middleton sports centres.
I preferred the South Leeds venue, largely because there were no brick walls lining the courts, just mesh fences which you could reliably expect to be smashed against several times during a game but knowing you would bounce off and not simply slide down like a cartoon character, blood trickling from an already open wound.
Many nights it was like old fashioned tag-wrestling and some games were simply a mini version of the US film Rollerball minus the referee because, believe it or not, the league ran without referees on the basis that it was a competition for the professional community. Ostensibly, then self-regulation should be no problem. Anybody mention the banks again?
To assume, simply because the players may have shared the odd professional qualification, that violence would not be common place was a basic flaw of the Leeds Law League. Indeed perhaps the worst perpetrators of all were a psychopathic bunch of Indian solicitors who turned each and every game into a twenty minute war.
There was simply no way you could expect to play against these lads without being whacked up in the air or smashed into the side wall of the court. How they treated their clients if they did not pay up beggars belief. And if you chanced retribution then all hell broke loose; this was a good idea if you were winning though as there was little chance of a restart and the win was effectively in the bag.
Many other games were equally spicy but, as most footballers know, if you are expecting to cop one, then it is far easier playing against the aggressor rather than the totally inept. These are opponents who may not be outwardly malicious but are so useless that they are far more dangerous because they have no idea how or when they will make a tackle.
So it was that Calm Colin from Compliance, let out for a run around from behind his desk before going home, would generally run around like a threshing machine, so late into tackles that most times man and ball had long since departed and ending up self-impaled on the fencing. #
At least you knew what was coming against the Mumbai Monsters and I can only surmise that they were quick into the injury compensation market, creating a bit of new business most nights.
How different things may have been if we had had a referee of the charisma and presence of Fat Frank, who officiated so many Sunday morning games I played in, with his own unique brand of humour and threats of gangland violence.
Forsaking the Gorbals in Glasgow for the far tougher estates of inner city Bradford, Frank had clearly never taken a refereeing course nor had he any understanding of political correctness, but somehow he had blagged his way onto the referees’ list. Ruddy faced, portly, socks always around the ankles like Georgie Best, you could hear him wheezing well before his entrance to announce himself each Sunday morning in the dressings rooms.
“Fuck me you still playing ya wee useless fucking wanker?”
Yes Frank always had that feel good factor following him around and was a proper ray of Sunday morning sunshine. Fortunately not many people could really understand him as he tried to insult everybody in the team before then trying to lecture us all about indiscipline.
This was not his chosen word as I think he used the phrase “fucking aboot” before threatening anybody who stepped out of line with physical violence.
Frank preferred his own form of justice rather than issuing a booking or sending off and having to ruin his afternoon in the pub filling out caution forms; in defence he claimed was dyslexic albeit he could always recognise Carling from Carlsberg.
Behind all the bluster, he was actually quite a shy guy who loved the involvement on a Sunday morning, not least as it paid for his Sunday afternoons in the pub. Although he rarely seemed to need much more than a gentle top-up as he smelt like a distillery most Sunday mornings, this did not inhibit his actual control of most games, refereeing them inimitably from the centre circle.
If they had installed a rotating umpire’s chair this would have suited Frank down to the ground although the Warthog may have had a territorial issue. Most decisions, especially off-sides would be pure guesswork and protests from players were met with a rapid “dinna you swear at me young lad…now fuck off!”
The sensitive souls of the Premier League would have been fodder for Frank as would their legions of litigators.
Even if the weather was bad, if Frank was refereeing you always expected to play simply because no game meant no beer money for Frank; so even if a river had burst its banks or the Polar Ice Flows had taken residence, we would still be lining up.
One weekend there was a blanket postponement across the entire weekend but Frank still had us out there, even though he was looking whiter than the raging, swirling snow, desperate to get that twenty quid or so up to the safe and grateful till of the Seven Stars pub at Greengates.
It was like dancing on ice with Rab C Nesbitt as a judge and we all gave up soon after the start with Frank’s money now secured based on a “start” of some sorts and “expenses” for the walk down and back up the hill to the Stars.
