The Beautiful Game

Last week was extremely busy on all fronts. The evening activity on Tuesday was going to an old division four football league match in south west London; Wimbledon versus the mighty Macclesfield Town. Why on earth had I chosen this to be the first live match I had seen since I stopped playing football 10 years ago? Well it turns out a colleague at work is a director of the club, and so he invited me and a few other clients for the evening. It promised to be a great match because Wimbledon, who had been struggling since the start of the season, had recently taken five players on loan from various Premier league clubs and this was the first time that they would all play together in a home match (the new additions to the squad had already inspired two away victories in the previous fortnight). In actual fact it wasn’t the new players that attracted me, it was the old Wimbledon manager, Terry Brown. I actually played for Terry when he was the manager of Hayes in the Nationwide Conference – it was him who gave me my senior debut at national level as a 21 year old. When manager of Hayes he ran the club on a shoe string (my wage packet confirmed that), and he also adopted a rather basic style of biff and bang football which wasn’t really up my cultured “total football rules ok” street. Needless to say, when a player and manager don’t see eye to eye, it’s often the manager who comes out on top. So imagine my sheer disgust when I sat down in the director’s box and proceeded to watch his team play beautiful football throughout the 90 minutes. Their elegant passing and constant movement was punctuated with two wonderful goals giving them a much deserved home win against a side that were above them in the table. At the end of the game I sat in the players’ bar ruing the fact that I had been born too early – how life could have been different if division four football had been like that 15 years ago – I too could have been a real journeyman footballer. The other slight disappointment was that I didn’t get a chance to speak to Terry despite the fact that he normally comes into the bar after the game…that will have to be for next time, now that I’m a confirmed Wimbledon fan.