Good Lord

You know when footballers, during pre-match or post match press conferences say that they and the team have worked hard on the training pitch I cannot help but think, given their antics and shenanigans whilst in play, that they must practice all of the foul play aspects of the professional game in addition to game plays, set pieces and all things tactical. 

Some top flight teams specialise in off -the ball intimidation and harassment and I often find myself concentrating on what goes on just off the sweep of the TV cameras. 

After all, I feel that I am able to give comment on such things because I too have been a victim of the Culture of the Professional Foul.. 

It was back when I was a schoolboy and playing for the first eleven team. 

As part of some celebration of another centenary of the ancient Grammar School that I attended a football match was arranged with the Old Boys or former alumni of that historic educational establishment. Former pupils had included one of the Gunpowder Plot protagonists, eminent persons from science and academia and as I have found out only recently the CEO of the industrial conglomerate and Cycling Team Sponsors, INEOS. 

On the day of the game, on a cold spring saturday morning, I was entrusted to man-mark a Mr Lord who had turned out for the Old Boy opponents. The name meant nothing to me. 

He gave me the impression upon first meeting of being a quiet and reserved guy, small and slim. I had him earmarked as an accountant, perhaps a solicitor or at a push some sort of medical operative. 

The match began and indeed so did a subsequent first half of what turned out to be a 90 minute nightmare. For me I meant rather than the reserved and unimposing Mr Lord. 

Those seconds before the Referees' whistle represented the few moments in the proceeding one and a half hours of action in which I was upright and on my own two feet. 

The concept and theory of Man-Marking. I thought before the match, was pretty straight forward. Stay close, follow by tracking back and forth over the pitch, intercept any passes intended for the opposition player and where possible bring my team mates into the game by a well placed pass. 

I tried to guess his age as a means to reassure myself that my youthful vigour and fitness would win through. If, for example he had left school and attended university followed by, say, twenty years of being in full employment he would be about 40 to 45 years old. That to me, a lad of just 16 years of age was an inconceivable age indeed. I expected Mr Lord or anyone of that age bracket to be struggling with stiff limbs, a constricted respiratory system particularly if he enjoyed a smoke and a drink, creaking joints and a failing eyesight. 

In fact I could have been describing myself as my adversary had no apparent afflictions, maladies or life threatening conditions whatsoever. 

He turned out to be quite a canny and skilful footballer. His control of the ball on a heavy and bumpy school playing field was exemplary, equal only to the adept way in which he tipped me off balance with a slight coming together of our elbows or tap on my leg causing me to fall polaxed to the ground whenever the match ball came close. 

The movement that disorientated and disrupted my role in the game was most subtle and evidently invisible to the overseeing eye of the referee. There was no malice or violence in his actions towards me, rather, I came to realise he had an unique understanding and application of the physics of balance, the effects of gravity and an almost mystic and magic control of a leather football, the prevailing wind and the combination of mud and grass under his fleeting feet. 

In spite of my best efforts to thwart that man of senior years he was the star-larker of the Old Boys. It was rout. A massacre. An embarrassment. If ever there was a mismatch of men and boys it took place on that Spring morning. 

At the end of the game,one of mud spattered exhaustion for me, I noticed a group of onlookers made up from younger members of the Grammar School hovering around my nemesis. They had, in their hands, pens and those small album type books in which autographs and mementos are collected.

Turns out, and I should have suspected from my travails, the nimble Mr Lord had been a Professional Footballer for some 298 appearances for Hull City and had only been in retirement for a handful of years before being brought in as a ringer by the scheming and overly-competitive selection committee of the Old Boys organisation. 

Malcolm Lord is still apparently going strong in his 70's. Being an Old Boy of the Grammar now myself I would welcome an opportunity to play alongside this great talent. 

He would very likely still put me to shame.