Frank was also cunning as well, as referees had to have regular assessments in the new era of “standards” although, thankfully, these did not apply to our playing abilities. One Sunday, some young, wet-nosed kid, fresh from refereeing Under Nine football, came to assess how Frank was doing controlling a bunch of hung-over thugs freezing their balls off.
Perceiving this as a threat to his cash-flow and, therefore, beer flow, Frank could not allow himself to be struck off the list which was a bit naïve as we were always so short of referees you only got struck off when you died.
This particular morning Frank was worse than usual and rumour had it, knowing he was refereeing us under the gaze of the assessor, that he had done a “through” and simply rolled out of the pub and down the hill to the game. His voice was croaky, eyes bloodshot red and had he been breathalysed he would have incinerated the machine.
As the game started with the young assessor, aged 11, ready to judge from the sidelines, festooned with his FA Referees’ Association badges, some two minutes into the game there was a yelp and a cry and Frank went down as if being shot clutching his leg.
He even managed a couple of rolls sideways a la Premier League before taking the foetal position and clutching his brow, emitting rather dramatic moaning sounds. It looked as if we may have to shoot him on the spot as nobody fancied the kiss of life.
We all knew what he was up to but given that the only movement he had made to that point was blowing the whistle it seemed a bit premature. No matter as on ran the assessor, feverishly trying to remember what the FA procedures were with dealing with a drunken, fat referee who had so clearly taken a dive.
It was hysterical, the poor young lad was clueless, we were all resigned to an early shower and Frank was laying it on thicker than Thierry Henri. A stretcher party was arranged and several of us tried to grab bits of Frank without getting too close to the alcoholic fumes exiting almost every pore in his body.
We sat him on the sideline, resumed the game and as soon as the assessor and clear threat to Frank’s existence had gone, up he sprang and off to the pub he went ignoring the game totally.
Generally I had a good relationship with referees as indeed I try to do with cricket umpires. It is always a good idea to welcome them to the ground, pat them on the back and wish them well just in case you do get that marginal decision which could go either way.
Of course, they get it wrong as often as we players do with a bad shot or a crap pass but without them you do not have game and, on a serious note, the growing trend of abuse towards officials perpetrated by today’s generations are threatening sports.
On the whole, Leagues tend to be too soft in my opinion when officials are abused and I would support a “zero tolerance” approach here. We could and should learn a lot from rugby where the referee has total control and respect in direct contrast to football which often degenerates into wailing anarchy; worryingly cricket has lots of room for improvement.
Take football again, where the issuance of a yellow card is often pointless, having no like for like impact on the game relative to the offence. Why not adopt the sin bin approach of rugby where sides go a man down as punishment for cynical abuses of the game? A ten minute sin bin would be far more effective than a pointless yellow card; sadly, expecting a governing body as corrupt as FIFA to cleanup the game is a touch naïve.
I am proud to say that over some thirty years or so I only ever collected one booking playing football although I realise that, in Porkas’s view, this qualifies me as a girl; but to be honest that slur on my character still rankles today.
I remember it well from those dark days of the White Bear FC, where we were clearly so desperate that I was playing in central midfield and still thinking I was Ray Wilkins wearing the Chelsea No 4 shirt. I was playing alongside Pete Hammond, a gangly and quiet lad who, like me, could run forever which was just as well because most games we had no choice as we were always chasing the opposition who had the ball; it kept us fit at least.
That particular morning the referee had announced himself in our dressing rooms with an almost unending series of demands-a list of do’s and don’ts; it was almost as if we had never ever played before. You could tell he was on some power kick, probably a primary school teacher used to frightening kids to death and packed off by his wife with his whistle for the morning to stop him blowing it all over the house.
Tall, greying and looking as miserable as anybody possibly could, he stood there wagging his finger for an eternity and the game had not even begun. Where was Frank when you needed him?
The game was awful Sunday morning fare and he was forever blowing up stopping any chance of a flowing game although this actually suited us as we rarely ever flowed. And then he awarded a free kick to the opposition just inside their half.
