Oldplay

There hasn’t been a time during the past forty years or so when I’ve been able to state, hand on heart that my abiding, defining passion is football, as opposed to literature, drink or music. Hearing the Spiral Scratch EP by The Buzzcocks on my older cousin John’s DER music centre on my thirteenth birthday in August 1977 changed my musical tastes forever. As a lifelong atheist, the only profoundly spiritual experience I’ve ever had was hearing Teenage Fanclub, the greatest band in the history of the Universe, performing Everything Flows at Newcastle Riverside in 1991. Until I die, I’ll remember being a 15-year-old schoolboy gaping, transfixed in disbelief at the opening lines of Metamorphosis by Kafka. Any Philip Larkin poem, but preferably The Whitsun Weddings or The Old Fools creates an all-encompassing feeling of private euphoria that I have struggled, in two and a half decades of teaching English Literature, to adequately convey.

Yet if I’m honest with myself, none of those experiences outweigh the euphoria and glimpses of the perfect Universe that football has given me: my son Ben saving a penalty against Longbenton Juniors for Newcastle East End, Alu Bangura’s winning goal for Benfield in the Northern League Cup final in May 2007, David Kelly sealing promotion for Newcastle at Grimsby in May 1993. Best of all, playing as an emergency striker on account of a massive injury list, seeing the Hearts of Oak right full back trying to run the clock down by throwing the ball back to his keeper, remembering the poor touches the keeper displayed when fielding backpasses previously, anticipating the ball bouncing slightly higher than normal because of the hard pitch, feeling it hit the top of my right thigh and squirming free as the keeper fails to get it under control, taking a steadying touch with my right foot to take it away from him, then rolling it in to an empty net with my left instep from the angle of the six yard box, before running off behind the goal and punching the air with my left hand. February 3rd 2007: just going into injury time and my first goal in competitive 11-a-side football since June 2001 meant that we were now losing only 5-2. 

Saturday 17^th May was Cup Final day; on a glorious Saturday, a large and expectant crowd, bathed in warm sunshine, saw the favourites overcome nerves and the occasional setback before securing the trophy their sublime football deserved. To clarify, this game wasn’t played at Wembley but at Herrington Burn YMCA, the trophy in question wasn’t the FA Cup but the Billy Lorraine Cup and the victors in this Mill View Working Men’s Club North East Over 40s Fourth Division final were not Wenger’s Arsenal but my team Wallsend Winstons, who saw off Horden Tin Pot Veterans 4-1 to complete a league and cup double. Vince Williams the league secretary presented our captain Aidan with the cup; a great honour, up there with being presented with the league trophy by Alan Shearer live on Football Focus in early April, when the programme came from Wallsend Boys’ Club, whose colours we share and whose pitches we use.

By the time next season kicks off on August 16^th, I will have reached 50 years of age (Monday 11^th if you want to buy me a card) and though I’ll miss our opening game by being away on holiday, I have no intention of retiring just yet; why should I when one of my team mates, Rod, turns 65 in November? When I look back upon my life, I have to say that my 40s have been my favourite decade so far and completing 9 seasons with Wallsend (formerly Heaton) Winstons has been a great part of that, even if my career with them began inauspiciously on 20^th August 2005 with a 6-0 hiding (I’m a goalkeeper incidentally) in the insalubrious East End of Sunderland at the hands of the inappropriately named Welcome Inn. That morning (our games kick off at 10.30 on a Saturday), having been drafted in to play by a work colleague Hezza who played centre back, as our regular keeper was on his holidays, I was introduced to my team mates while we got ready by the side of the pitch as the changing rooms had been vandalised the night before. Fail to prepare; prepare to fail and our boys took a hell of a beating.

I wasn’t to know it then, as I gloomily reflected on a dire performance where 2 of the goals were my fault, 2 others similar defensive calamities and the final pair, a brace of outrageous refereeing blunders, from my seat in the Gallowgate while Newcastle played out a sterile 0-0 with West Ham, but I had seen my future for the next 8 seasons concertinaed and parcelled up in one morning’s sporting incompetence.  However, that was nothing new; there’s several of our lads, good mates like Rod, Bryan and Trevor, who have played for the team for upwards of 15 years who regarded finishing in the top half of the bottom division as a great moral victory.  This is why our 2013/2014 league record of P26 W23 D1 L2 F110 A30 and a 17 point league winning margin, not to mention the Billy Lorraine Cup, is so impossibly special and the best possible way to end my 40s. After 9 years in Division 4, I am fascinated to learn just what Division 3 has to offer us. In all those years, I’ve never played against Houghton Cricketers, Seaham Deneside, Shildon Grey Horse or Newton Aycliffe Cobblers Hall, so I’ve got to test myself against such redoubtable opposition.

