Soccer

Brendan Crossan: Playing football again and touching the sky

St Malachy's girls at Solitude earlier this year
St Malachy's girls at Solitude earlier this year St Malachy's girls at Solitude earlier this year

IT’S exactly 11.28pm on Wednesday night. I’m sitting in our unruly dining room. It’s always unruly. The lap-top has to rent space on the dining room table inconveniencing Batman’s residence and a doll’s house.

I’m surrounded by action figures, dolls, Lego, cars, felt-tip pens and a miniature pool table. It’s the kind of room that beats a parent into submission every time.

I’d no intentions of writing this column tonight but home schooling requires discipline and better time management.

This is just part of my new reality. The future. For the time being. Typing into the small hours, the silence broken by the drone of the dishwasher.

At least there’s no school runs to do in the mornings.

The crushing reality of Covid-19 was felt long before the British government issued its belated but inevitable directive to close the schools until further notice.

Coronavirus can break your heart in a million different ways. As parents, our heartbreak is not seeing Shea, our three-year-old boy, enjoying his last few precious months of nursery school.

Let me tell you, Our Lady's Nursery School in Deanby Gardens is the greatest place on earth. At least to us it is.

When Shea releases my hand each morning he skips into the classroom ready for another adventure.

From the start of school term, Mrs O'Neill, Mrs Blakeley and Mrs Gray have invested their souls in Shea and all the other children.

They have moulded Shea, shaped him, taught him and loved him like he was their own son.

When he's older he'll remember them.

How could he forget?

He'll be too young to remember the day he stopped going there, and I'll never forget the day I stopped taking him.

Every tired, zombie-like morning walk from our house, the world was just about perfect in every way: Shea holding my left hand and Rosa, my right.

Your nursery year was never meant to be cut short by some mysterious global virus. How could a bloody stupid virus cause all that trouble and disruption?

But it has. In an unimaginably devastating way.

Rosa is six-years-old, seven next month.

I haven't had the heart to tell her that her birthday party is cancelled. Nor does she know the full extent of how her wee social life of football, drama, dance, school and after-school clubs have been obliterated for the foreseeable future.

Rosa will miss her football most of all.

She plays for St Malachy's OB Youth. The club is only a few years old but is already one of the most successful sporting enterprises in north Belfast, and beyond.

They have youth teams coming out of their ears, full to capacity. Good people doing great things.

Rosa is in her third year with the club. Affectionately known as the 'Wee Macs', I was recently - and quite easily - recruited to the coaching staff of the girls section.

When you stand and watch the training sessions and matches on a Tuesday night and Saturday morning you might as well give a hand.

In the early days, after months of training sessions, I decided to let Rosa play in a game.

So timid and yet excited by the prospect, every touch of the ball she got she shouted to me.

"Daddy, I've got three touches... Daddy, Daddy, I've got eight touches..."

This is how her St Malachy's debut unfolded. She got 15 touches in total on that blissful Sunday morning.

Over the past three years, I've realised there is no greater joy than watching your son or your daughter do something that they absolutely love doing.

Being a 'coach' of an U7s girls' team is quite a grandiose title. There are no blackboards or tactical messages or overly clever training drills.

As coaches, our role is fairly simple: we're energy givers; we inject confidence into their little minds through praise in the hope of them realising that they are good, that they have a talent, that they are of value.

On different mornings you see the penny dropping with them during games. With Rosa. With Éabha. With Julia. With Erin. With Catherine. And Mollie. And Olivia. And Jess. Lilly. Mya. Katie. Emma the dribbler. And the two Fiadh's.

And when they score a goal it's like touching the sky.

Saturday mornings at Solitude are special. Truth be told, I live for them.

Hundreds of kids from every part of the community descend on the north Belfast venue for small-sided games - a programme brilliantly tailored by Marc Smyth, Cliftonville's youth development officer.

Every Tuesday and Friday night and Saturday and Sunday morning, the 'St Mal's Girls Team' WhatsApp group is buzzing with messages from coaches and parents.

But in recent times it has fallen silent. Our phones no longer buzz in our pockets as everyone tries to absorb the devastating impact of this ubiquitous virus that we'll never, ever forget.

After our last match on March 7, we got the girls to do elbow bumps with the opposition players of Andersonstown Boys rather than shake hands.

We all thought the kids would be be back doing high-fives in no time. Since then, the economy's wheels have ground to a stunning halt.

The world has changed forever for so many people. It's how we go about picking up the pieces when this passes. And it will pass.

A bag of footballs has taken up permanent residence in my car boot. I don't know when they'll be taken out again for use.

But when the day comes I'll empty the bag in the middle of the pitch and the kids will have a ball each. And they will run 'til their heart's content.

You see, kids are more resilient than us, they'll continue where they left off.

And it will feel like touching the sky - a bright, blue, endless sky.

For them, and for us...