Passion

I’d spent the entire night out on the batter in the centre of Madrid, drinking a week’s worth of alcohol, smoking a lung’s worth of fags and consuming plenty more besides. Now it was nine o’clock in the morning and I was stood between the goalposts and balanced delicately between drunkenness and a hangover. As the two teams stretched and spat and hoofed the composite ball to each other, the smell of beery sweat spread across the dirt pitch. It was already 25 degrees in the slim shade of the crossbar and was going to get worse. But I didn’t care. It was my debut in Sunday League.

No big deal. I was just another lad who couldn’t play football in another random pub team. I was talentless, and the sheer excitement rendered me more useless still. It wasn’t the perfect pass, it was any pass. I was an amateur player, but not only would I be prepared to do this for free, I had actually paid 5,000 pesetas in subs for the season to throw myself around on broken glass and syringes. Yet I was like a kid with new shoes, because there is nothing like playing football.

When I was a kid, football was an obsession. It was a privilege to be picked for a side, even in the playground. The best Christmases or birthdays were the ones when I got a new ball. The best days at school were the ones where we went down to Carr Lane Rec and clattered down the narrow passageway of the changing rooms in our tiny boots and out onto the muddy pitches. In my head I was Ian Porterfield.

Two jerseys dropped on the floor was a challenge not to be ignored. Two trees a certain distance apart could only be goalposts. A white chalk line was the gateway into paradise. And as I got older I stood by those chalk lines come rain or shine and watched anybody and everybody. Local teams, pub teams, I didn’t care.

But I was never really interested in first division football, despite the fact that my own team (Sunderlandnil) occasionally played in the top flight. I’ve always preferred the lower leagues or non-league football. While exiled in the north-west I went to see Southport at Haig Avenue on a regular basis rather than travel to Liverpool or Manchester.

The problem I have even with lower league football and especially amateur football in the post-TV revolution version of the sport is the fact that whereas before the players copied the feints and dummies and tilting runs of their heroes – and even Lineker’s plaster cast – now they copy the falling over and the twisted, indignant face of the diva.

What next? Will Sunday League players start shoplifting and drink-driving and punching people like they do in the Premier League?

Football is not about cars and WAGS and yachts, it’s jerseys for posts and even beery sweat and the dressing-room banter. Cliché? No more than the antics of modern footballers. And certainly no more than going down like a sack of spuds in the box because some over-paid ponce does it every Saturday.