Title: The Beautiful Game

Author: G.J. Melling

In: Sport 32: Summer 2004

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, December 2004

Part of: Sport

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Sport 32: Summer 2004

Nutmeg

Nutmeg

Should the fans turn ugly, I may find myself at fault—shirt out over shorts, lousy haircut, two left feet. A scissor kick that cuts and runs away.

I pull my fingers from my ears—booing is the wooing of despair. It spurs me on.

This season is the longest yet, corrugated mud in midfield. A leg folds into a rut, and snaps. A cut on the kneecap takes months to repair, a teasing white ghost of its slice. I'm on the slide, the receiving end of a two-footed tackle. Head down, I grimace and limp.

My touch seems lost, but when she taps me on the shoulder, I've been picked to play for England. It takes a while to recognise the colour of my shirt, its famous emblem.

I'm confused, I believe. Not me, she accepts.

I wear my heart on my knees, catch my breath with both arms at full stretch. Deliberate handball.

I'm under new management, just as I take my place in the directors' box. Before each game, my kit is pressed and folded, carefully aligned under a clothes peg on the wall. Half-time oranges are freshly-peeled and juicy, the showers hot and steamy.

This is some club. Its training ground appropriates my fitness—there are trophies to be won. I've seen the way she leans against the changing-room wall.

The hardest challenge is the fifty-fifty ball, a confrontation with the softness in the head. Whereto the bounce? And under whose control?

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I lunge for possession. She holds her own.

Silly darling, she tuts.

She complains of a plump bottom, this slim little woman in white trousers. Bollocks, I say, as I give it a slap. To flatter the referee invites morbid interest. I'm already on a yellow card.

Whenever she blows the whistle, I feel like I've taken a dive, a professional foul. A fake, or a flake? My feet sweep from under me, surely—there's that ghost of a push in the back. But must I fall flat on my face?

She reflects in her stainless steel sinkbench, dolefully slicing a pepper. Mud dries my cheeks.

The body-swerve is a form of attack, of the necessity to be forward. It's in the loins, like rock'n'roll. The sweep of a foot in one direction, a flick of the hips in another. At speed, it's a movement of startling beauty, the shiver in a curtain's lace.

We make our bed and fly in it. Down both wings, straight up the middle.

Lacking the coordination to kick my own arse, I run into trouble, the blood to my head. The coach concedes frustration. Just do your fucking job, I'm told, and let me be the genius!

I read my poems to her over the telephone, each word a nutmeg, an innocence spreading its legs.

I drift in and out of the game, a muse to her amusement. I'm a winger, left or right—a marginalised talent glued to a touchline, a dreamer with time on his feet.

An occasional vignette in someone else's story, I relate. That's me! I'm losing my place in the pages.

She calls for action, passes me the ball. Teamwork, she declares, and runs off into space.

Her generosity gifts the avarice in my soul, a free header at the far post. Every game to yield a hat-trick, every goal the season's best. The page 60 duty of a striker is to score. Against Porirua City, I poke over the line a ball already on its way into the net, raise an arm in triumph.

Whatever we make of it must be made sure.