A Beautiful Game

I have a confession to make. I have a habit, a secret habit that I’ve never shown anyone. I’ve told one or two people, yes; but I’ve never actually done it openly in front of them. Out of all the things that the average person has done in front of someone else by the age of thirty-one, I’ve done my share. But at this little habit, I have so far drawn the line.

I do it most openly when I know I’m alone—but I do it in public places too, when I’m quite sure there’s no-one looking. There are ways of doing it discreetly, so that if someone should see, it might look like I was just fiddling with something, like earphones, or maybe just rubbing something off my hands—but if they looked for more than a moment, if would be clear that I wasn’t doing either of these things. They would see that I had nothing in my hands. In fact, it might even look like the objects I was playing with were my hands themselves—as if they were little animals with volitions of their own, moving in ways as graceful as they were incomprehensible, a courtship dance evolved over millennia—and how would I begin to explain that to a stranger, or even a friend? What could I possibly be doing?

But there’s no great risk of being seen. As I say, over the years I’ve learned how to hide it—to disguise it, at the first hint of a turned head, as something else: dropping a bit of fluff, picking at my nails. No-one’s ever asked so I’ve never had to explain, but now I’m telling you.

What I’m doing is playing football. Not exactly playing football, but making the shapes that footballers make when they play football—with my hands. With hours and hours of practice, days and months and years, over a period of over fifteen years, my hands have become exquisitely dextrous at it: free-kicks, crosses, tackles, headers, step-overs, pile-driving volleys, saves—or as often as not, just a sweetly-struck pass. At the mere suggestion of an idle moment, dozens of times every single day of my life, my hands will transform themselves instantaneously and autonomously into a footballer and a ball. (Curiously, I now realise that my left hand is always the footballer, while some combination of right thumb and index finger plays the easier role of ball. I’m right-handed and left-footed, but my right hand is as duff at football as my right foot is.)

Why do I do this? I’ve said to myself before that if I had my own shrink like they do in the States, that would be one of the first things I’d want to get to the bottom of. From a purely practical point of view, it must take up a great deal of my brain capacity at any one time. Did I mention that, when it’s not viable to play out this baffling sign-language in public, I’m forced to content myself with imagining all the aforementioned passes, tackles, strikes? And I mean all but constantly: every little lull in thought, every few minutes, every day. I’m sure I could be, perhaps should be, using my brain more efficiently.

Well, as writing is so often a form of auto-analytical therapy, let me ask myself about my childhood.

I was a loner. I was obsessed with birds. When I wasn’t hermetically sealed in my bedroom studying them, drawing them, learning the name of their every quivering feather, I was out on my own in the fields, stalking them with binoculars for a gun.

It wasn’t the kind of thing I could do with a friend. One time I agreed to bring my school-friend Scott, who was the epitome of the happy-go-lucky hoodlum, when he had become intrigued by my formidable dedication. He gamely spent the afternoon alarming partridges and scanning the horizon for what he envisaged as a splendid, all-red bird, having misunderstood my English accent when I’d said we were looking for a ‘Reed Bunting’. I had few friends, then, and when I was with one I was generally waiting until I could be alone again and do things properly.

Football was always there though. I might trace it back to Mexico ’86, when I was eight: the World Cup of Maradona and—in our little English household anyway—Gary Lineker. My brother and I had the player cards, hoarding the England players like newly-minted money: Ray Wilkins with the permanently baffled forehead; Chris Waddle with long hair which my brother and I thought was cool; Mark Hateley, John Barnes, Peter Shilton, Bryan Robson... The value of these cards was anything but diminished by the fact that no-one else at school wanted them. We had a book of facts about all the teams in the competition, and I pored over the pictures with almost as much zeal as with my bird books.

At first I didn’t venture beyond the back garden with the football, but that much I knew down to the last daisy. I’d play on my own for hours, playing one-twos with the house itself in the absence of a team-mate. I’d take a thousand free-kicks, trying to curl the ball round the corner of the house and into the top corner of the wooden fence round the side; if I heard the metal gate clang I’d be particularly impressed, because you couldn’t see the gate from where I’d hit the ball.

