I’m a keen soccer fan, and since retiring from playing the game two years ago with injuries, I’ve taken up watching my boyfriend play on the weekend for the All Age 2 side at Sydney University.
I’m usually one of two or three supporters that turn up to watch the boys play – usually one of the younger guys’ dads and maybe a girlfriend of one of the players. Interestingly if there is a girl sitting on the sideline, it’s always someone different each week. My conversations with a few of these girls make me realise that I’m one of very few people who regularly watches park soccer – willingly, at least. The rapid turnover of fans for the AA2s suggest to me that most supporters begrudgingly meet their quota of attending one game per season, and that’s generally one game too many. I personally really enjoy having a front row seat to an always entertaining game of local social soccer. I will admit though that the minute-by-minute, player-by-player analysis of the game on the way home in the car can get slightly tedious.
But recently I’m struggling to fulfill my duty as the faithful spectator at these games. My attention wanders and I get distracted. Suddenly it is far more interesting to tear up blades of grass and sleep in the sun than watch the beautiful drama unfold in front of me. What’s wrong with me? Don’t I care about soccer anymore?
What’s wrong is that I’m suffering a case of World Cup delusion. Every four years soccer fans are bombarded with images and footage of soccer freaks from around the world. Men with fitness and skill so extraordinary that they make gravity-defying moves look effortless. In park soccer, the moments that make you gasp come not from feats of skill but feats that defy physics or all probability – most notably when you have to cover your mouth to stop yourself from yelling “How the %*$# did you miss that!” After seeing such well-oiled, perfectly drilled teams on TV, watching games where the ball spends more time stuck in trees or out on the road than on the pitch is quite a shock to the system.
So if I can get more than my fill of ridiculously good games from the comfort of the couch, what’s the point of making the trek halfway across Sydney, in weekend traffic, to sit on cold hard ground in bone chilling wind to watch amateur soccer?
The point is that World Cup soccer, and all professional soccer for that matter, is a fantasy world that in no way resembles the reality of the world game. The vast majority of soccer players around the world do not get paid tens of thousands of dollars to simply roll out of bed in the morning and rock up to training. Your average weekend warrior certainly does not get round-the-clock access to free physio treatment and massage or free boots and gear from their sponsors, nor do they play with the roundest ball ever manufactured on perfectly manicured pitches.
The reality of soccer is far more interesting and entertaining if you make the effort to go and watch it.
After navigating their way to an obscure field somewhere out in the Sydney ‘burbs, the weekend warrior turns their gaze to the pitch. You may not know that the pitch is an important factor to take into account when devising tactics for each game. Players should aim to keep any slide tackles or falling over to a minimum on concrete-like pitches. Make a spectacular slide on your knees to celebrate a goal like they do in the world cup and you will be rewarded with a spectacular hospital bill for your knee reconstruction. The more experienced in the team make mental notes of the sprinkler heads and ankle-twisting divots in the playing surface.
Commentators have been raving about the technology behind the playing surfaces at this year’s world cup – an impressive hybrid of natural grass and artificial turf to strengthen the field. Apparently no one has told them that this technology has been used on Sydney pitches for years. As the weekend warriors will attest, most Sydney soccer fields have at least some percentage of artificial turf, usually in the form of an Astroturf cricket pitch right across the middle of the field. Some Sydney councils kindly cover these cricket pitches during the soccer season with a two-foot high mound of top soil, forcing all play to the edges of the field and leaving centre midfielders picking clods of dirt out of their studs for days.
Nevertheless, the weekend warriors pull on their boots, using sufficient electrical tape to keep their toes from coming out the split that develops, without fail, along the inner seam of their shoes. These broken bravehearts are an innovative lot, devising imaginative methods to strap up dodgy knees and weak ankles and developing entirely new uses for heat cream. Broken legs and gushing wounds from head clashes can always be treated with water from someone’s drink bottle on the sideline. I’m still waiting for this all-curing “magic elixir” to be snapped up by pharmaceutical companies.
Weekend warriors are resourceful too. Three shirts that have the number “8” on the back? Some quick thinking and those guys have turned two of them into “18” and “81” with their trusty electrical tape. And it seems like these shirts are always recycled, lovingly salvaged from mythical soccer teams full of blokes sized XX-large (I’ve never understood why soccer clubs buy their jerseys so bloody big!).
Refs have a tough and thankless job and let me tell you, they’re not doing it for the money! But there has been a lot of dissatisfaction about the standard of refereeing this world cup. The Socceroos in particular are crying that they’ve been hard done by in their two games so far against Germany and Ghana. I reckon they should send some of our very talented local Sydney refs over to South Africa. Our referees are so good that they can accurately make offside calls without linesman and from the relative comfort of the centre circle. Unbelievable (yes, really)!
So get up off the couch and go and watch the weekend warrior you know play the game they love, even with the odds stacked against them in every way. You won’t have to put up with those awful vuvuzelas either!
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