Colin had just been on another rampaging and uncontrolled run and so was lost, temporarily making the return journey to his right-back berth, wheezing and puffing. I found the ball at my feet and was making no great effort to kick it back till we saw Colin somewhere on the horizon.
I flicked it up – as the Brazilians do – and then it was thigh, thigh, knee and then boom! Horrified, I watched as my intended ten yard chip back to their waiting defender flew over his head and off somewhere in the direction of Colin still some fifty yards in the distance; good job they had shut the gate that morning.
It was like one of those chip shots at golf where, having almost driven the green and with barely ten yards to the pin, somehow (well actually because you are crap at golf) you manage to fly the ball over the green, into the trees and end up taking eight instead of that par three you were dreaming of.
“Come ‘ere son” bellowed the Darth Vader lookalike we had been tolerating as a referee. “You’re in the book”
“What for ref?” I pleaded quickly realising that negotiating with Robert Mugabe may be easier than this humourless, power-crazed, half-wit.
“Time wasting…kicking the ball away…saw it with my own eyes” he muttered.
“That wasn’t time wasting ref I’m just shit!” I pleaded. “I just got giddy as that’s my record for keeping it up…did you not see that…three touches”.
“Yellow card!” he boomed “And be warned, no more”. This was a bit insulting as we were well into the second half and I had barely touched the ball anyway.
I had no choice but to accept my fate with my final hope that at the end of the game he would have mellowed and have a similar aversion as Frank to administrative duties, thereby ripping up the booking. Absolutely no chance and the miserable sod duly submitted the caution for which I received a £6 fine and a scar on my personality.
If only the referee had ever seen me trying one of those bullet like cushion passes to Winky that I mentioned earlier he would have realised there was no mischief as I was indeed, totally crap at football as indeed, Screwy Driver had concluded years ago. I had the last laugh though as I wrote a sarcastic piece which ended up in the Referees’ Magazine and ensured that he became forever known as Darth Vader.
Generally, cricket umpires do get far more respect out in the middle although, as I mentioned, standards are slipping and leagues seem slow to back the man in the white coat even if some should also carry a white stick.
Decisions are again a matter often for judgement and, over the years, we have all been victims of some howlers. As a junior coach I umpire games each week and, only until you do it, can you really understand how hard the job is. At the top level the guys umpiring test matches, making judgements on balls travelling at 90mph and under the microscope of numerous cameras, must have nerves of steel.
Sometimes though, a decision is so bad you just have to smile and get on with it. Of all the dozens I have seen, this was one of the best. Bodger Lee was batting against our old rivals, Jer “Gob” Lane and there was little love lost here; even I suspended my conviction that, if you nicked it, you should do the honourable thing in the spirit of the game and “walk” when playing against Gob Lane.
There was no question this day that Bodger had indeed nicked it as the ball flew off a thick edge to second slip and Bodger began to walk to the pavilion. And then he noticed the umpire had not moved and looked as if he was asleep. Suddenly, Bodger converted his march to the changing rooms into an arcing circle, walking back past several incredulous fielders, ready to face the next ball and a lot of flak.
Of course the purist would say that this was blatant cheating and with some justification even despite it being against Gob Lane. And yet where are the standard bearers at the very top level of sport? When was the last time you saw a batsman “walk” at cricket?
Some even stay awaiting a referral despite the DRS video evidence that will prove in a matter of seconds that they have indeed “nicked” it and are stood there clearly cheating.
As for football, personally, I no longer watch it as it is devoid of any honesty or morality, merely an ugly spectacle drowning in a sea of television money. If we are bringing kids up to understand the real ethos of sport then football has nothing to offer anymore.
18 – A VIEW FROM THE BACK OF THE CLASS
“Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you don’t need it: if you are sick you should not take it.” Henry Ford
Growing up, like most young lads, I was obsessed with playing sport and chasing girls in no particular order, but I never saw an obvious link to join the dots so to speak. Of course I could have joined a netball team but I may have been rumbled pretty soon.
