Walking Right Into It (First Half)

I will begin by laying my cards on the table: I am not blessed with confidence: I am plagued by doubt and hounded by social ineptitude and yet I seldom do things alone.  It is rare for me to even enter a pub or a restaurant on my own and I would never consider going to the cinema, a concert or any form of social gathering alone.  I will do anything in company, I will go anywhere as long as somebody I know will be there with me, but meeting new people, unsupported, takes me further from my comfort zone than Velcro underwear.  Now I don’t want you thinking that I am somehow conspiring to encourage you to believe that I am in some way pathetic, because that would imply that it might take some kind of effort to persuade you of it.  Frankly I think that a certain portion of my psyche – could be ego, could be id, could be Maureen, I just don’t know – must have stopped developing in childhood.  Whatever the cause, I have spent a lifetime wanting to do things that I almost inevitably never did.

I played football until my late fifties when I realised that I had to stop for the good of my health.  Not because I was physically unable to compete, but because I was mentally unable to accept that I would be kicked by people who were less than half my age, against whom retribution would appear, at best, churlish.  Through the long dark years of Covid, when we were all forced into prolonged periods of solitude, I took up running (chronicled in this blog in many ‘Running Man’ posts) for a couple of years until my hips, knees and ankles began to catch up on me.  In truth it was always me versus running, and in the end running won.

I am aware that at my age I need to find some form of suitable (eg not gym-based, not entirely solitary, not guilt inducing, unlikely to kill me) exercise while I am still perambulate and Walking Football has been on my agenda for a while, but I have never quite made the jump for two reasons: one, I have no-one to go with and two, the people who tell me they do play always seem so very old, but I think in principal that if I can just find a way to slow myself down, I might enjoy it.  My wife – ever keen to get me out of the house – looked up the village team, found that the minimum age criterion is actually fifty five, and arranged a trial for me today.  The football session is, I am told, an hour and a quarter, followed by a ‘social session’ at the local sports and social club.  If I don’t like it, I will have lost a couple of hours of my life.  If they don’t like me (more likely: I am something of an acquired taste) I hope I will be able to recognise it and withdraw.  If I do like it, and they can put up with me, it will open me up to trying other things: give me confidence to go it alone now and again.  Mind you, there is, on a different weekday, a group for less able and older players and my main aim today is not to get relegated before I start.  I’m not sure how I would react to that.

Setting aside the sheer terror of meeting new people I am, of course, worried that I will not be good enough.  It’s been a while since I’ve played football competitively.  Will I still have any touch, will I still see a pass, am I likely to find myself in an ambulance sucking oxygen in through a mask after fifteen minutes?  More to the point, as the new boy, will they stick me in goal?  I have no idea what talents I may have left, but I am pretty certain that goalkeeping is not among them.  I am fit, but I am also 66 and it’s been a while since I’ve done anything even remotely strenuous that takes over an hour.  But then I remind myself it is walking football, how strenuous can it be?  I walk all the time.  My step count is the healthiest thing about me.  Physically I know I should have no problem, but I can’t help but wonder if I’m quite ready for walking pace yet.  My normal walking pace is more of a scuttle and I get frustrated by fit, young people who insist on walking so very slowly in front of me, particularly when I can’t find my way past them.  I just know that I will forget myself and run when I shouldn’t.  I know that I might be a little bit more ‘robust’ than is necessarily desirable, but I also know that I will do all I can to ‘fit in’, because that is what I do.  If I’m honest, I’m keen to find out if I can do it.

There is, I must admit, a distinct possibility that I will not even go, or if I do, that I will slope away before anyone has noticed that I am there.  As things stand I am very determined to join in, but when I get there, things could definitely change.  If I am faced with a large group of people who are very familiar with one another, but not with me, I could easily buckle.  Having no perceptible talent of my own, I have always been very much a team player, but I am aware that I often struggle to take that one, vital first step of joining the team in the first place.  I can only hope that this time I can walk right into it…