Training | 2009.11.14
The touchline timeline | Peter Preston
Just as in my childhood, winning or losing together remains a basic lesson on the great field of life
One thing in life does not change. Here I am, back on the school touchline again. Mums are holding bottles of water. Noisy dads are shouting "Push up, son" or, more crudely, "Get stuck in, blues". Bored sisters are chatting at the back. And, out on the pitch, 22 11-year-olds, some brawny and puffing, some titchy and nippy, are chasing a ball – and dreaming of miracles to come.
Nothing changing here? No: absolutely nothing. That\'s one of my grandsons in the centre of the defence, the lad with the clumping tackle and booming boot. Roll back three decades, and it could be his uncle, my second son: same flopping hair, same enthusiastic forward surge, same hoofed pass over the heads of the opposing back line. And that agile kid in goal, rushing out to punch a corner away, that could be my other son, clumping tackler\'s dad: same school, same team, same faces set in grim determination.
Go back three more decades, and the goalkeeper was me. Another school, but no real essentials altered. Still boys, still triumph or disaster, still mud and glory. Such things are much the same. Forget moon walks, digital highways, twin tower destruction, Karzai\'s non-election: the world of the touchline is frozen in time – and your heart bleeds a little as you sample it again.
The most vivid moment of my footballing boyhood involved quite another goalkeeper. His name, I think, was Proudman, the young keeper for Midland Woodworkers against Quorn Athletic. Proudman dived, as I might have done, amid a forest of swinging feet, and then lay very still. By the time the ambulance came, he was dead – and we clustered round as the doors shut behind him. It was another, more instant and somehow different sort of death, not like my father, taken away to struggle and die from polio in the middle of one night: not like the unknown body I\'d glimpsed on a trolley at Markfield Sanatorium when I got polio too.
Is Proudman forgotten? Not by me, whenever I walk the line or stand just behind a net, wondering whether I could have saved that last shot, wondering if I\'d have got the ball in that final melee. The dream, in a sense, is indivisible. Football on proper grounds, with stands and turnstiles and thousands cheering, is not the same. You watch, and perhaps you wish a little: but you can\'t identify with the entertainers out there, Drogba diving or Carragher hacking for the multitude. The real fields of dreams have no stands, no roaring crowds – just a few dozen kids, with dads and mums doing their stuff, prepared to get stuck in or suffer in silence, somehow showing they care. "Don\'t keep cringing when I shout at you, son, wake up and stop standing around."
It was, to be honest, the hardest part of being ill, and permanently crocked. I couldn\'t kick a ball any longer, or run. I couldn\'t play cricket with a duff arm. I was touchline Charlie wherever I went, never part of the squad. You could volunteer to score for the cricket team, learn to umpire at the local tennis club ... but play? That was another closed door. You had to live one slice of your life through others: it was the most oppressive loss.
Not all children, I know, feel like this. Clumping tackler\'s big brother grimaces at the mere prospect of team games, and goes away to make tree houses and hen coops. And earnest teachers – invoking the policies of two decades ago that saw school playing fields sold off to supermarkets and competitive games shunned because they involved losing as well as winning – will wince over even a trickle of testosterone. Some 72% of kids on the latest government research don\'t get a regular chance at teamwork, 81% will never play anything against another school. Yoga and juggling are much in individual vogue.
But the central pitch of existence still teaches many useful things. It shows you in a trice who\'s good and who never can be better than mediocre. At my old school, Richie Barker, who went on to manage Stoke City, was just instantly, obviously, in a different league. At my Spanish grandson\'s school in Barcelona, the 10-year-old who never loses the ball is already down on Barca\'s books. Does it hurt, though, to know early on that you\'re an also-ran, that you\'ll never have the X factor that brings riches and renown in train?
No, not really, because that isn\'t the true point whenever little lads trot out to show what they can do; because being part of something is a quite different feeling; because winning or losing together, whatever teacher says, is one of the basic lessons for those on the great field of life – and for those strung out, shouting, clapping, cheering, above all involved, along its eternal touchlines.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]all-education-childhood-school
