day after penalties (2006)

Woke early.  Where..?

Oh yeah...

Oh no.  Oh, shit.  England were out.

I didn’t want to be there anymore but I didn’t know what to do.  I’d slept quickly and well so hadn’t heard my hosts return.  A snatched glance through the large clear window of their bedroom door revealed they were in, asleep, on a small futon.  I left early, just for a trip into slow rising Sunday morning town, an internet session - flight searches, email, breakfast.

Never anticipated feeling quite so choked, deflated and empty by defeat.  It had a greater impact on me than any other tournament exit because of my Semi Final ticket which would now never be.  It was personal.  Like anything you invest time and emotion in, anything which is deeply embroidered in your weekends and day-to-day life, football can powerfully dictate mood.  It matters.

I digested this and an over-priced but good buffet breakfast outside a classy Bochum bar, trying to enforce perspective.  My mobile bleeped and I knew it would be Esther, my host.  Her message was all in block capitals, inviting me back for breakfast.  Groaning at their hospitality and my own crapness, I replied that I had eaten and would go to an internet café before returning.

My emails home reflected my over dramatic misery and indecision.  I learnt that another online host I was due to stay with in Munich had bailed on me.   What to do?  I would have been delighted to snap my fingers and be home but there were, predictably enough, no cheap flights available.  Zero motivation for this whole trip now, I wanted somebody to take me by the collar and direct me.

After spending an hour with my kind Bochum hosts, this time accepting an orange juice and sympathy, I left for the final time.  They had suggested places I could go to with my Deutsche Bahn rail pass and I settled on the 12.57 to Nuremberg.  They also mentioned sailing a short distance away, but being isolated on a boat with them and the potential for ever heightened awkwardness didn’t appeal.  I thanked them, apologised for myself, asked them to enjoy the English tea which I had brought for them, and left.

Feeling comfortable with and around them could have developed in time, but it was time I wasn’t motivated enough to dedicate.

On the train I pondered the small differences in the deliberateness of everything, hence its perfect efficiency, which flows through everywhere: the difference of humour, speech, a basic style of interacting.  Everything from speech, conversation, penalties, good driving, popular slapstick comedy shows; it can appear almost unfeeling, robotic and charmless.

I was proud of our English fallacies: our nerves and awkwardness, our human weaknesses, our erratically channelled passion; that we find it hard to be so cold and clinical.  You could push this argument down dangerous corridors to extreme, totalitarian limits, but I think there’s a grain of truth in it somewhere.

In a way it was more infuriatingly alien than the far-east, because they’re so close, but yet..  It led to fatigue and exhaustion when you wanted subtlety, irony, or dry sarcasm.

I wondered too at the still prevailing suggestions of war guilt.  The inside of the Olympic Stadium is full of grey seats, apparently so as not to forget.  Does this sober need to remember and not become colourful stunt imagination on a wider scale?  Is this why they feel they must be so straight, so deliberate, why they mustn’t publicly, formally approach from leftfield?  Do they feel a need for permission to think wider, to be dangerously opinionated?

And is to do so misunderstood or disagreed with?  The fiercely contrasting 21st century look of the newly developed Potsdamer Platz area of Berlin with its dwarfing sky scrapers, I sensed was frowned upon by, or simply embarrassed many of the older generation.

The train journey south from Bochum to Nuremberg began to cheer me up and momentarily sieved my brain of football.  A glorious day in Bavaria: pylons, windmills, chimneys, straight lines, wires, lush greenness, quilted fields, sloping hills, forests and blippy darkness as the train spurted in and out of hillsides.  I selected rarely played classical music from my iPod – Beethoven and Bach – and gazed out of the window.

We stopped at small provincial stations once every half an hour.  A pretty girl stood on the opposite platform, doey eyed at a carriage or two further down from mine, missing him already.  I felt pretentious and cultured.

