1.
I am not sure why, last winter, sat beside my dad in the Ninian Stand, I was thinking about the way the pitches I played on as a child used to flood.
Of course, they still do. Like clockwork. Worse each year. I vividly remember seeing them drown each Sunday morning, to my disappointment if it had meant my game had been called off, and to my fear if it had not.
A second later, as the seasons felt back then, I remembered the fields suddenly bone dry in summer. More recently, when I or anyone played football during the pandemic’s lockdowns, I would walk past my local pitch in the evenings when they were like this: dusty and still and warm and empty. I took my feet to the edge, so the ends of my trainers just nestled in the grass, and I leaned my torso over the rusted railings. I thought that the last time I had been there I may have been small enough not to notice the pole at all; I could have just walked under as if it were never there.
I am not convinced whether, at that particular moment, I could tell you that I was happy to be back seeing Cardiff sulk out another 0-0 live and in the unfortunately cold flesh.
I think I forgive myself for wanting to think of something besides the recent weariness of a bitter-tasting winter World Cup. Every drop of disillusionment from unintelligible discourses and every endless seriousness of the football world seemed almost inescapable outside this imagination.
To feel something else from Cardiff’s December cold, I remembered the way training sessions and match days would fulcrum the turning weeks, and I felt the sensations and clumps of memories attach themselves like gold summer grass onto an old jumper in everlasting summers of absent years. Of kickabouts and the lingering, swelling smell of summer in autumn, sun and snow, lightning, and local parks briefly submerging to lakes.
My life has had a chronic entanglement with football, and it has moved me more than most things have moved me in my life. So, for a moment in the long slog of a second half in Canton, I allowed myself to think of the ignorant bliss of innocence, of a time before the loss of faith in seeing the flaws in the world began its tormenting haunting.
2.
I feel I cannot remember the important things of my growing up. I hardly remember my grandad’s voice or my dad’s youth or the way my mum used to get me to sleep. But selfishly, I remember my tiny, outstretched foot meeting a ball high above my head to flick it down into a small goal, I remember specific sitters that took an age to arrive, and the relief that they went in.
Such small things. I still feel the relief. I remember my mum at the touchline every week, as a decade of mothering Sundays came and went, and she remained there at every game.
And I remember myself at 13 or 14, with her sitting with the same whole conviction of presence at the side of my hospital bed, and the look on my parents’ faces that somehow, very suddenly, the world had gone slightly wrong.
I remember my mum keeping a record of every time this unnamed illness got worse, from the date it started, every episode, every call, every worry, every thing I missed, in the hope of a diagnosis. In the hope that this pain had some name. ‘Very bad week.’ ‘Struggled for much of the week.’ ‘Said sorry for scaring dad.’
I remember the exact corner the car turned on the way back from a hospital appointment where I felt for the first time something had been ripped apart. That something had been scraped from the soil and suddenly grown into something solid and serious, like I was a problem that needed to be solved.
We eventually got a diagnosis, but I always wondered why she kept them, how long she pored over them, what she imagined for me the day she could stop tracking my regressions and instead when I was ‘good.’ I wondered if she ever missed the cold Sundays when she would stand like a lighthouse with thin hair to the wind watching me play. I wondered if she knew I missed seeing her there as much as I missed playing itself. We always agreed that getting ‘back’ to football was the priority. For the sanities of us both.
I remember writing a GCSE speech for English after I was finally diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, the first time I had thought about it properly. I sat on my bed and the words came and so did the tears, and so too did that unshackled feeling of it all coming loose. I realised I had slipped into the love of football and writing in what I later learned was the only way there was to love anything: without choice.
During this time, football was absent from my life; I didn’t have the health to play or the heart to watch, it had become an object that ‘I must get back to. I must get back to it. One day I’ll get back to it’. Until ‘it’ felt as far away as early childhood, and there was some important lesson or exam I had missed, stumbling into adolescence and adulthood without passing ‘go.’
There aren’t many ways children can make up for the guilt they feel for worrying their parents.
3.
I believe if I were to sit opposite that small, ten-year-old girl who lived for the weekends full of football, it would be all she talked about. Perhaps we would sit longing for each other’s perceived paradises, the future and the past, staring with mirrored and familiar intrigue and projecting our imaginations on the other.
But I don’t think I would have the heart to tell her how heavy some things are from here. Like reading the news; my eyes don’t go to the page in the newspaper my dad flings at me with all the predicted line-ups and what time Match of the Day is on anymore, but instead they wander to the latest club on the brink of bankruptcy or ‘doomscroll’ through the latest state takeover.
I couldn’t tell her that most things aren’t as vivid now, that the news of football’s spending sprees, relentless schedules, and fabricated media bust-ups never seem to me to feel as exciting.
I don’t think I could even warn her of the ill and stagnant years to come, or how, after I recovered, the lost fears would be there again, as if it had been useless to grow up at all. That nothing ever really goes, even after recovery, as someone close told me: “It’s not gone, darling. It still looms over you.” My young self’s shy fears of the world and how she fit in it are remembered as each summer I remember my freckles. And now, all the time, from those ill years to my discomfort and disillusionment at football’s off-field world, the very real fear I am betraying her.
But perhaps I could comfort her fear that reappears so often, the one where she lies awake not knowing what to do with herself, where to put her hands or words.
I would tell her the secret that no one knows anything. Not really. No one knows where to put their hands or how to live without guessing. I would whisper to her that all the men in suits in those press conferences really just want to go back to that summer they fell in love for the first time, with those gold specks of stardust on the jumpers-cum-goalposts before heading inside for a cold drink, haloed with sweat. Or the first time there was a tournament when they were old enough to go to the pub or to place stickers in temporary bibles. That all they want to do is get back to that feeling and not have to worry about what they have forgotten.
I would laugh and tell her quietly that I get the feeling we’re all just obsessed children who didn’t stay young for long enough to realise it and instead carry it all with us, attempting futilely to hide it. I would hope she would take that as me telling her to keep what’s on that side of paradise for as long as she could.
I would tell her, of course it’s not a man’s game. It’s a child’s.
