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

Kick off

Kick off

I hold no recollection of my birth—it slipped through a hole in the side netting. As always, I blame the officials. Can't they get anything right?

I will either be a girl, or the disappointment I reveal myself to be. As compensation for the loss of the last three letters in Geraldine, I gain three visible genital parts. A raw deal, according to my father, who has a natural eye for one.

You were an ugly little monkey, he says, through teeth clenched on the stem of a pipe. Covered in red hair.

Red hair, red shirt. What else can I be but a Liverpool supporter? He should be pleased. In those days, girls don't follow football.

When the sirens sound, mother shoves us into the cupboard under the stairs, then squeezes herself in the pantry. The two enclaves adjoin, and she talks to us non-stop through the thin dividing wall. A diversion—she remembers—from the whistling of bombs, the thuds of impact.

Regardless of the roar of disapproval, she waves play on, keeps the game flowing. Quite the best referee I've played under.

Like the pencils we must sharpen, we are whittled into shape, narrowed to a point of least resistance. Through the giddy depths of a magnifying glass, we focus the sun's rays onto the backs of our small white hands, inflicting tiny burns to the skin. We are—of course—unflinching.

The school hall is a ritual assembly of black shorts, white vests and thin-soled pumps. The PT master waves a finger at the monkey bars stretched out along a wall.

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Aspiring gymnasts, he announces, line up over there! The rest play football.

We close a circle in the centre of the room, idly vault the horses, pull the ropes suspended from the ceiling. The master is a grinning ape—he knows that life swings from the crossbar of the goalposts.

Arsenal 2 Liverpool 0, the 1950 FA Cup Final. After switching off his radio, a father puffs furiously on a pipe, crosses and uncrosses his feet on a pouffe. Little wet footballs roll down the side of a small boy's nose, whose ambition in life is to read out the scores on the wireless.

In its Stop Press, the Football Echo runs pictures of the bruises to the shins of Billy Liddell, the legendary Liverpool and Scotland winger whose parting down the centre of his greased-down, short black hair is as straight and white as a halfway line rolled neatly through the grass. As if unmanly, Billy poses coyly, one foot raised on a stool, socks rolled to the ankles.

They kicked the danger out of the game.

The old man punts the horses over Beecher's Brook, his highest jump for glory. On Grand National day, he always backs the favourite.

Success, he soberly maintains—hunched forward in the sureness of his armchair—is a jockeying for position.

Though by nature defensive, as a goalie I'm defeated. Comprehension whistles past me on all sides, at frightening speed. I swap my jersey with a more aggressive boy, and gravitate upfield towards the ball.

I'm a trialist for a team that owns its grandstand. Amidst a thin and colourless crowd, my father chats to a man with a yellow armband. As he speaks, he points in my direction, rocks on his heels, stamps his feet, folds his arms. He's warming up for a big game.

I'm an inside-forward, played at fullback. We lose, 1-0, and I'm the scorer. My attempted clearance is a hurdle we can't climb. Hands in pockets and pipe extinguished, my father descends the steps to the exit.

I tie together the laces of my fully-studded boots, hang them from a rail inside a wardrobe. My heart is a waterlogged football, heavy, page 62 leathery, complete with its own knotted string. Only sixteen, as the song so sweetly goes. Too young to know.

I'm passing one of those life's trials my mother talks about. We can't keep our dreams, she insists. Sooner or later, we let go.

I'm an academic success. I join a lesser club, and sample smoking.