Biting off more than you can chew

Very depressing practice tonight. During a scrimmage, I watch one team defend a corner and am utterly appalled. As the ball comes into the box, not a single defender is doing anything to upset their direct opponent. Nobody is pulling a shirt, nudging a guy in the ribs or, even, my personal favorite, kneeing an unsuspecting striker in the back of the thigh. I blow my whistle and erupt.

‘What is this?’ I shout. ‘Some sort of wuss convention. Where is the foul play? Where are the dark arts I spent hours teaching you last season?’

They all look to the ground sheepishly, obviously ashamed at having forgotten some of the best coaching I’ve given them. I proceed to give a refresher course in the myriad ways defenders can torment offensive players at corners. I grab the biggest kid on the attacking team and offer a tutorial in just how to dish out sly punishment.

I start by elbowing him in the ribs. A little too hard judging by how winded he is. Then I demonstrate the simple shirt pull. I can sense they are hanging on my every word. It’s all coming back to them. After kneeing the kid in the back of the thigh so hard he goes down in a heap, I have to find a replacement for my latest trick.

Using this new foil, I coolly demonstrate the art of biting into the back of the opponent’s shirt collar while holding your hands out wide in the crucifix position for the ref’s benefit. They’ve never seen this method of stopping a run before and are very obviously impressed at the extent of my knowledge of the beautiful game. First kid to use it in a game will be an early candidate for my MVP.

Just say no to baseball and other drug paraphernalia

I can’t work this morning. How can any soccer fan work after what happened last night? I inhale three cups of canteen coffee with the consistency of tar and I decide to give ESPN a piece of my mind.

Dear Worldwide Leader In Deifying Steroid-users,

It’s not that long ago since you used to bump Champions’ League matches off the schedule so you could show a college basketball game on a Wednesday afternoon involving two teams of alleged students who couldn’t spell graduation if they were spotted the g and the r. However, in recent years you’ve tried to take soccer seriously by giving the commentaries an English accent and putting the insufferable Tommy Smyth in a cupboard somewhere in Bristol. Bravo on at least one of those counts.

Last night though was a throwback to the bad old days. The decision to show the first 20 minutes of America’s battle, sorry, meaningless friendly with Mexico on ESPNews rather than bump a Little League World Series baseball game from one of your real channels was beyond insulting. Firstly, you shouldn’t even be broadcasting a competition that routinely celebrates over-age players and starts innocent children on the road to what will be certain steroid use and enlarged head sizes later in their teens.

Secondly, ESPNews is not a real channel. It’s a stopping-off point, a truck-stop really, for insomniacs on their way up the channels towards VH1 Classic in the wee small hours of the morning.

Thirdly, it’s not a World Series if the rest of the world doesn’t know or care about a group of snotty-nosed kids who are so physically incapable that they play a sport that involves standing around for long spells sniffing a sweaty glove, wondering when they will be old enough to start using syringes. I mean, in baseball if you hit the ball once every three tries you are apparently headed to the pros. If you do that in soccer, you are headed to the bench. So please, in the future, stop celebrating mediocrity and stop promoting the drug culture at the expense of real games!

Yours in sport,

Travel Team Coach

Hell hath no fury like a cheerleader insulted

Space is at a premium at the high school fields tonight. Two sets of adolescent stormtroopers are prepping for their military careers by hitting each other with lacrosse sticks and being excessively macho. A couple of men’s baseball teams are waddling around the bases showcasing a selection of the finest duplex beer bellies in America. And some cheerleaders are jumping around noisily while their mothers sit in lawn chairs and spread gossip.

Despite the lack of room, our practice goes quite well. I make the kids run for 50 minutes non-stop without the ball and with only one brief government-mandated stop for hydration. This is the kind of heavy mileage 10 year old boys need in pre-season. Against my better judgment I then start a scrimmage. As usual, it’s the starters versus the scrubs. The problem is the scrubs’ goal leads onto where the cheerleaders are doing whatever cheerleaders actually do apart from shouting in unison.

The first time a ball goes flying into the cheerleaders, they say nothing. The second time, there are a few murmurs of complaint. The third time, however, the cheerleading leader (I mean I can’t call her a coach, can I?) decides to pick a fight with me.

‘Can you please stop your boys kicking the ball over here?’ she asks.

‘No, I can’t,’ I respond. ‘This is a sports field. You and your dancers don’t need to be out there.’

