The beautiful game

Some years ago it became apparent that playing competitive football was no longer an option for me. The body took longer to recover from each match; stretching beforehand was seemingly taking almost as long as the first half, and warming-down was no longer desirable but essential. Of course, all footballers—professional and amateur—face a time when a decision to stop playing has to be taken. Fortunately for me there was an alternative: coaching.


During the 1980s I had lived and worked in the United States. At that time it seems that there were far too few coaches with experience of playing the game. With an English accent, I was approached by players at the College where I was working as a Lecturer, and asked to help out with the men's team. I rapidly discovered that there is a huge difference between playing and coaching. I was fortunate to find a coaching clinic which enabled me to start on the coaching ladder, and acquired a coaching license under the auspices of the United States Soccer Federation (as it was then called).


During my decade or so in the United States I was privileged to coach mens' and womens' college teams, as well as mens' and womens' high school teams. In addition, I also had the opportunity to coach on various soccer camps during the Summer months. However, in many ways the highlight was helping to establish soccer programmes for girls in the western Carolinas. In 1987 I was invited by Briggs Sherwood to help start a girls' programme in the Asheville NC area. We started with between 6 and 12 girls playing soccer on recreational basis, and rapidly expanded. Soon there was a selective "travel" team. By the time I moved back to London in the early 1990s there was a full recreational league for girls in the Asheville-Buncombe area. I understand that this now numbers several thousand players, with full-time administrators and coaches! From little acorns might oaks develop.


When I returned to the UK, I was fortunate to be instrumental in helping start the nascent internet football competition, being the founding coach of the Internet Hotspurs. This was a team drawn from subscribers to the Spurs-List, an online forum for Spurs' supporters. The first ever match played was when we travelled to the midlands to play the Leeds team ("internet Lard"), and shortly thereafter we played in the first ever WorldNet: the internet version of the World Cup! The Internet Hotspurs also played in a high profile match against the Internet Gooners, a game played at Clarence Park, St. Albans before a crowd of about a hundred, and covered by .Net magazine.


Currently, I have the honour to coach my son's team, HMH U13 B. One of twenty teams organised by the HMH club, this sees me return very much to my roots in coaching. Back in the late 1970s I was a member of the north London Victoria Boys' and Girls' Club, and I was approached by Nick Sonnenfield  to coach a team of U10s. which I did until moving to the USA in 1982. HMH is headed by the same Nick Sonnenfield! As I write I had expected to be coaching away in St. Albans against Harvesters South, but a late phone call informed me that the match was called off due to a frozen, unplayable pitch. Hopefully, my text message to all of the parents of my players got through in time to save them from making an unnecessary journey up the A1.


For me coaching initially was a way to stay in contact with the beautiful game when my playing days were numbered. Something of a vicarious pleasure. However, since then the rewards have become much more manifest. The great relationships a coach makes with his players is something which transcends time and space. The young teenage girls I coached back in Asheville in the 1980s are now grown women with children of their own, many of whom continue to enjoy the beautiful game. Facebook (for example) makes it easy to stay in touch with these wonderful people, and see how the chain continues with new, additional links down the generations. The values of a team sport with room for amazing feats of individualism was well understood by the Victorians, the original founders and codifiers of the game. While the upper echelons of the professional game have lost their way, as have some of the key broadcast personalities, the game remains beautiful because its destiny, as was its history, lies in the hands of the ordinary people who play and coach, often on a purely voluntary basis.