*

Eerie chills clashed with pounding heat as I overlooked Nuremberg’s Zeppelin field, Adolf’s podeum to my left.  A mass of uncared for, weed ridden concrete and uneven steps leading up to the podium, which visitors were free to enter - although signs warned that they do so at their own risk.  You can stand where he stood.  Parts of the concrete stand had been demolished at either end due to their unsafety, according to an information board: one of a couple of token embarrassed boards, which briefly outlined the significance of the monument.  The famed field it overlooked was even more anonymous, a large field apparently still used for concerts.



Seeing this monument, standing there 60-65 years afterwards - no great amount of time - was chilling, especially given its lack of attention or dress, its shameful unkempt nakedness.  It wasn’t demolished for the same reason that the seats in Berlin’s stadium were grey.  A short distance across the field, the brand new stadium which hosted World Cup games poked out: a naive child to a worn, bitter, convict grandfather.

Several hundred yards away was a large, serene lake.  I took to it on a pedal bound.  It ground itself in, the gravity of that concrete monument, that road behind it, those few large trees and everything they had witnessed.  Where else have so many been so thoroughly brainwashed by so few, into believing, into being willing to die for such principles?

I splashed out on a hotel room in Nuremberg.  Why should I always go for the cheapest hostel option? -  I went for a perfectly functional hotel room instead, the cheapest Expedia could find me in the station’s internet café.  An overhead television played the England team’s press conference from their Baden-Baden base, a teary David Beckham.  The words were all in German translation.  I still loved him.

I wandered round Nuremberg’s extremely pretty old town on my first evening, up the steep slopes and towards the castle on its cliffs: lofty vantage point views across the whole city, and further.  Dinner, increasingly ubiquitous local wurst with potatoes and sauerkraut, was taken outside a small bar.  A blonde waitress admitted to struggling with my accent.  None had in the north of the country and I couldn’t discern a difference in her accent to theirs.



There was a fine breed of people around there, as many latin looking tourists as locals, and I couldn’t help individually admiring most of them.  Very few are out of shape.  When you’re a child in the early summer months you might idly squat the odd fly or ant.  Then, suddenly, a nest has hatched under the patio and they’re everywhere.  Local, natural, immaculate blondes were equally everywhere, or so it seemed to me.  Was it wrong to imagine them in a nazi uniform being strict and demanding?  I wondered how mechanical and deliberate and German they’d be in bed.  None offered as much as a passing glance, unless I looked too long, paralysed - then their look was usually one of disgust.

I hadn’t had a conversation worth the name since my hosts in Bochum - and grew sick of the words bouncing exclusively within my own head, and off the pages of a notepad.  I wasn’t confident that anybody who was worth speaking to - ie. not English or American - would understand me, and nobody looked like wanting to speak to a lone man.

sport and stories

What is it that drives millions of people to spend substantial wads of free time on any number of sports which might also be considered “silly little games”?

That it can be reduced in such terms is part of the reason we love it.  For all its ability to devastate and demolish us, reduce us to tears, we do know somewhere in the dark recesses of our matter that it is merely a game.  Our lives, by and large, will not depend on the outcome of a match. 

Sport attracts the attention of so many with the promise of new stories and the chance to witness their creation.  However small or big.  Individual games provide definite immoveable frameworks which contain an uncomplicated linear momentum of action.  It’s familiar, but leaves much open.  Even if the story is terrible, heartbreaking, empty and desolate; or if the experience leaves you feeling sick, angry, ashamed or embarrassed: that’s still a vivid passionate story.  And one that can be used, retold, reminisced about, maybe even learnt from.

By enfranchising with a sport, you sign up to be part of a story.  There are no guarantees about what kind of story.

We enter into this gamble with games and competition, expecting to feel as much negative as we do positive.  Our craving for involvement in stories drives sport’s success.  From following the twists of a four day cricket test match and half heartedly flicking channels between football matches, to those which extend outside the immediate field of play: seeing a wronged player return to a former team, score a vital and characteristically gutsy goal, but still end up on the losing team.