‘They are not dancers, they are cheerleaders, they are elite athletes!’ she shouts, already losing the plot.

‘Whatever you want to call them honey, they are taking up space on a sports field and whatever they are doing, it certainly ain’t sport.’ I use ‘ain’t’ for effect and it seems to work in annoying her.

‘How dare you?’ she says rather menacingly before storming away. A minute later, this unstable force and a dozen other women start to walk towards me. I’m so scared I can’t even figure out the collective noun for a group of cheerleader moms. A coven? A gaggle? A cackle?

‘Practice is over for tonight kids,’ I shout while walking rather briskly to my car. Some people call fleeing like this cowardly, I prefer to think of it as common sense.

The importance of saying the right thing

If it’s Monday morning, it must be time to get back to work on my coaching manuscript. Perhaps because I have such a wealth of knowledge to share about the sport, this thing is proving easy to write. Indeed, if people here in the office didn’t stop asking me to contribute to ‘urgent projects’ all the time, I swear I could have this book ready for the Christmas market. Anyway, today I decide to concentrate on helping newcomers to the sport understand the lexicon of the coaching game.

It’s important for new coaches to learn stock phrases that they can use during certain situations. For instance, at the end of any game that my team loses (a rare enough occurrence of course), I will go to shake hands with my rival and say through gritted teeth: ‘My boys just didn’t turn up to play today.’ It doesn’t matter if we were defeated heavily or squeezed out in a thriller, this throwaway remark works perfectly in any losing circumstances.

Firstly, it hurts the other coach, makes him think that your team had an off-day so the victory wasn’t exactly fully-earned. Secondly, it allows you to save face and not have to admit that your boys were beaten by a superior opponent. And if it adds an extra edge to your next meeting with that club, all the better. For some inexplicable reason, my teams tend to do better in contests of physical strength rather than skill.

Another alternative reaction to a loss is to walk up to the opposing coach and say: ‘You should buy a lottery ticket tonight buddy ’cause your luck is definitely in.’ Again, it’s the type of back-handed compliment that takes the wind right out of his sails, diminishes the achievement of his kids and sends him away thinking that perhaps his victory had more to do with good fortune than good play. Which is exactly what you want.

The church of the blessed iPad

Catch a lucky break on the way into church this morning. I spot a 10 year old kid with an iPad that he is using to watch the Community Shield between Manchester United and Manchester City. God bless his lazy parents for allowing him to bring it with him.

‘Let’s sit here honey,’ I say to wife who looks only slightly suspicious as I slide up next to the boy and his family.

She’s so busy looking pious and holy she doesn’t notice that I’ve settled into a spot that allows me a full view of the second half from Wembley Stadium.

I give the kid a discrete thumbs-up and in a very Christian move he even offers me one of his ear-plugs. I decline. Just seeing the rest of the game is a bonus enough for me and catching me listening to the broadcast might be a provocation too far for the wife.

It’s by far the best religious service I’ve ever attended. Rather than dragging on and on, the time flies. Okay, once or twice, I nearly mess up by failing to stand up and kneel down at the correct moments. For the most part though, I perfectly juggle faking interest in the activities on the altar with marveling at United’s comeback. At least until right at the end.

The priest is raising his trophy up on the altar just as Nani breaks clear to score the winner.

‘Yesssss!!’ I roar, jumping up and punching my fist in the air.

The whole church turns to stare and the priest makes his best biblical attempt to turn me to stone just as I turn to high-five iPad kid. Then his mom gets mad at him and my wife glares and glares and glares at us both. Small prices to pay for getting to watch a great match. Sometimes you have to take one for your team.

You give me fever

Tonight, wife asks me to go the library to get a movie we can both watch.

‘You know what I like, honey,’ she says, ‘something English, anything with Colin Firth in it.’

Those words are ringing in my ear as I head out the door. Thirty minutes later, we are sitting down for movie night, Chinese food on our laps.

‘You are going to love this,’ I assure her.

‘I’ve never heard of a Colin Firth movie called “Fever Pitch” before,’ she says.

‘Yeah,’ I respond, ‘he must have made it just after “Pride and Prejudice”.’ That answer, pulled from thin air, sounds convincing enough to assuage any fears she might have.

Within 20 minutes, however, she’s marching out of the room, stopping only to fling the DVD box at me.