It might have been my mum’s persistence in suggesting that I play with the other children in the park which induced my first circumspective steps into society. One afternoon after school I summoned my resolve and my ever-growing love of football, and set off down the road, into the park, and towards the group of boys who were gathering there.

Mercifully little was required of me in the way of talking, which I tended to avoid unless absolutely necessary; in a way that I’d already accepted, my voice just didn’t fit with theirs. But the conventions of boys’ football are universal: all you have to do is be there—in the way, as it were—and it becomes incumbent on a senior member of the group to tell you either to get lost or whose side you’re on. Assuming the latter is established, any further speaking is purely a matter of personal choice.

From then on I was a fixture at the park. My shyness would give way to a feeling of tremendous excitement as I walked across the grass, never quite sure if there would be anyone out to play that evening—I was never party to the bush telegraph that apparently determined this—to see others emerging from the trees, gates and pathways. Each new arrival would offer one or two clipped little greetings, carefully avoiding anything too friendly or enthusiastic; this would not be cool, although everyone there was desperate to get the game started. Once it had started, it would only stop when it was too dark to see the ball. By then the blackbirds would be in full voice, and one by one we’d slump to the soft ground and prolong the evening a little longer with laughs in the darkness, better friends now than when the game began—before wending our separate ways back home to warmth and electric light.

Being English, I was disliked and mistrusted by a couple of the others. I sensed a resentment that had been fostered in them by their fathers, perhaps that very dinnertime at the table before coming out to play. I felt mortified by their name-calling, I felt it deep in my stomach, but at the same time I could think of no response to it: the word ‘English’ was used as a swearword, and yet it accurately described me; I couldn’t deny it.

Besides, I was accepted for the most part, and I had my allies: there was Neil, who was a couple of years older than the rest of us; he openly championed my ‘cultured left foot’ in front of the others, who were forced to defer to age. Then there was Greg Weir, a dogmatic nationalist who grudgingly befriended me nevertheless. He was quirky in his own way, he kept tropical fish like I did, and when he went on holiday I was given his house key so I could go round and feed them.

Greg’s house, silent and strange without its inhabitants, seemed musty and old-fashioned to me, as if his parents were poor or elderly. I’d met his mum a few times though, and she wasn’t especially old, but she seemed careworn and somehow maltreated. She made me think of Judy from ‘Punch and Judy’: she was scrawny, with a doll’s checked dress; she had comically rouged cheeks and black, frightened eyes. Greg would shock me with his cheekiness to her, bossing her around, trying to impress me. His dad was usually away on the oil rigs. Maybe it was the oddness of this household compared to my own that sharpened my curiosity when I found myself alone in it.

In Greg’s upstairs bedroom was an undersized tank containing two large ‘oscars’, hidden somewhere in a fog of thick green algae. The big dark fish loomed mournfully into sight to swallow mouthfuls of the flakes I sprinkled, and I shuddered involuntarily in the clean, empty house. My task accomplished, I felt I still had some grace time to have a wander around. Each room greeted me with an electric silence that raised the hairs all over my body. My exquisite transgression didn’t reach its conclusion, however, until I discovered Greg’s little sister’s room—and specifically her underwear drawer. I allowed myself no more than a minute on the higher plane of consciousness to which the little items inside transported me, before closing the drawer, descending the stairs, locking the front door behind me, and entering a world that wasn’t quite the same as it had been an hour earlier.

I was at secondary school now. Every day new circles of friends were forming in the classrooms, corridors and playing fields, and I was just about holding my own in them. But what happened to these circles when the bell went at the end of the day was a matter of great intrigue to me; I’d overhear stories on Monday morning about gangs gathering, and of trysts in the dark parks over at Strathburn—only fifteen minutes’ walk away from my own little park, and yet an unknown country as imposing as Russia.