Similar underhand tactics were employed by Hugh Grant’s character in the film About A Boy where the bachelor joins a single parent’s support group in pursuit of “romance”. Certainly the concept of a gym held no appeal to me whatsoever as a means of keeping fit or anything to do with chasing girls.
It seemed to me that these were all darkened, cold dungeons with clunking metal and populated by tattooed meat-heads and that I would have been better off in my dad’s garage with his old, rusty Bullworker, a contraption of expanding springs that defied you to try to pull them apart.
Of course, I did spend the odd night in there trying to breathe life into my puny chest, simultaneously risking losing my few chest hairs and having my nipples being surgically removed every time the thing snapped back across my chest.
However, with the end of my twenties looming it became clear to me that I could be seeing more of the phsyio’s table than the playing fields as certain bits of my body inevitably began to creak; so it was that I nervously entered the hitherto unknown world of the gym.
Plucking up the courage to go and sign up, all I can remember was a gorgeous leggy blonde on reception with magnetic eyes and a flirtatious approach guaranteed to get you to sign your life away so much so she could have sold me anything. And one look into the gym and it seemed to be a sea of lycra-clad women; had I died and gone to heaven?
This was Nirvana and it was all for around twenty quid a month.
The gym I joined and remain to this day was also a squash club at the time with a bar and a night club upstairs, known locally as The Last Chance Hotel. Allegedly, even after a gallon of Tetley’s at the local and smelling of curry and chips, if you did not score at the gym bar on a Friday night there was definitely something wrong with you.
My early years confidence did not need such an acid test though and so I rarely ventured there; you were never likely to be let down by the safer option of fish and chips and the long march home solo.
In the early days there was nothing like the range of classes or indeed, mind-boggling machinery we now have at our disposal these days, all seemingly aimed at inducing a heart attack inside an hour. Initially it was very intimidating with these complex machines offering untold agonies, competing with MTV blasting out threatening a perforated ear drum or two.
The treadmills remain to this day a real challenge positioned in front of the giant screen and the advent of pop videos bordering on soft porn has hardly helped the running stride; I bet Seb Coe would not have won his gold medal training in these conditions. It seemed only a matter of time before I fell off the thing tripping up over my tongue.
Gyms to me though are as much a social as a physical arena and the lure of the class session has always had more appeal than grunting in front of a mirror with something akin to my dad’s vest on, trying to look like the next Arnold Schwarzenegger.
So I sought out a few classes which had the added advantage of being packed out with girls; hell could this place get any better? One of the first I tried was an early version of Body Pump, which should definitely come with a warning specifically aimed at the over-confident male of the species along the lines “You Will Not Be Able to Move Tomorrow”.
The big mistake, in a class largely populated by women, is being duped by the modest weights stacked up at each station and assuming that you must choose at least twice that because you are not a girl. This is guaranteed to ensure that you will promptly collapse in a heap inside ten minutes with previously undiscovered muscles on fire and screaming in protest.
For days after my first class, my entire upper body and arms were on fire and I cried myself to sleep. It is not just the scale of the weights but the combination of the numbers of reps plus the mental pressure of having to keep in time to the music, a feat alien to mere mortals like me i.e. white guys.
Bouncing up when fifty other people are squatting down does tend to set you apart from the crowd especially when your lack of co-ordination is there for all to see via wall to wall mirrors.
It is always hugely pleasurable as a seasoned pumper, pardon the expression, to witness the latest muscle-bound newbie stride confidently into the class, take a condescending and dismissive look at the various piles of weights, stacked around stations mainly occupied by women and start to build a pile that suggests he is a professional weight lifter.
You know this means trouble and, in a matter of only a few minutes, the look of shock spreads slowly across his face mid-way through the first exercise. The realisation that being water boarded would have been more fun and certainly not have cost him £5 for the hour dawns ever so slowly.
Years before pump, I discovered Circuits which ran Mondays and Thursdays with probably the best trainer we ever had in a guy called Mal, who ran the class for around twelve years with a devoted following of near disciples; it was probably the beginnings of a cult.
