Scoring success

November 11, 2009 louhamilton

It is a cold drizzly afternoon at Falmouth Football Club and a tired looking stadium with a sprinkling of supporters stands on one side of the pitch, a corrugated hut on the other in which a bleak row of bedraggled away fans hunch up against the wind. When my boyfriend was a boy the club was in its glory days. His grandfather was the grounds man and he wore a suit to mow the grass into rows and to etch pin stripe white lines onto the pitch. As a twelve year old, my boyfriend would announce the players over a tanoy system. Today the electric wires hang in broken webs. I am not a football fan but I am here to support my boyfriend revisiting the memories of his grandfather and the club he loved. His dad is here with us too and together they reminisce on the club’s hey day at the top of the non-league. Squashed between them I pull my fake  fur leopard print coat around me and my hat down to my eyes. The grey rain drenches the players and soon the pitch is cut to ribbons; churned mud clods making treacle of the players’ progress. But they battle each other undaunted. Everyone in the crowd is wearing poppies and I can’t help wonder at men’s capacity to lay in to one another. Bodies pound into each other, knees smash, one player head butts another, another roars abuse at the referee. This is a ‘game’? I cannot fathom the instincts that drive this muscled furiousness. But I can feel the crowd’s excitement and there’s a powerful energy in being part of it. It’s an alien world but for 90 minutes I feel a sliver of what it must be like to be testosterone fuelled; the camaraderie, the team spirit, the thrill of trying to win. Falmouth score finally in the last minute and I rise with a cheer along with the rest of them. They have victory but so do I. I allowed myself to step outside of my comfort zone and to experience a sense of belonging. I also score a little success in my boyfriend’s heart as he squeezes me to him and thanks me for standing in the cold and the rain to be with him and his memories.

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