A Tribute to Sunday League Football - Leeds City Magazine (November 2015)
After cutting my footballing teeth on my school’s modest tarmac playground at lunchtimes, I joined Kirkstall Crusaders when I was in Year Five. Sadly my introduction to competitive action was not a smooth one. On the back of Euro 96 and scoring a good goal one evening in my back garden, I had already decided that I was going to be a professional footballer and would therefore glide effortlessly into the first team and become a prolific striker. I was unperturbed by the fact that I had an ungainly running style and was pretty rubbish.
Preparation before my debut training session was flawed as I’d been to a sleepover (the pinnacle of a ten year old’s social life) at my friend’s house the night before. With peer pressure beginning to rear its ugly head, it was highly frowned upon if you didn’t stay awake until sunrise and I was exhausted. On top of this, a friend had drawn a penis on my forehead in marker pen which I hadn’t managed to fully scrub off. This was unlikely to endear me to my new teammates and coaches although I doubt first impressions of my friend were great either; he smelt awful having had to spend time locked in a cupboard with a full bin on his head during a punishing game of truth or dare.
My foul-smelling friend redeemed himself by being a good player and immediately caught the manager’s eye. I, on the other hand, did not and quickly found myself with the ‘have nots’, a mismatch of ages, sexes and generally not very good players, who were cast to playing at the top of a hill on some uncut grass under the guidance of someone’s older brother who had an ear stud. I remained there for months.
The manager came up the hill to watch us for a few minutes every training session, making notes and occasionally calling players up to the first team. I resented these players. You had to be exceptionally lucky to time your moment of magic accordingly, a task made more difficult by the older brother / coach playing at full tilt and never passing the ball, often for the entirety of the manager’s scouting mission. It was difficult and I always found myself feeling nervous and making bad decisions, things which I would become increasingly familiar with in later life.
Eventually I got the nod and by the following season, I was called into the squad as second choice right back, a role I would hold down for the next five seasons. As with any kind of football, there were plenty of ups and downs over this period. Scoring my first goal was pure unadulterated joy but within literally seconds, our centre back and I sandwiched and clumsily bundled over their striker for a penalty and we went on to lose.
Life as a squad player could be tough with a particularly low ebb coming when the manager chose to toss a coin to decide who should start a key game between me and my friend who, incidentally, was the other part of the sandwich. He chose tails and won, so I had to be the linesman.
As a substitute, you often had to face the indignity of running the line, a task I exclusively seemed to get given when we were playing the toughest teams in Leeds. Getting abuse hurled at you for wrong offside calls was never a fun way to spend your Sunday mornings. Even less-so against teams whose alleged twelve year olds had beards and tattoos suggesting a particularly lax / fraudulent ID card policy.
On one occasion, it almost got too much and our recently-dropped striker and I came up with a bizarre ultimatum; if both of us didn’t get back into the starting line-up, we were going to join the Leeds Lizards, a weekend climbing group at Leeds Wall. Quite why we had chosen this I don’t know. What would it have proved? I haven’t been to Leeds Wall since, so I guess we must have forced our way back into the manager’s plans.
Midway through my Kirkstall Crusaders career, we were joined by a new coach, a portly, peculiar but jovial Irishman who wore a faded baseball cap that was far too small for his large head. He had some unconventional coaching methods and if you didn’t understand or were caught mucking around, he would shout, ‘OH, SIT DOYN NOY!” in a thick accent which made it difficult not to chuckle.
If you were caught laughing, you too had to sit down, which ruined your morning and put your place in Sunday’s squad in jeopardy. He was also prone to chucking in catchphrases and sayings that were often lost on our young ears: “OH, if you swing on those goalposts, it will be Goodnight Vienna!”
For all his idiosyncrasies, he was a good guy and it was under his stewardship that we had our most successful spell, although this was in-part aided by fielding a number of ineligible players, often at my expense. As I mentioned last week, I’m fairly sure that identity fraud was rife in the Sunday leagues at the time so it didn’t feel too untoward, although this was Lance Armstrong’s reasoning wasn’t it?
It was with a heavy heart (and a growing fondness for drinking cheap cider in parks) that I left Kirkstall, aged fifteen. I departed with many fond memories, three goals to my name (one a penalty in a friendly) and a ‘team member’ award for each of my seasons there, to proudly put on my mantelpiece. I was admittedly disappointed at never picking up any of the more prestigious awards, I’d thought I was a shoe-in for ‘Most improved player’ one year.
After a season out, I returned to football in Year Eleven, joining Lawnswood YMCA. My weekend’s had freed up after splitting up with my first proper girlfriend.
I tried to reinvent myself as a central midfielder and was fortuitously given an opportunity after my friend, one of the best players, received an eight match ban for swearing at an antagonistic opposition manager who had been hurling abuse at him all game. That this was a footballing injustice to rank alongside Lampard’s disallowed goal against Germany didn’t bother me; I was in the starting eleven. For eight games anyway.
Again, our manager was a bit of a character, offering some strange ideas. Before games, he would ask our left winger, and only ever him, to carry out a ball test, which consisted of him dropping footballs on the floor from a set height. No-one was ever sure what this test was hypothesising.
A vivid memory from the season was a match against Pateley Bridge. I, alongside the rest of our midfield and our right-back, had been camping in Otley the night before and had come straight from the tents to the pitch. I hadn’t slept, was covered in woodchip and was still inebriated. You wouldn’t have thought this was the best pre-match routine but for some reason, Pateley Bridge had a squad of eight players and I managed to score my first goal for the team. (That it came as a result of an inexcusable goalkeeping error is by the by.)
Delighted, we cruised into an eight nil lead only for one of their players to, selfishly, break his arm, leaving them with seven players and the referee with no choice but to cancel the game, which in turn chalked off my goal. Gutted.
It was an excellent season though and we won the league title which was a fitting end to my Sunday league career.
Until recently.
A friend of mine runs a kid’s football club and last season I agreed to manage the under elevens. On the first game of the season, there had clearly been some confusion in my selection policy as about twenty kids had turned up for a nine-aside game. This included a couple of players who were definitely too old and one eight year old. I had forgotten to sort out a referee and the goalposts I’d got were too small, leaving the opposition manager, quite rightly, unhappy. As many of the players’ ID cards still processing, some of our starting line-up had to pretend to be other people. I had to ask the subs to run the line. We lost eight nil.
With the large volume of players at the club, in training, I soon had to divide the group into the first team squad and the rest. With coaching resources limited, one of the kids’ older brother’s had to take charge of the rest.
Any of this sound familiar?
Original article here: http://leedsstudentmagazine.co.uk/my-sunday-league-football-experience-part-2/