Committed levels of ritual and routine propel people to attend live sporting events every weekend, or to play a sport itself.  Their commitment to a Saturday afternoon narrative is even better defined. 

You leave the house at a certain time, to go to a certain place to meet certain people and go for a drink afterwards.  The opening and closing frames are familiar, comfortable and known.  But that that small segment in the middle, the part you get nervous and excited about, the game itself – there, anything can happen.  Unpredictability is rife.  How exactly will the story pan out?  You might be fairly sure that Manchester United will comfortably beat Portsmouth, your much more coordinated colleague will beat you in a round of golf, or that by the end of the season your team will finish in nowhere midtable again.  It doesn’t stop you from watching and seeing how.  The subplots within each section of the game, personal tussles between players, rare moments of startling elegant beauty.

What keeps players turning up to play football for a quite woeful team week in, week out?  The hope of improvement, the desire to play, compete, keep fit, the desire to maybe sometimes win?  Equal incentives can be found in wanting to be part of it: a community and a group.  But also in a story and how it plays out.  The going on awaydays, the postmortems of incidents last week and several years ago, the reliving of stories - terrible referee, awful journey there, getting lost on the way back, disgusting food after the game, a penalty save; the opportunity to influence the outcome of the story.  Or being able to say that you were there and part of it.

=======

Much of this Sunday morning was spent completing Paul Auster’s remarkable new novel, ‘Invisible.’  It was the most gripping read I’ve had the pleasure of for some time.  Reading something so exquisitely paced and plotted, with such lightness of touch whilst being so nuanced AND assertive, it makes you wonder why you try writing at all.  What the point is.  You couldn’t dare hope to emulate an atom of this sort of quality.  Sebastian Faulks’s muscularity also does this, although it errs more obviously towards the showy at times. 

And yet it serves to inspire too.  To encourage you to try.  There are novels I’ve read which have invoked this feeling more than Auster’s latest, those which are more attuned to my own style and voice perhaps.  Examples escape me.  Nevertheless, there’s something there which inspires.

I could never do that. 

But… go on, just let me have a go.

David Beckham smashes in a goal of beauty from some considerable distance, the recognisable angle of his foot striking the ball up and over a wall, with pace, dip and bend.  The goalkeeper has no chance as it nestles into the net over his head.  Amazing.  You could never do that.

During the second half of yesterday's embarrassing, horrible slaughter of a football match, I saw a gap and broke towards the far right side of the penalty area with the ball at my feet.  A third consecutive touch took the ball within a few yards of the chalked line.  More by luck than any skill of appreciation, I caught up with the ball before my opposite number, edged it away with the outside of my right, and was clattered by a mistimed challenge from my left. 

A whistle.  No pain.  Realisation I’d won a free kick in a threatening position.

Go on, just let me have a go. 

I don’t usually take offensive free kicks of this kind.  In fact I can’t ever recall taking one in over ten years of playing.  But I’d decided that because I won this free kick, I was having it.  None of my team-mates tried to take it off me, my intention was clear.  I was having a go.

I fantasised briefly, attempting to visualise success in the way dreamers, or anyone with any sort of ambition does.  It could be another uncharacteristically sublime, but essentially pointless consolation goal against the same team I scored against earlier in the season.  A wall of four or five men lined up ten yards from me, partially obscuring my view of the goal.  I tried to rid the fantasy and not think too much about it: thinking too much is the folly of anyone who plays football.  Thinking ruins you. 

The whistle blew and I took my first of three steps towards the ball, then measured a right-footed swipe.  Despite arcing pleasingly over the wall – its conjoined heads turning in unison - and being on target, the pace and direction was manageable.  The goalkeeper carefully fielded it into his midriff.