But football, I understood. In most of my classes I sat beside John Welsh, because he was before me in the alphabet, and we’d covertly draw pictures of the goal nets at all the different grounds around Scotland. We loved the way the nets would bulge when a goal went in. And we didn’t stop at Scotland: it was now the time of Italia ’90, and the Italian nets were all the more satisfying, billowing extravagantly as only Italian nets could. I even did the net at Wembley, which John disdainfully accepted as accurate.

John played football with three other boys—Bob, Skinner and Hendy—and I quickly found that I didn’t have to worry about being cool around them. They were Aberdeen supporters, but John was a devout Celtic fan, and I didn’t get any more hassle for being English than he did for being a Fenian. The other three lived over at Strathburn, and at the weekend we’d meet at the park there to play football.

It was different to the football I’d played before. We’d arrive before midday, the sun high in the sky, acres of close-cut grass stretching out before us. It was all light and space compared with my twilit kick-abouts in the little park with its swings, bushes and hillocks. We wore boots with studs, shin-guards, and full strips: three Aberdeen, one Celtic, while I defaulted to Manchester United. We’d do a proper warm-up and practise set-pieces, all with the earnestness of ambition: Bob, at least, had his sights on making it in football, and some of his dedication rubbed off on the rest of us.

We’d play through the whole afternoon, and then drop exhausted on the grass—and that’s when we’d start speaking about girls. This was a great leveller between us, because we were all equally clueless. The revelation for me, though, was that we were sharing real thoughts and feelings—not the gruff exchanges I was used to. There was a period during which I’d still go down to my local park, but the contrast was clear: I could barely imagine seeing this new group of friends in those surroundings. These were real friends, for whom enthusiasm and even affection were no longer taboo.

I joined the school team and did alright. The coach was an energetic young teacher who had once been a reserve for Dundee United; I once scored a goal in a five-a-side training game and he pronounced it ‘genius’, about which I inwardly rejoiced. I still had an idea I had some talent, then, but that ended when I joined the local boys’ team, Colony Boys.

I was young for my year at school, so I was entered in a team of boys who were in the year below me at school. Suddenly I felt like a lumbering fool: unknown, English, older and bigger-built than most of them, but not proportionally hard. I wanted to prove that I could play, but this wasn’t the beautiful game I knew: every time I got the ball it seemed that the whole team was screaming derisively at me to get rid of it, and that’s what I generally did—generally straight to the opposition or into a neighbouring field or industrial estate. Game by game my confidence plummeted, until I barely knew who was on my side. My dad offered to come and watch, but I didn’t want him to hear his surname hurled about with such disgust.

The end came in one particular post-match debriefing, following a significant defeat. While addressing the whole team, the coach said that they should not give me a hard time: I was doing my best, after all. I hadn’t expected to find the attention so suddenly on me; I was mortified to have been singled out, as though I alone were responsible for losing the match. I was given a lift home that day by the assistant coach, a thin and rather quiet man with whom, for this reason, I felt a little more kinship than with any of the others. We drove in silence, and as we drew in at my house, he said something about the next training day. I’d have liked to explain myself, perhaps to say a kind parting word, but I was numb. I said only that I didn’t want to continue at the club—a decision that I’d made immediately and irrevocably. I climbed out of the car, with barely the strength to stand. How sad a figure I must have seemed to him.

Afternoons at Strathburn started to see a shift in emphasis, away from training and towards post-training discussion. Bob had started having sex with his girlfriend, to all our astonishments. Hendy had started having parties, where there were girls and bottles of cider. It was at one of these that I found my first girlfriend, and football (nearly) disappeared from my life.

Over fifteen years on, though, I still remember the best passes I made, the best goals I scored. They even find their way into my private re-enactments sometimes, alongside the most graceful of players: Zidane, Henry, Beckham, Larsson.

And that’s what I think all this is about: grace, beauty, control—things that we so often lack in our various relationships. Maybe I deal with this lack, when I feel it most, by retreating into daydreams of what first typified these qualities for me—what drew me into contact with other people in the first place. Maybe that’s why it would be so humiliating if someone should catch me at it, clinging to this idea of grace, admitting that I can’t find it in the company of anyone else—admitting that I’m still on my own.