‘It’s a soccer movie!’ she roars. ‘I can’t believe you got a soccer movie for our date night!’

‘It’s exactly what you asked me to get,’ I protest in a calm voice designed to make her even more mad. ‘An English movie starring Colin Firth.’ I hold up the box as evidence to bolster my argument.

‘You really are a child,’ she shouts. ‘A big baby.’

‘I did exactly as you asked,’ I say.

‘It’s a soccer movie!!’

‘No, it’s not, it’s a romantic love story with some thematic elements about soccer!’

She has no comeback to that so I decide to add fuel to the fire.

‘Your problem is you are just addicted to shows with men in frilly shirts and English accents. Why don’t you go and watch “Downtown Abbey” on PBS. You’ve DVRed enough of them.’

‘It’s “Downton Abbey” actually.’

‘Whatever it’s called, it’s downright boring!' I shout.

No response to that. Just some banging and clattering in the kitchen. I turn up the volume so I can watch the rest of the quietly excellent “Fever Pitch”.

Explaining the Cosmos

Nice end to the week. I sit in the conference room with the boss, nursing cappuccinos and watching New York Cosmos get trounced by Manchester United as my co-workers stare through the glass, jealous of my new proximity to power. Of course, it’s not all fun and games. The boss needs a crash course in the history of the sport.

‘Who are these two guys?’ he asks when Pele and Eric Cantona walk onto the field to hand Paul Scholes a Cosmos shirt.

‘Well, let’s start with the older man. That would be Pele. Some say he was the greatest ever to play the game.’

‘What’s he smiling so much about?’

‘Back in the seventies, he made a whole lot of money out of the Cosmos when he was way past his best as a player.’

‘And?’

‘And now that the club is reborn he’s going to make a whole lot more just by turning up to endorse the new Cosmos.’

‘But surely he knows a lot about the game if he was that good a player.’

‘Not sure about that. He told us Freddy Adu was going to be world-class and regularly offers the opinion, usually when talking to American media curiously enough, that the US is going to win a World Cup sometime soon.’

‘Who is Freddy Adu?’

‘That’s a story for another day.’

‘So what about the other guy, the smug smirk?’

‘That would be Eric Cantona, barstool philosopher, Frenchman, and now the Cosmos’ director of soccer.’

‘He must be experienced to get that job.’

‘Now that you mention it, his last job in the sport was managing the French beach soccer team.’

‘Beach soccer? That sounds like something you do on vacation.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Has he done other stuff?’

‘He played a bit back in the day, Kung Fu-kicked a mouthy fan once, pretended to like bad poetry a lot and came over all pseudo-intellectual by wearing his shirt collar up.’

Boss looks at me bemused while checking his own collar.

‘Oh and he’s done a bit of acting too.’

‘Wow, this guy will be huge in New York.’

‘You’d think so.’

Operation stake-out

I’m sitting in my car at the bottom of our street when wife taps on the window.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.

‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m in the middle of a stake-out.’ Sometimes it stuns me how slow she is on the uptake. Has this woman even seen the Emilio Estevez and Richard Dreyfuss movie?

‘And,’ she says, sighing, ‘who exactly is the subject of your stake-out?’

‘The kid I cut from my team, the one you told me might have cut my new soccer net.’ As if she wouldn’t know that.

‘I was only joking when I said that,’ she says.

‘Well, I’m not. This is very serious. I want that boy in jail for criminal damage.’

‘Firstly honey, I don’t think any court will put a nine or ten year old in prison for cutting a net.’

‘We’ll see about that. Or at least we might if you get away and stop blowing my cover.’

‘Do you mind me asking how you propose to prove he did this?’

‘I have my phone ready to record his confession,’ I say, stunned at her lack of awareness at how these things work. She’s living proof of the unfortunate side-effects of not watching enough TV.

‘And how will you get him to confess?’

‘I figure once he sees me he’ll be so scared that he’ll blurt it right out.’

‘Okay, honey,’ she says, pausing as if going to deliver some advice on how best to get a crook to cop a plea. No, just more negativity from her. ‘Please come home now. It’s almost eight o’clock. I doubt that the kid will be out and about much for the rest of the night.’

‘No way. I’m here until it’s dark and I’m going to be here every evening after work, apart from when I’m running a practice or am too tired. I’m not giving up. Remember, I only have to be lucky once. He has to be lucky all the time.’