Reading a book like Auster’s is a bit like getting fouled just outside the area.  Look!  Go on.  Try.  Still though, my words too seem like an ordinary looking strike into the goalkeeper’s midriff, quickly forgettable to anyone except the taker or scribe.

culpability strain

It was hard not to feel culpable yesterday, disappointing in a new way.  We’d been solid and organised for over an hour, my central defensive partner was a robust player I trusted, we’d both had decent games in an evenly contested match which remained goalless.  Then I extended my legs to chase an opposition striker.  Quad muscles stretched and moaned, snagged painfully.  It was the same weakness and set of muscles which forced me off several weeks ago, and which I believed I’d recovered from.  Shortly after I went to ground in a tackle, again overstretching the same set.  And so it incrementally became more painful to run flat out, rather than in one smash.  I could trot about with tolerable pain, but snapping into a sprint to keep with a nippy striker soon became a no-no. 

A cross was whipped in, my man dodged and left me, I physically couldn’t turn and run to get near him - whereas in the first half his small frame posed little threat.  He got on the end of the cross and scored.  A few minutes later a gangly athletic striker collected the ball on the left and went on a run, beat our full back, who I’d tried to arc in behind and cover, failed then found myself swearing in frustration and pain.  The striker outstripped me with ease and popped the ball in the near post.  Two nil.  Having only eleven players, I agreed to move myself to centre forward, where I loped around ineffectively.  For over an hour we’d been a far cry from the team who were so comprehensively demolished last week: compact, organised and able, we moved the ball around ok in the midfield, despite similar impotence up front.  It may sound arrogant to think I was that influential on the goals and the whole game’s outcome.  In this instance though, it seemed the obvious turning point.  The damage was done.

I left straightaway after the game, not even bothering to shower: grouchy and disappointed at the recurring injury and its impact, unlike the flat-out depression which immediately followed the week previous - but which soon turned to a nonchalant, Guinness-fuelled ambivalence.  Yesterday was different.  To be so solid and come quite close, and to feel so responsible after having a strong hour my best of the season.  Not to mention the new fitness doubts.  Could this be the beginning of an ongoing struggle?  Arse.

concessions

Today I spent an unpleasant afternoon at the centre of a football team defence which was comprehensively taken apart.  We lost heavily, with the main protagonist a graceful young black guy who, as well as being outrageously skillful for the level we were playing at, was also sporting and without an ounce of malice or ego.  Everything this guy touched turned to goals.  He sliced an attempted switch pass across the penalty area in the first half, me again a yard off his gazelle-like stride.  It looped over our goalkeeper’s head and into the goal.

It was a horrendous, ghastly, car crash of a performance to cap a crappy week.

In the clubhouse afterwards, watching the England match by virtue of our dodgy access to an Albanian sports channel, I chatted with a team-mate. 

He works at an airport loading and unloading aircraft.  Apropos of nothing, he regaled a story from this morning.  He has colleagues: superiors who aggravate him by being excessively stressed and picky about aspects of the job he feels aren’t worth getting that stressed about.  Yet he stil enjoys good working relationships with them, tolerates them, is professional. 

This morning, however, waiting to clock off with his immediate colleagues, he felt he was in relative safe company, and so he vented.  He said they were jobsworth wankers, only too late alerted to the fact that the obvious subject of his allegation was sitting just a few feet away.  And had heard.  This probably wouldn’t threaten his position, but it was deeply uncomfortable.

I listened, nodded, growing more aware of the parallels to my own week.  Precisely the same thing had happened, just within the nerdy Twitter domain which he probably wouldn’t empathise with, and which would make me appear a geeky prick.

Jobsworth wankers versus gonad crushingly annoying.  Which was worse?  But people do this.  It’s a natural symptom of having colleagues.  Over a career you’ll have some colleagues which will be harder to work with than others, but you will still work with them.  How well you handle it, and if you can restrain yourself from venting or ensure your annoyances aren’t transparent: that makes a difference in your progression. 

Keep your defence tight, make no concessions, go far?