Into added-on time and still the only highlight this bitter Tuesday night has been the lino right in front of us tumbling into mud. Our lot aren’t taking this latest pasting especially well: five names in the book and odds-on for a red before the end. Our white-booted number nine, who joined on a free […]

The day after a game, I used a slotted screwdriver to loosen the radiator-hardened mud from the edge of each boot’s plastic sole, matted grass and all; levered in one unravelling, like peeling a half-time orange, the phantom, size-eleven-shaped plaster-cast of turf, studded, symmetrical evidence of my right-back graft; damp-cloth-wiped the uppers clean of any […]

It begins with all the boring stuff, which makes ‘the match-day experience’ just so: box office, police control room, the pitch- marking gear, St John’s. Then the physio waves us onto couches, fluorescent-lit; pretends to examine our ‘injuries’. In the home changing-room, they let us sit where the players do. It must be a squeeze. […]

Sunday league corner the other ‘keeper mimes takes in the gale’s teeth

poplars in May a long ball over the shoulder hangs on the wind