Normality...and the problems it brings
Things in the UK, at least, in regards to Covid-19, seem to be levelling out. Occasionally we get a day with plus 150 deaths, but nothing seems to be rising exponentially. Some members of the medical community, have even said, Britain is past it's peak, too early to say the pandemic is history?
It's easy to get complacent, and it's easy to forget, in these days of statistics, that the figures are people's lives and their families attached to them. But, it does feel like life has returned to some sort of normal. There's still reminders of the 2 years of Hell we have all been through....we still (well the good and able people) wear masks on public transport and at our work place, we are doing swab tests every morning on arrival to our new office. Though as I said, things feel relatively normal. The headlines are often non-Covid related, sport is back and in particular, footy is!
But that's where the optimism has jaded somewhat. I think we were naïve. During lockdown, it was a different World. All we had to look forward to was starting football, myself, Jumbo & Frodo planned furiously during lockdown. Then we went into lockdown once again for a month's circuit breaker, before all our Xmas plans were kicked to the curb when we went into a 3rd lockdown, which ended up lasting till April '21. That's the thing though, we were all at a low, and the excitement of the future, and what it held, was maybe with hindsight, over-inflated.
We thought, that lockdown was lockdown, there was fear, people had moved away from London, so at the time, the end of lockdown and the return to normality, we thought footy would be embraced with open arms...but it wasn't to be.
It's not a negative thing, it's not like people had suddenly hated football, maybe there was an element of people having fallen out of love with the game, given the loneliness of isolation or whether it was some of the poison that came from England getting to the final and the disgusting behaviour that ensued post match or maybe the arrogance of the top EPL clubs in announcing their breakaway super league of greed. We don't know, maybe we never will. But 1 thing we do know, is that we overestimated the return to normality.
With lockdown, football was the only thing we had. Sure, there were some players who couldn't physically play, due to being based outside London, but if you couldn't get up for a game when it was the only thing you had going for you in your life, then you never would surely?
Thinking, that people would be up for a game, when life returned to normal, was naïve as I mentioned before, because, people now had loads of things to do. Holidays, drinks, other commitments. One of our key visions was to make footy, routine. What did we mean by this?
We meant, that football is "our" thing...…we all own it, we all play it and love it, and it's our Thursday night thing. If someone offered you a night out drinking on a Thursday, you would say, thanks but no thanks, I have footy that night sir. I'm not saying you turn down all offers, just that football is in your calendar...a permanent weekly fixture. You're committed to that. You don't sit there all week, thinking mentally that footy is there...but only till something better comes along. And there in, lies our problem. We are still struggling to get people to sign up promptly, we are struggling to maintain high turnout, week in week out.
We hear too many excuses, and not enough reasons, in my humble opinion. Oh I wasn't quick enough to sign up - that's on you. Oh I thought I'd attend work drinks - footy finishes at 7pm, so we can do both, again, that's on you. I want to play....but the reality is I can't be bother....on you.
At the same time, I have to take responsibility too, injuries have been tough on me, but my general fitness is still poor, I need to get on top of that and start representing. I lost a little bit of love for football too, wasn't sure why, but it affected my ability to rally the troops. But I'm quite happy to put my hands up and take that burden on, hopefully that's in the past for me now, I feel good, rejuvenated and ready to take on this new challenge. But, I have to say the majority of fault, lays at the feet of our players and also on this "return to normality".
I, for one, am not saying that everyone commits to a whole year of playing football with us. People have lives outside of footy, I appreciate that, but the point is that we have nearly 30 players in our group....if just a 3rd of them were playing once a month, we would often get a full house of at least 10 players weekly.
There's no excuses that we don't. Laziness, too much talk, not enough doing. I've said before, I don't care if people play footy weekly, but what I will change, is people's mentality. To live every day like it's their last. I've been lucky/unlucky (depends how you view it) enough to see how short life really is, and all I'm doing to trying to make people realise it, before it is too late. We've seen 1st hand at work, what this means, but people dole out their sympathies and condolences, but none of it means anything, if they don't actually "do" anything about it.
But this is a challenge, it's about changing mind sets, and making footy refreshing, we've got a little comfortable with 5-a-side at Powerleague@Shepherd's Bush recently for example, so we need to start branching out to other venues. We have an Finance vs IT match, this has rallied a couple of other departments, so could push them into taking part too, and we even have the numbers for a non-FF team too. The Finance vs IT game in particular, proves that with a little pushing and hand-holding, that we can get 12 people signed up for footy in a couple of days. Just a week ago, I went in hard with the lads, and we had our first game of 10 players in a 5-a-side, another key vision of '21 achieved.
We were all looking forward to joining a league in January '22 and even interest in that, seems to be on the wain.
But I like a challenge, and I'm determined that normality won't beat us.
It's easy, as we often do, to get too hard on ourselves. Since we started, we ticked off a lot of our goals that we set out to achieve.
- Start football
- play it regularly every week
- up of membership
- up of weekly average of players
- sign up to a game full of our players
We have had some competitive games, which gave birth to the idea of our 2G - First Team. It's coming to that time of the year where we need to set more new goals for 2022. I'm thinking of joining that league, maintaining our average players per game, get the females to play, to at least grow the idea of a female or mixed team. Play maybe in a tournament. Get a full team together for an 8-a-side game, play more than 5 x games where we are all signed up with no randoms. Have some more intra-company departmental games and games vs other companies.
It's all possible,
Onwards and upwards!
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