LOCKER ROOM:Watching junior footballers in action on a bracing day in Breffni Park inspires memories of the way it used to be
TWO WEEKS back, we were sitting in the press box in Breffni Park. When we were young we used laugh at how the oul fellas would arrive into the press box on days like these. They’d come bursting in like breathless arctic explorers finding the sanctuary of a weather station. They’d explain how they’d got there and where the ice was. We’d nudge each other and roll our eyes.
Anyway we are young and not like them at all and it feels natural that Heaney of the North should explain to us that he is wearing under armour today and frankly he likes it. Heaney is enviably frank in these matters. We feel foolish for not wearing under armour too.
On the pitch there is one of those chilblained junior football games unfolding point by bitter bloody point, foul by undetected foul. Full forwards who have been thrown in just to see what will happen. Corner forwards, as Sweeney to the left of me notes with some bitterness, who are just fodder for the subs bench.
The pitch is icy. Great clouds of foggy breath belch out of the tackles. You can feel the weight of the hard ball on your cold foot with each kick. We’re not oul fellas, well not Heaney and Sweeney my rhyming corner forwards, but in this weather we are entitled to warm ourselves with reminiscence. We get into it like Python’s Four Yorkshiremen.
Stomping around the goalmouth at the start of a game? Trying to get some circulation into the foot and to break up the iced hardness of the mud which the fat full back is going to plant you in first time he gets the chance. You can tell by the way he shook your hand for about three seconds too long and with about three tons too much pressure that he has a spot picked out for you. Oh God. Remember.
The fear. Is it better for your hands to be completely numb before you make the first block so you get that needling recognition of trauma. Or should you still have some feeling there? Be able to turn the slap into an illusion of warmth. Worst is a cold, wet windy day when all the little bits of grit and mud off the ball transfer themselves into the skin on the palm of your hand along with the pain. We are talking about hands and the pain of them but my personal horror was always the block which missed the hands for some reason and inflicted violent trauma on the underside of the wrists of a cold day.
We are talking about hands in the plural but in effect we mean hand. Singular. All junior players nowadays arrive with two sets of gloves which have been warmed and ironed and pressed, pieces of handwear which are so large and so luminous that you could use them to guide an aeroplane into landing on a dark runway if necessary. Back in the day all gloves were balled tight and remained wet and frozen between winter games. They were orange in theory but mud-coloured in general, with snail traces of snot for a glittery effect. The rule was that unless you wanted to wear a jersey with the words Big Girls’ Blouse printed across the chest you only wore one glove.
You had very little choice in this. The first hawk in the dressingroom to spot that you had an intact pair of gloves was entitled to shout the words “gis your glove” and expect to be given it. This was like making a land claim in the Klondyke. (How did the pioneers of the under armour gain the moral courage to come out to their peers?)
For the next hour the borrower would sweat in your glove and wipe his bits with your gloves and blow his voluminous snots into your glove, chew the spare bit at the top of the index finger of your glove. You could never focus on the game from worrying about what he was doing to your glove. Charlie Redmond always liked to lick the fingers of his glove twice before taking a free kick. You couldn’t give a fella like that a glove. Yet there was choice.
After a while you would take to switching the glove you had been left with from hand to hand, wearing it with the thumb redundant half the time hoping nobody would notice. You’d put your cold, ungloved hand under your armpit and look concerned as if feeling for a tumour. Steal some warmth – before the blackcoat from the club who had come to stand behind the goals and abuse you noticed that you had ceased to move.
Sometimes the glove borrower would be substituted and instead of returning your glove like a gentleman you would see him hurling the glove in front of himself as he departed, there it would lie trampled by wing forwards and linesman and fat mentors until you picked it up after the final whistle surveying it tenderly, shaking your head at its grotesquely frozen form, it’s besnotted fingers desperately grasping the air. Never again.
The one-handed approach was very much in vogue when I played junior, and that may have influenced the trade in glove trafficking. The rule was that an opposing player could disembowel you or shuck you with an oyster knife so long as he held his other hand in the air and shouted “one hand ref, one hand” while he was eviscerating you. Provided he used just one hand he was entitled to continue until you had been stuffed and mounted.
These things were a legal and rich part of the game. You pass into old age regretting that a cold wet ball will never again slap full on against the back of your thigh in a warm-up or worse, that some figment of inattention will see you walk face first into a driven practice shot from that corner forward with the toblerone-shaped feet. Grit in your cheeks, your busted nose making the tears well in your eyes as you shoo everybody away red-faced because you will be alright in about five minutes and you know the bastards are laughing at the hilarity of it. Ah youth!
And that was just the football. Is there anything more mortifying than a sliotar whickering into your testicles on a freezing cold morning, arriving at the speed of a Japanese bullet train which hadn’t intended to stop there.
The injury is salted with insult in such cases because obviously there was some unmanly defect in your reflexes to have let the sliotar make such violent contact at all. No real laughter this time. Just the knowledge that you have become a good anecdote, just 29 junior hurlers wincing. Just the mortification of limping around as if your quad is busted when really you want to lie in a foetal position make sure that your lads are both present and correct and then to have the affected area bathed and caressed by maidens who arrive with warm oils. Not a squirt of the water bottle. Never. Not in December. Not in March. Not even in August.
(There is actually one thing more mortifying than the sliotar to the prataí on a cold day as a player. That is the sliotar to the same postal district on a cold night while coaching youngsters. Not even a flicker or a twitch of your facial muscles can betray your agony. Just carry on as if you were gelded as a foal.)
All this was the epic stuff of our youth. Decembers dimly remembered. Sometimes at training you pee dreamily against a wall and 10 footballs or 30 sliotars would come flying at you with the accuracy which was so badly lacking in general play. The odd time there’d be showers. Bastards pouring entire bottles of Clinic shampoo into your mighty mullet and then the hot water either getting switched off for amusement or just running out.
What the hell, five minutes later you’d be out into the frosted air anyway – the cold insinuating itself through your threadbare denim, your head wet and hatless and smelling of Clinic, the peddles of the bike going as furiously as possible.
Back in Breffni, Heaney of the North is speaking learnedly and entertainingly of some other matter now but, like Proust with his biscuits, the talk has set off such a remembrance of times past that we are sitting leaned forward out of the press box window hands warm but clutching our biscuits. Just in case.
