The agony and the ecstasy

I now have trainers without holes! I have borrowed a pair from my grown-up live-at-home son, who by some miracle is the same size.

 

On the downside, my sciatica is playing up big time.

 

Will these two factors cancel each other out? Maybe?

 

I’m late for my latest session of walking football – everyone has decided at the same time that they love nothing more than being on the ring road for an hour  – so I have missed the warm-up and I’m straight into it, sciatica and all.

 

At first, I move quite gingerly, the pain moving up and down my left leg in waves, but soon I’m in the thick of the action and miraculously pain-free.

 

I make a goal, I score a goal (the ecstasy!), I stop a goal.

 

My tactic is to spend a short spell defending, then move up front for a longer period in search of goal glory. Then it’s back shoring up the defence again for a few minutes.

 

That way, it looks to my teammates that I am everywhere, while I can actually conserve energy. Clever, eh? But I am probably fooling no one.

 

It’s a cold, windy evening, there’s a storm brewing, but that matters not in walking football. The ball is supposed to be played along the deck, as they say. Certainly below head height anyway, although exactly whose head height isn’t clear. There is a guy called Craig who must be 6ft 5in and a couple of others probably not much over 5ft.

 

This rule is ‘clarified’ by player/ref/organiser Alan, who rules that the ball should not go any higher than the height of the goals (shoulder-height on me, about waist-height for Craig). But play the ball along the ground and you’re fine – that’s the takeaway here. Any transgression and it’s an indirect free kick to the other side. Indirect free kick sounds harmless enough – and it is exactly that. No one ever scores from one.

 

I chat to one of the guys after the game. “I’ve not played for years,” says Jez, who was in the other team and looks quite a bit younger than me – if I had to guess I’d say mid-40s.

 

“I’m 33 now,” he adds.

 

I’m stunned. I’ve just been playing football against someone 26 years my junior. No wonder his ‘walking’ was a bit more athletic than my ‘walking’.

 

“Do you get a kick out of walking rings around old blokes,” I think, but actually say: “Yes, it’s really tough when you haven’t played for a while.”

 

I mean there are 33-year-olds playing in the Premier League – but football is a young man’s game, whereas walking football should be left to those of us on the slippery Astroturf slope to Retired-ville. 

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