Category Archives: Sport

This year at school I am fortunate to have a 1st XI team that has been enjoying the best results of any team in my time, having won every one of their Saturday fixtures, and although they slipped up in the county tournament, they had at least qualified for the West Schools Regional Finals.  So I went into the tournament today with quiet optimism.

Which proved to be misplaced.

It started with a decent enough performance against one of the favourites and although it ended in a 2-0 defeat, we were playing well and had weaker teams to play in the group.  But our performance level tailed off, losing the next one to the agony of a goal scored in the last five seconds, and although we played better in the next, we failed to score in a 0-0 draw, before subsiding 2-1 in our last match.

To paraphrase Alex Ferguson: “Hockey – bloody hell” and although he said those words after a memorable victory, I was thinking the same thoughts for contrasting reasons.

Claire reminded me (by text) that it is “Only Games”.  But I find that the older I get the more tense I become over these matters.  I fear that my genetic inheritance is coming through at last.  The Old Man will not watch big sporting contests on telly as he finds it too stressful and even spent England’s finest hour in 1966 digging the garden as he couldn’t bear to watch in T.V.  After the debacle today, I think I know how he feels.

And yet, and yet…. I would not have wanted to have been anywhere but on the side of the pitch today, posing and poncing around in my team track suit, doing my impersonation of a stressed premier league manager in the technical area.  Because one day I still believe one of my teams will do really well – and I want to be there when it happens.  It is the kind of addiction that keeps people going to see football teams, that eternal hope.

Somehow it is not the losing that hurts most: it is the hope, or the memory of that hope.  It is hope that keeps us going in life, that drives us on and gives us the motivation to succeed.  And that is why we come back for more.  It is why sporting efforts are so much more than ‘only games’, and why in a couple of weeks when the under fourteen team is at the Regional Finals, I will need to be there in the technical area once more, pacing the touch-line.

Because I really believe (hope?) we can do it next time.  Hopefully I will report back with better news by the end of the month.

WordPress (the blog website I use) have issued a challenge to publish a post every day this month.  Well, I only read that email on the 2nd November, so missed one day.  But I am doing my best to publish something every day, so today I’m taking the opportunity to start a new strand and to write about my main passion – sport – which happens to also be my occupation.

My role as P.E. teacher and head of hockey is essentially a job in which I get to do a lot of stuff I enjoy: coaching players to improve their skills in a sport I love and which I have played since the age 13, as well as managing teams in regular fixtures.

But it does have its stresses and strains – such as today when I was assisting with interviewing candidates for 6th form sports scholarships, but also teaching and preparing for a big tournament tomorrow.  This involved tedious things, like making sure I had enough players (some of whom had conflicting commitments in other departments), checking shirts, change of shirts, tracksuits, hockey balls, first aid, ensuring the girls have lunches, planning to buy more to supplement the lunches….the list goes on.  Throw in a fixture today that was cancelled at the last moment, and the subsequent rearrangement of training for senior teams, and it was a another fraught day at school.

But, at the end of the day (to use a sporting cliche) Claire reminds me that it is “only games”.  Which reminded me of an ironic (or perhaps idiotic) poem I once wrote when disgruntled with the fact that a lot of girls missed sport to do music.  I would add that I enjoy a good relationship with the music department and that the following words are meant very much in jest – before someone in senior management reads this and hauls me over hot coals.  But I think anyone who has worked in P.E. and sport in schools will identify with some of the sentiments.

So, no pics today – just words.  Make up your own pictures.

Play Up, Play Up – Play up It’s Only Games

 

Our School Girls are a talented lot

Involved in many things

But when it comes to playing sport

They’ll have to sprout some wings

 

Because music and P.E.

Do not comfy bedfellows make

So when deciding what to do

We’ll show them what’s at stake

 

They’ll have to miss some sport –

Their badminton and swims:

It’s better to blow a metal tube

Or pull horsehair over strings

 

Hanging out in the Music room

Shouting out rude names

Why trudge up to the astroturf?

Remember it’s only games.

 

One has to think what matters

Like it takes up so much thought

It’s obvious to sensitive girls

That music outshines sport.

 

Singing is for ladies:

P.E’s not for dames.

It’s on the national curriculum

But we know it’s only games

 

Don’t waste your time with Nicky

Or Katharine or James

What are you going to learn about life?

You’ll just be playing games.

 

The sun shines on the righteous

On sport it only rains

Don’t go down to the squash court Maude

Bunk off: it’s only games.

It’s been nearly a month since put finger to keyboard for this account of my continuing takeover of my father’s garden.  Of course May / June is a great time in the garden as the seedlings germinate, grow and are hardened off in the cold frame before being planted out in  serried ranks in and around the patch under the increasingly watchful eye of the Old Man.

A year ago I would have dreaded the offer of advice from the OM, but now I can take it or leave it and it does not worry me. This year I have germinated the mangetout in three phases separated by a couple of weeks to ensure a longer harvesting season.  When I planted them out I wanted to put them in separate rows to ensure I knew which was which to see if my cunning plan had worked.  Unfortunately as I was about to insert the third set, the OM appeared and advised me that I was spacing the plants out far more than I needed to.  I went to transplant them to reduce the spacing but was advised to just put the remaining plants in between the others.

There lay the quandary: should I do as he told me and mess up my planting plans, or contradict his suggestion and carry on with my relocation of the previous plants?  Of course I steered my usual path of least confrontation and decided to change the activity while we continued our conversation on other topics.  So I got on with hoeing, watering, weeding…anything to pass the time until he decided it was time to head back indoors.  Of course the conversation took ages: we men find it easiest to talk when one of us is DOING something while the other observes and advises.  Only after the best part of an hour did her return inside and I was able to go back to the mangetouts and plant them in the order I wanted.   But in the spacing that he had suggested. A fair compromise, I reckon.

Is that diplomatic on my part? Or merely spineless? Perhaps this is why we manage to rub along as neighbours – despite some differences.   I might get frustrated but don’t generally get annoyed or angry.  Not my style – and I think it works best with his lordship.

With the good weather of late, the OM has as taken to spending more time in the garden, busying himself with the industrial tasks, such as weed-killing the grass around the beds.  I think he likes the instant results of his death-dealing actions as the weeds wilt and die.  Unfortunately his sprayer has been a little wayward so that some of my purple sprouting, runner beans, and kohlrabi have a bad case of the measles as the Weedol has drifted off target.

It is bloody annoying.  After all that work planting the damn things, I do not need them being wiped out by some over-exuberant chemical warfare from my father.  I suppose I could have given him some advice on how to do it or I could just rant at him for his negligence, but I probably won’t do either.