I am 42 years old; which means that whatever sporting prowess that I might have had at the peak of my powers is slowly fading away, as eventually so will I. I am in Jaques's fifth age from "As You Like It" by the Bard in 1599; which means that my bank-grey carpet eyes are severe my beard of formal cut and that I am probably full of wise saws and modern instances (though equally likely to be full of what VP Biden called 'a bunch of stuff' in 2012) and so I play my part. I will eventually pass into second childishness and mere oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything; when I will again rejoin the dust when the wind will pass over me, and I will be gone and my place will remember me not.
While my eyes begin to fail and the light within me which once burned so brightly suddenly begins to burn pale, there still exists within me a stupid desire to go on playing games and sport. I play indoor football on a fortnightly basis, where the stakes are nil but the players play on for the higher ideals of fun and for the fate of the world hanging in the balance. Even though I am bad (and would be rated around about 25 in the game FIFA) because I know that I am bad I have a keener sense of what I can and can not do on the pitch. As football is a team sport, that also means using what little abilities that I have to produce preferable outcomes. That also means that because football requires performing similar actions repeatedly, even the worst player can produce occasional flashes of brilliance due to the law of large numbers.
However before I tell of the story of what happened on Tuesday night, I wish to tell of another story which makes this look utterly feeble.
In a Year 9 PE Class we were playing a game of indoor football in the school's gymnasium. One of the features of the school's gym is that the basketball hoops and backboards are cable stayed and can be pushed back to lie against the walls at either end. Most of the time, they were left out and as such, they hung over the ends of the baselines; to where a regulation position for the hoops should be. On this particular afternoon, the basketball hoops and backboards were left out and the goals for the game of indoor football were set up, so that the pitch was defined by the basketball lines.
I was standing in the Left Back position (because even as a 15 year old, my natural tendencies were to stand behind the play and then cut off any attackers coming through) and my friends Saiman and Denis were playing in central defence. As Saiman was a relatively smallish chap and an opposition play had come through to barrel in on him and steal a cheap goal, someone on our side told him to thump it up field which he dutifully did.
Saiman's thump up field, which was kicked from possibly no further away than three feet from the baseline, was the truest and straightest kick in the history of ever. It was so true and straight that it drew a perfect centre line strike, sailed through the basketball hoop at the other end of the court, and because it had the deftest amount of topspin on it, it landed and then with one perfectly dead bounce, rolled the remaining six inches at the other end for a goal.
Strike. Sail. Swish (nothing but net). Plop. Spin. Goal.
Sports and games are one of the very few areas in life where it is possible for very brief periods to obtain perfection. By my reckoning that was a 28 yard strike, into a goal which can not have been anymore than about 6ft tall by possibly 8ft wide. Not even Ronaldinho's free kick against England in the 2002 World Cup from 35 yards out had this degree of precision and perfection. Moments of perfection on the sporting field are so rare that they end up being named with a special label. Shane Warne's "Ball of the Century" to dismiss Mike Gatting for 4 at Old Trafford in the 1st Test of the 1993 Ashes springs to mind; as does Greg Murphy's "Lap of the Gods" at Bathurst in 2003. Eric Cantona's 85th minute strike to give Manchester United an FA Cup victory in 1996 has remained in my memory to this day, and then there's moments like Nadia Comăneci's performance at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow which actually did score perfect 10's across the board.
Legendary sporting careers are built upon genuine skill and talent and while that's worth its own accolades, that's still based upon being better than everyone else consistently. Moments of perfection are like flashes that care not for ability or talent and will visit when the exact moments of circumstance line up perfectly. That still needs some initiative to pull it off but those fleeting moments of perfection are no respecter of people. They visit whom they will.
There is always some element of luck involved with any goal because the world is a complex system and the opposition is always against you but even if that is true, Saiman's goal which then took on legendary status and got the nickname of the "ten pointer" burned itself in my memory. To date, I still think that I witnessed the single greatest moment in sport that I have ever seen to this day in that gymnasium.
Fast forward 28 years and on Tuesday night, in a game of indoor football in an indoor cricket/netball/football venue from an almost dead ball situation, I spotted my team mate JJ at the other end of the field and sent a deliberately flighted chip pass over the heads of everyone; to where he dutifully tapped in a goal. I stress that I didn't score a goal; nor did I come anything close to Saiman's "ten pointer" but that chip pass landed on a sixpence within where I wanted it to be and JJ's tap in proved that my sense of what I can and can not do on the pitch is still excellent but it is still not as perfect as Saiman's goal from 28 years ago.
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