A Whole New Ballgame

A few weeks ago, the soccer team that occupies rather more of my thoughts than is healthy had a problem. Well, strictly speaking, it had several. One was that all of the players, including my son, were under the age of 7, which it turns out is something of a tactical limitation. Another was that I had been roped into being one of the coaches.

More urgently, though, we kept conceding goals. Avoidable goals. Silly goals. Goals wrapped up in gift paper and presented to the opposition, accompanied by a heartfelt card.

Technically, when children start playing formal soccer in England — at the age of 6 — the games are not competitive. There is no league table. The results are not even recorded. That arrangement is not quite the same, though, as nobody knowing what the results are. And it was apparent, to anyone who could count, that our results were not good.

It was at this point that I hatched a plan to limit the damage. It seemed to me quite a good plan. We had spent two years encouraging the children to play soccer the way it is meant to be played. They pass out from the back. They take a touch. They rely on their technique to avert danger. They express themselves.

But it had become very clear, very quickly, that this approach had not really survived first contact with reality. We were conceding goals in great bucket-loads because we kept creating problems for ourselves: dribbling across our own box, passing aimlessly into the middle of a congested field, turning not into space but into trouble. We kept losing games. And while winning or losing was not supposed to matter, we worried that, sooner or later, the children would start losing enthusiasm.

What we needed, I thought, was just a dash of the ancient wisdom that had been passed down to me, when I was taking my first tentative steps in soccer. Geoff — my first and only youth coach, whose son took all the free kicks and corners — had given us two instructions, and only two: Play the way you are facing and, if in doubt, boot it out.