Circuits, as it implies, is a set of varying exercises moving from station to station and working in pairs and so I chose my little, balding mate Winky, in an effort to make me look good. Once again, there were lots of girls in the class and fit ones too because Circuits was brutal; so choosing Winky as a running mate to make me look good was cynical to the end.
Most weeks the compensation of several attractive girls often softened the pain and offered a diversionary view or two whilst my body screamed in protest as the inner competitor was always trying to beat the previous week’s achievements.
This was not a pick up class though as any hopes of playing it cool and maybe landing a date were always nullified after an hour by looking like a sponge, snot dripping from your nose and with Winky trying hard as he could to make us making us look the only gays in the class. Married friends, although they often enjoy living vicariously through the trials and tribulations of we bachelors, do enjoy putting hurdles across our progress from time to time.
Mal’s class ran so smoothly that change was neither needed nor very well accepted; it was the only class where the male ratio approached fifty percent and, as is well known, we simply do not do change that well. Granted he would vary the exercise stations from time to time but the warm up was sacrosanct.
After a few years practice even the rivals for Worst Movers of All Time, me and Winky, could jig about well enough to get through the warm up without too much embarrassment, safe on the back row with all the other lads taking in the view.
What messed us all up though was when Mal went on holiday and we got as his temporary replacement, generally one of the instructors from another class, to throw us all out of our comfort zones. You saw the warning signs early as Barbie waltzed in resplendent in spray-on body suit, complete with head set, beaming bleached teeth and boobs so pumped up it was a wonder she was not attached to a basket in need of being tethered to the ground.
A quick blast of More Music to Get Your Sledgehammer to Volume 45 and off she went. “Come on guys… wooooooo! Is this great… woooooooo!! And one – two – three – four woooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!”
Soon it was a question of who wanted to stuff the microphone down Silicon Valley for a bit of peace and quiet.
Bodies often went everywhere but the right direction; there were so many different moves that we must have looked like maggots in a fishermen’s tin and, as far as the back row was concerned, it would have been fair to note “there ain’t no black there”.
When Mal came back he was treated like a returning hero and once again we slipped back into our favoured routines like a drunk finds his favourite bar stool.
Today there are a bewildering array of machines and more classes than the local adult college. My favourite, in a masochistic kind of way, is Spin which involves pedalling on a static bike, invariably to more music that would prompt you to smash a radio into smithereens if you had the energy. This is generally at the same time as your eyeballs begin to pop and you sweat like a prisoner of war; it is forty-five minutes of sheer hell.
Despite the popularity of gyms though and the expansion of some into global brands, added to our expensive stadia, high profile world class events and deluded notion that we are a sporting nation we are now officially the fattest people in Europe.
Depending on which set of statistics and definitions you believe, some one in four adults are now obese which is a dreadful state of affairs; surely nothing to do with no sport in schools? Additionally, some people go to gyms now as much for vanity as keeping fit and healthy and most spend as much time in the spray tan booth as on the running machine; true you are unlikely to trip up in there and break your jaw.
Perhaps equally as puzzling are the young girls who seem to come to the gym simply for somewhere different to chat; you can spot them a mile off, sat at a machine they have no idea what function it serves consequently barely moving, magazine spread out and an array of mobile devices that would shame Barack Obama.
The make up is impeccable and in no danger of being disturbed by sweat as none is likely to be generated; these types are a dream to the gym owner who welcomes them with open arms, safe in the knowledge they will not be wearing out the machinery. They will retain that gym direct debit for their entire lives as a badge of honour, probably oblivious to ever having signed one in the first place, as they make their way up the waiting list for the gastric band.
Young lads are just as bad, seeming to view the gym as a place to preen and pose; it seems to me that young lads go to the gym to look good for girls whereas old lags go to train and look at girls; life can be cruel for the elder statesmen.
Behind closed doors in the gym changing rooms, I can only vouch for the male rooms, these are a zoo. All sorts of preening and posing goes on and, as eccentric as I may get in later life, I daresay I will never revert to standing naked in front of a mirror with a hair-dryer caressing my bollocks. It’s just not the same at the gym any more!
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