There's no midfield in Middle Earth

Determined to put my down time to good use, I head to the local library tonight to check out the soccer section. Want to see if they have anything similar to my soon to be best-selling “Commandments of Travel Team Coaching” tome. It’s a strange place, the library, eerily quiet. It takes me a while to find the sports section because I’m afraid to ask any of the employees for directions in case they might try to get me to join their cult.

No sooner have I found the pitifully small soccer books section (lots of tomes about some clothes horse called Beckham but nothing at all about travel team!) than I hear my name being called. Oh the embarrassment. Caught with my hand on a bookshelf in the library by a soccer mom.

‘Hey coach, what a pleasant surprise,’ she says. For her maybe, not for me.

‘Oh, hello,’ I reply, pretending to be all comfortable.

‘Doing some research are you?’ she asks, rather rudely as she nods towards the soccer books behind me on the shelves.

‘Kind of, kind of,’ I say, my face turning redder and redder.

‘I’m here getting the Lord of the Rings trilogy for ____,’ she says, naming her son, a half-decent midfielder with a delightful nasty streak his parents will probably parent out of him before long.

‘Oh he’ll like those movies,’ I say, ‘lots of action in them.’

‘Not the movies, silly, the books,’ she continues, laughing as if I’ve just made some joke.

‘Oh yeah,’ I say, pretending I was kidding.

‘I’ve told him if he reads the entire trilogy by August 1^st, I’ll give him 50 dollars.’

I’m not sure why she is telling me this bizarre information or how she wants me to react so I just nod. Obviously, it’s difficult to resist the urge to ask why she doesn’t have the boy on an incentive scheme to improve his game over the next few weeks.

‘Anyway, must dash, have a good night,’ she says, bouncing towards the front desk in her Skechers Shape-Ups.

I walk away disillusioned. America is never going to amount to anything in soccer when parents are too obsessed with promoting reading over practicing soccer skills. It’s a sad day indeed when books are deemed more important than balls. What can Middle Earth possibly teach a promising young talent about patrolling midfield?