Team sports for duffers

Do you like team-sports? Do you do team-sports?  Whether you like or not, do or not, there's a lot of it about. Irish radio on Saturday and Sunday is wall-to-wall reportage of sporting events. Watching, listening to sport is okay, can be exciting, but my final assessment is the same as Dr Johnson's on the Giant's Causeway - "worth seeing but not worth going to see". On the rare occasion I find myself in The Pub watching The Game and folk ask me "Do you play {rugger | cricket | squash | soccer | tennis | hockey}?" My Jesuitical response is "I have played whatever". Because sport was an integral part of my very expensive education; not to mention bezique, contract bridge, canasta and chess.

I was reminded of this because of a thread on Metafilter about teams-sports and Calvin and Hobbes [prev] which had the effect of opening the floodgates of emotional response from the unsporty minority. Sports have become so entirely normative that you are regarded as a special sort of peculiar if you don't buy into it. If you're a boy who 'throws like a girl' or suffers from asthma or is too tubby to run or just plain prefers reading, then life can become a special sort of hell in school. At my expensive school as part of a mens sana in corpore sano policy, we were requested and required to carry out a minimum of three "changed exercises" every week. That meant getting into shorts and having a shower afterwards. For what happened in between there was a fair degree of latitude: you could go for a run, or swim, or play squash, or sign up for a seasonally appropriate team game. Despite the asthma, I'd often go for a run because that meant I could trot out of the school gates with a book of poetry tucked into my waistband and go and find a park bench in a remote part of town.

Then suddenly, in my last year in school, I was made responsible for fielding a team of people to play soccer once or twice a week through the soccer season. Everyone who was sport competent would be doing that and winning medals but that left a substantial minority of misfits who needed to get out for some exercise several times a week. It became my task to round up 11 of these duffers to have rings run round us by fitter, faster and more engaged people from other parts of the school. I decided that the only way to play it was with a mixture of passive aggression and irony to satirise the whole idea of team sports. I don't have much in the archives from those distant days, but I have kept an envelope full of the notices I posted to announce the next fixture and the names of the squad. Names redacted to protect the then-innocent - these chaps are probably captains of industry or ambassadors now.

Nature Lover's League.

Another country ramble today, that is Tuesday 8th of Feb on Birley's 5 They want you to wear a striped shirt this week, so think of it as fancy dress. There will also be some lads from Marlowe there, they will be wearing blue shirts. This time we are trying to find Bellis perennis, but as it is not in fkower it should be quite a test. Also Agropyron repens which is more easily found on soccer pitches at this time of year. If you get bored there will be a leather bladder to kick at each other. But try to concentrate on the beauty of the natural ecosystem that is at its best in Winter. We'd be grateful if the following would appear . . .
Also a prize for the first lad who spots a rabbit. RA RA

Your Captain

Football Vendor's Association

Dear Prospective Buyer,

We of the Football Vendor's Association are offering you, the man in the cloister, a unique opportunity to purchase one of our luxurious velveteen footballs. We offer a variety of sumptuous models to choose from: The Classic - covered in silky soft Skivertex, longer lasting and more durable than real leather; or The Bladder - a hard-wearing cheap football covered in absolutely (money back guarantee) waterproof plastic; and many other superb models in a variety of colours and covering a wide price-range.

And we offer you, absolutely free, an opportunity to see one of our footballs in action. You may even try a tentative kick or two yourself. This unique opportunity to see how good our footballs are will take place on Birley's 5 at 2.30 of Wednesday the 23rd of February.

Perhaps the following would give it a try . . . Please wear blues.

Your Captain

Bulgarian Liberation Front

Brothers of the red poppy! Support our cause. Liberate Bulgaria of the Golden Horde. Fight for Freedom. There will be a rally at Luxmoore on Wednesday the 9th February and our leaders will speak to us about our cause, outlining the atrocities which the self-style Genghiz Khan and his fiends have committed in our fair country. We will be joined by our comrades from Luxmoore who, to demonstrate their friendship with other branches of the Order of the Red Poppy, have offered to play a game of football with us. To avoid confusion comrades we will wear striped shirts. The rally begins at 2.30. Invitations are especially extended to . . .

Unity is Entity

Your Captain

Here's the league table just before the last match; my boys second from the bottom:

	P	W	D	L	F	A	Pts
Luxmoore I	9	8	1	0	97	2	17
Grange	9	6	2	1	44	9	14
Marlowe I	9	5	2	2	19	10	12
Walpole	9	5	0	4	37	12	10
Linacre	9	4	0	5	27	27	8
Galpins	9	4	0	5	14	52	8
Meister O	9	3	1	5	28	22	7
Luxmoore II	8	3	0	5	20	38	6
School Ho	9	2	0	7	19	50	4
Marlowe II	8	0	0	8	1	84	0

Clearly my attempts to rally the boys with cynicism and irony wasn't a winning strategy. Would I have done it differently? Not at all. It's also a bit mind-bending how many goals are being scored. If I hadn't been there I'd believe they are recording rugger or basketball results.  The first notice above has Won 8-0 Ra Ra Ra scrawled across it in big letters. Note also that, as goal-keeper, I let an average of 8 balls a game through me legs or past my out-stretched toes as I dived the wrong way. I don't remember any of us acting or feeling the least bit demoralised from another trouncing, so maybe the strategy was ultimately good for self-esteem in a world stacked against us.