She walks away and I check the passenger seat to make sure my binoculars have the covers off.

Hate the player development not the game

My enthusiasm for the new season has been tempered already. After just one practice. Nothing to do with the players complaining when I made them run 25 laps of the field as a warm-up before working on some box-to-box sprints for half an hour. It’s not even the Botoxed weatherman parent annoying me about worrisome cloud formations. No, it’s the president of the club. Up to his old tricks. He sent an email to all coaches this morning reminding us our first priorities are player development, character building and skills enhancement. Yup, it’s a regular losers’ manifesto where the word “winning” is notable for its absence.

Suitably appalled by this defeatism, I decide to put a new section in my coaching manuscript. It’ll be a translation guide at the back of the book, an appendix designed to help newcomers to the game understand the true meaning of buzz words and phrases. First on the litany is “player development”.

Player development is a word you will hear a lot in travel team soccer, mostly used by higher-ups to convey the impression that they don’t care about winning or trophies as long as the players are improving year on year. In reality player development is a phrase that is the last refuge of every bad coach, an excuse for not winning, and a way of placating dumb parents into thinking the coach is doing a good job. Essentially, player development is code for failing to win and learning to lose, two things you never want your kids exposed to. It is usually deployed by the type of coaches who like to give equal playing time to all squad members regardless of ability and who waste hours of practice time working on improving their players’ technical ability. Regularly used also to explain losing seasons. Sample: “We lost more games than we won but in terms of player development we learned a lot in this campaign.”

Decide this section of the book will be dedicated to El Presidente, the lover of losing.

Thunder road

The problem when you sign new players is you never know what kind of parents you are going to get. Before a ball is kicked at the first practice of the season tonight, I’m assailed by a father. Guy in a dapper suit, hair combed and pasted to within an inch of its life.

‘Hi there, I’m ____, my son is ____’ he says, sounding suspiciously like Troy McClure from The Simpsons.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ I respond, trying not to encourage any further conversation.

‘I hope you’ll be keeping an eye on the skies coach, there’s a threat of thunderstorms this evening.’

These parents and their weather obsession. It’s either too hot or too cold for their precious little darlings to practice. And the mere possibility of thunder and lightning has them quaking in their boots. Do they really think one of their kids will get fried out on the field by a bolt from Thor?

‘I hadn’t noticed’, I lie, turning my back so I’m no longer staring at the apocalyptic black cloud looming in the distance.

‘I’m a meteorologist, by the way,’ continues Guy Smiley, ‘you may have seen me on the TV news.’

Now he’s getting annoying.

‘That’s your job?’ I ask.

‘Yeah,’ he says, mistakenly getting the idea I’m impressed by this occupation.

‘Wow. I thought you guys were all toupee-wearing holograms onto which they project the same tired, old lines and fake personality implants every single day and night to save money.’

He laughs at this like I’m joking.

‘I’m actually a highly-trained professional,’ he says in the same tone he obviously uses when bantering with the newsroom blonde for the benefit of the cameras, ‘and I’ll be keeping an eye on the weather just for you.’

I walk over to where the kids are gathered, and, along the way, resolve that his son will never, ever start a game for this team.

Achtung Baby!

Even with my Teflon status at work, I still can’t wangle a trip to New York city today to gatecrash the Jurgen Klinsmann press conference at Niketown. Of course, I sit down to watch it at my computer this morning and just get more and more frustrated at the soccer journalists who are in that room. Why oh why don’t they ask him the hard questions? Here is a list of questions they should have but didn’t ask Herr Klinsmann on his first day in office.

1.      When you first saw the movie “Victory”, did you cheer for the Allies or the Germans in the soccer match in Paris?

2.      Would you be prepared to try to convert an American football player into a soccer goalkeeper as Michael Caine did so successfully with Sylvester Stallone in that movie?

3.      During your time at Tottenham Hotspur in England, you apparently drove a Volkswagen Beetle around London in a blatant FU to the British automobile industry. Will you continue to drive a German tank or will you now be prepared to do the right thing and drive a real car like a Chevy or a Cadillac?

4.      Will you be coaching the players in simulation given how good you were at diving in your heyday?

5.      Your bio claims you’ve been living in California for years. Have you ever visited the mainland United States before today?

6.      Will you be bringing the famous German sense of humor to this job with you?

That not a single reporter saw fit to ask even one of these sums up the problems facing the American media in the 21^st century.