The North East Over 40s League has 5 divisions containing, 72 clubs, with a constitution that allows for 80 clubs in total.  Currently, this means that, accounting for substitutes, management and the odd spectator, upwards of 1,000 blokes in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, in the case of 73 year old Freddy Wilkinson of Trimdon Vets, turn out every Saturday morning from August to May for the sake of prolonging our sporting dreams and expressing our love of the game, albeit in a way which is often ugly, crass and brutal, especially when one considers some of the more intransigent outfits from Wearside, which is unavoidable as the demographics of the league show it to be dominated by teams from County Durham and Sunderland in particular. The only recognition of our age is that games are 40 minutes each way and the 5 permitted substitutes, from 7 named, can roll on and roll off.

The most northerly team are Woodhorn Lane Veterans from Ashington in Northumberland, who are the only other team from our side of the Tyne we’ve faced in the season just ended (won 3-1 home and away), while the outfit from the furthest south are Richmond Town, from Yorkshire rather than Surrey thankfully, but still a 129 mile round trip for the Woodhorn lads. One of the rewards we have for promotion is the chance to play Richmond; let’s just hope it is a Saturday and not a midweek game.  On the flip side, we will have a local derby as Darsley Park, one of only 10 sides under the jurisdiction of the Northumberland FA, are in our division next year, giving us a chance to play on the immaculate bowling green at County FA headquarters that they share with Northern League D1 side West Allotment Celtic. It isn’t the same pitch of course, but it’s still an honour to play on such a surface, especially when you save a last minute penalty in a cup tie to help your side win 2-1 as I did.

On the flip side, we are often forced to travel to remote and desolate former Durham pit villages and use the facilities of semi derelict Miners’ Welfare pitches, such as Thornley or Bobby Robson’s home ground at Langley Park, many without running water or electricity, often for reasons of vandalism, where the pitches are scoured by the tyre tracks of trails bikes or scarred by the remnants of fires. Wrecked, torched car bodies abandoned on muddy tracks in West Durham are an all too familiar reminder that the sons and grandsons of players in our league have found themselves so dissociated from society and sport that the league will continue to be played by older and older men as the youngsters take no interest in the chance to find oneself in organised team games. It’s impossibly sad to see pitches and pubs that were once the hub of communities fall into disrepair; neglected and forgotten, soon they’ll fall into disuse.

Then again, places like Marley Potts in Sunderland, nicknamed Fallujah or the adjacent King George V Playing Fields, known uniformly as Dogshit Park, won’t be missed if a tactical nuclear weapon obliterates them. However, they do have the benefit of being familiar locations; in the dream time before sat navs, the Winstons’ Saturday morning caravan, all radios tuned to Brian Matthews’ Sounds of the Sixties on Radio 2, set off from Newcastle for many points south west with only a vague idea of where we were going. A 7-0 loss to Premier Division Darlington Croft in the Villa Real Cup saw the convoy of cars become hopelessly detached and eventually lost, with vehicles serendipitously meeting up at the correct location after endless detours through villages athwart the A68. Even worse, a trip to West Cornforth saw us risk prosecution under child protection laws as 16 of us, already late for kick off, went charging into the changing rooms somewhere near the correct location, only to be told this was the South West Durham Boys’ Brigade Under 11s championship.  By the team we got to West Cornforth, the referee was practising his golf swing in the centre circle and the opposition were lounging around on the grass, playing keepy-ups. Somehow we sheepishly beat them 2-0, when our late arrival had allowed them to claim the game, if they’d so desired. A foggy morning away in Stanley saw us draw 1-1 with Beamish Ball Alley when I couldn’t even see the edge of the penalty area, but it was almost Christmas and both teams were keen to play. The post-match food saw us given meat pies and in one of them, our midfielder Adrian detected an aorta.

Great memories of ridiculous times off the pitch that I’ll remember forever, as our mediocrity on it held less and less to recommend it. Then, last summer, a seismic shift occured; simply by changing our name from Heaton Winstons to Wallsend Winstons, to reflect our change of home pitch from Paddy Freeman’s Park in High Heaton to Bigges Main in Wallsend, we gained some really top quality players. Chris , aged 40 and 2 months, still playing for Wallsend Labour Club on a Sunday morning, arrived to score 46 goals, while never being on the losing side. Mickey, the Yaya Toure of our division and top quality local non-league player, who won Man of the Match in every game he played. Tom, a striker I used to pay money to watch at Benfield and Percy Main in the Northern Alliance, arrived and also scored 46 goals, including a chipped finish in the Billy Lorraine Final that deserved to win the World Cup. Most crucially of all; Hallsy, a proper goalkeeper with 20 years’ experience of the Northern Alliance, who I watched play with such distinction at Percy Main. I was honoured to spend two thirds of the season on the sidelines watching him showing how it should be done. Best of all, whenever we got 3-0 up, he’d signal to come off so I could get some time on the pitch. Coming on for the last 15 minutes of the cup final after Tom’s wonder goal, with the shattered opposition staring bleakly at the ground as the realisation of inevitable defeat struck home, was definitely the most emotional I’ve felt on a football field. 

The French Algerian novelist Albert Camus is credited with the quotation; all that I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football. I’d often thought it a trite and clichéd expression, but reflecting on the 9 years I’ve spent with Winstons, I have to agree with the sentiments, especially as Camus was a keeper himself, but probably not a shit one like me…