Soccer

Brendan Crossan: It was the kids who kept the adults going...

Some of the kids of St Malachy's OB Youth FC on a manic Friday night Picture: Dee Magennis
Some of the kids of St Malachy's OB Youth FC on a manic Friday night Picture: Dee Magennis Some of the kids of St Malachy's OB Youth FC on a manic Friday night Picture: Dee Magennis

FRIDAY tea-time. Rush hour traffic. Belfast’s Westlink is bumper to bumper. Trying to get across town at a snail’s pace. We’ve a friendly game against Belfast Swifts at 6pm at Brook Leisure Centre.

The first instinct is we're never going to make it.

You're constantly clock-watching and the minutes fly by like seconds.

Sitting in the passenger seat, Rosa, my eight-year-old daughter, is bedecked in her St Malachy’s kit, ready for another adventure, and completely and utterly oblivious to the stress of this car journey.

Remember, take all the good moments you have in the game and airbrush the bad ones. Simple.

The WhatsApp pings. The mental stock-take: What’s in the car boot? First-aid kit, bibs, footballs, pump, spare jerseys.

How many kids tonight? How many footballs? The warm-up. Greet the parents. Greet our hosts. The traffic inches along. A David Gray CD is playing in the car. Rosa is singing along to Track Six.

We get there on time. Just. The homework books never got out of the school-bag. The five-times tables and reading books can wait.

This game is way more important - and more fun too.

For the next hour this enclosed 4G space is the kids’ playground, their field of dreams, the confidence-builder.

Remember all the good things you do. Express yourself. Work hard. Enjoy the game. Help your team-mates. Enjoy being with your team-mates.

The photograph on this page was taken by a parent after that game at the Brook Leisure Centre on a manic Friday evening at the start of October - Éabha, Rosa, Fiadh, Jess and Eve happy with their night's work.

The kids didn't know they were getting their photograph taken right at that moment as they skipped away from the pitch and back to their parents' cars.

This is my favourite image, bar none, because it captures so much.

It probably says different things to different people but, to me, it is kids in the prime of their childhood and conjures an epic sense of camaraderie among them.

During the game you sometimes wonder how on earth you got here. What just happened?

One minute you’re behind the fence, chilling. The next, you’re standing with a tracksuit on, pointing and directing a bunch of seven and eight-year-old kids who absolutely adore the game.

Beyond the metal fence, the parents chat among themselves and applaud every goal and near-miss. Sometimes you think that’s where you should still be. Chilling. Chatting. Clapping.

But then you get sucked into this new life. The responsibility of it. The Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday mania. Twenty-two kids. Twenty-two unique personalities. And the new-found friendships with other parent-coaches.

You often think of the last two years of their lives. No school for months on end. No play parks. No football. No friends.

Huge chunks of their childhoods stolen from them by a virus forever engrained in their little minds.

There is not one child – or parent, for that matter – who can properly articulate or understand the impact COVID19 has had on them.

And we’ll probably never understand what happened. But we plough forward, navigating this new world as best we can while at the same time trying to retrieve what the kids lost.

This global pandemic tightens your senses in so many ways. It makes you appreciate every training session, every match and every childish moment.

Everything matters a little more than it did before.

Tomorrow morning at St Malachy's College, the ‘Wee Macs’ will play their last game of a tumultuous 2021. It has been a journey like no other.

Probably like every other underage team up and down the country, we’ve been bobbing along since restrictions lifted back in April.

At one point we were spraying disinfectant on anything that moved.

Sometimes you wonder how much a coach can improve a seven or eight-year-old.

Coaches can show them stuff that they've learned, but I think the kids improve all by themselves.

But, of course, the last two years hasn’t really been about dribbling through cones, or a kid using their weaker foot, or shooting for goal better.

Amid all the hand sanitising, lateral flows, PCRs, isolation, bubbles, one-way systems, mask-wearing and the doom and gloom stereo-sound in our lives, kids playing sport in 2020 and 2021 has been more than just kicking a football around a pitch.

It’s about cupcakes, party bags, a kid shedding a tear, laughing, enjoying ice-lollies on a baking hot Saturday morning at the Falls Park and soaking the coaches with water.

It’s about living in the moment more than we’ve ever done, it’s about scoring a goal, missing a goal, winning a pizza voucher, the drum-roll for the players of the week, the smiling faces, playing football in the rain, the absolute freedom, the joy, singing happy birthday endlessly, protecting a child’s space and making up for lost time.

It's about winning as much as losing, and the little life lessons contained, it's sharing a Christmas card with a team-mate when one writes to another to tell them: “Don’t change – be you”.

It’s a sense of belonging and community. It’s about remembering the good things they did and trying to forget all the bad things that happened since March 2020.

We coached and cajoled and, through the madness, we enjoyed the privilege.

All the while it was the kids who kept the adults going…