Goal!

Cricket "screen" at Southampton Sports Ground

"Games" – that is, team sports played outdoors, usually on grass, as opposed to chess, poker, or tiddlywinks – no longer seem to feature as prominently in the curriculum of schools as they did when I was at school. Back in what it's useful to think of as the "long 1950s" – i.e. the period from 1945 to about 1965 – the idea of mens sana in corpore sano (roughly, "mud is good for you") dominated educational thinking, to the extent that an entire afternoon every week would be dedicated to compulsory "games", usually played in teams ranked by ability. Having no interest in sport whatsoever, but having inherited a degree of instinctive sporting competence, my school years were mainly spent as a blue-shirted "possible" (as opposed to a red-shirted "probable" [1]) in the top-team games, so I never got to witness what must have been the strange, and quite likely hilarious spectacle of the matches lower down the pecking order, where the ill-coordinated, the clumsy, the mud-adverse, and the downright unbiddable were forced to enact parodies of games of rugby, cricket, or hockey (the rather elitist games favoured by our state grammar school, in emulation of the private "public" schools). I imagine those weekly rituals of humiliation still play out in the nightmares of their most reluctant participants.

Nowadays, it seems that fewer state schools any longer have their own playing fields, which, after all, occupy valuable real estate, and require constant maintenance by dedicated ground-staff for the appropriate season: mowing, rolling, and re-seeding, and repeatedly re-defining the same old boundaries, touch-lines, and penalty-boxes with white paint. That is, if they ever did: it's possible we may have been spoiled, sports-wise, by growing up in a New Town equipped with custom-built, modern schools, each with at least one large, flat grassy field, laid out so as to get as much edifying mud onto as many pupils as possible. Not to mention gymnasiums, where classmates could monitor and mock each others' physical prowess and differential rates of progress into adolescence [2]. But, if my own children's experience is typical, these days you can go through an entire primary and secondary education without ever suffering the agony of playing the first games of a new season in last year's size-too-small boots, or getting a maternal earful for yet again forgetting to bring home your stinking, wet, and muddied games-kit to be washed. In fact, today it seems school team sports are no longer a compulsory rite of passage for all, but the preserve of the athletic, sport-minded kids only, which must come as a profound relief to everyone else.

This lack of playing fields means that our municipal sports ground is much used by the local school jockocracies during the week, not least for hockey, a game which has seen a resurgence in interest in recent years. One of my regular perambulations takes me through the sports ground, which can be a strangely nostalgic acoustic experience: the shouts of young voices echoing around a playing field on a February afternoon accompanied by the click-clack of hockey sticks, in particular, can still give me chills of anticipation. Not because I'm a hockey fan, but because for every year of my secondary school career I was the First XI goalkeeper.

No, really. I was pretty good, too. As in football, the role of goalkeeper is undemanding for the majority of the game – you simply stand in the goalmouth or lounge against a goalpost – but requires an instant switch to total, undivided attention when the opposing team launches an attack. In a "good" game this hardly ever happens, of course, so the main thing is to stay just alert enough, on a hungover Saturday morning, to notice when this is happening. If you've never played hockey (or indeed cricket) you've probably never wondered what it is like to be hit by a hard ball about the size of a fist, struck with malevolence and travelling at speed. Well, I can tell you: it really fucking hurts. As does taking a knock from a flailing hockey stick. Consequently, the goalie is equipped with protective padding. This, for the entire time I defended the honour of our school on Saturday mornings, consisted of a pair of cricket batsman's pads, a pair of strap-on padded "kickers" to cover my boots, and, um, that was it. I provided my own track-suit and a pair of leather work-gloves, and at some point I bought myself a cricket "box" (rather like a hard, pink, plastic oxygen mask) to slip inside some swimming trunks, but beyond that I faced the enemy onslaught more or less naked. Which, I have to say, does wonders for your ability to be in the moment and react with speed, if only in panicky self-defence.

The path I usually take through the sports ground takes me immediately behind several hockey goals, and I can't help raising an eyebrow when I see how generously the school goalkeeper of today is kitted out: massive, deeply-padded and wide leg-and-kicker combos, an external "box" the size of a car's radiator grille, padded gauntlets, and a helmet – a helmet! – with a barred face-mask like some Cromwellian trooper. Most amazing of all, when a "short corner" is called – a perilous situation usually amounting to the goalie taking a bullet for the team – even the full-backs don protective plastic face-masks, which are kept lying around next to the goal. What wimps! Next thing you know, they'll be playing with a tennis ball and foam-rubber sticks.

My main problem as a goalkeeper – and possibly at least one of the reasons our team had the most abysmal record in years – was that I was easily distracted. Let an attractive girl appear on the touchline, or even an interesting cloud formation start to build up overhead, and my attention might wander. Although, in fairness, occasional inadvertence at one end of the pitch cannot be blamed for a dearth of goals at the other. But I'd certainly have been distracted by that wonderful, map-like image above, which is the late-afternoon sunlight blazing through the cracks in a battered vinyl sign lashed to the fence behind the goal, as seen from the goalie's side. Mesmerising! Mind you, even though I did manage to remain sufficiently alert and quick-witted to stop enough goals to keep my place in the team and, more important, avoid serious injury, the potential hazards of my long-past sporting career have proved useful in, of all places, the dentist's surgery.

Whenever I have needed to explain why I have two missing upper front teeth and one chipped lower front tooth, it has generally been easiest to say, airily, "Oh, I used to be our school hockey goalkeeper... No face-masks in those days!" Your typical dentist can understand, and even approve of that: honourable sports injury, no problem! Whereas the honest truth – that I lost them, aged 17, to a single sucker-punch from an Irish labourer I had unwittingly offended around the back of a pub – has never seemed to go down quite as well. It seems dentists – a conservative bunch, in the main – disapprove of brawling, however one-sided, almost as much as they do of muesli and sugary drinks.

Sports Ground skip

1. This curious nomenclature referred to the likelihood of boys in the top game being picked for the school team. We were all supposed to have two rugby-style shirts, one red with a blue collar, one blue with a red collar. These were much sought-after by the local girls' grammar students for some reason, however, especially the red ones: which gave an unfair advantage, perhaps, to those of us habitually blue-shirted as "possibles", or who, like me, had to improvise their own team kit.
2. This was not as entirely one-way as you might expect. One poor lad in my first secondary class was extremely well-advanced into puberty at age 11 (and well-endowed even by adult standards), which caused much hilarity in the showers among his pinkly pre-pubescent classmates. But only for the first two years...