Before anyone panics, I'm (moderately) certain that this is only going to be a two-part series. This episode is about my lovely boy, and my attempts to manage his hopes and expectations so that he doesn't follow the same contorted mental path that I have, and accepts that doing things for fun is OK, being average at things is OK, and enjoying his life is more important than winning. Nothing like setting myself a nice easy goal.
There have been Things Afoot in the life of LittleBear this year that I haven't written about here, partly for fear of jinxing things, and partly for fear of turning into one of those parents who casually drops into conversation how Tarquin passed his grade 8 Euphonium exams when he was seven*.
As assiduous readers will have noticed, LittleBear loves football. He plays football at every opportunity, he watches football at every opportunity, he can remember (in mind-numbingly tedious detail) the events of matches lost in the mists of time to normal mortals. So, in the brief, golden window of less-lockdown during the summer holidays, he attended a football summer club for a week. And at the end of the week, not only did he receive a trophy for being "Player of the Week", we also received an email telling us that he'd been identified as having "strong attributes" and would be invited for a five week trial with the Norwich City FC regional development program.
And thus followed five very cold, very wet, very windy Friday evenings spent in the middle of the fens, watching my gorgeous little boy training with a group of very talented other little boys (including, fantastically, two of his team mates from our team). I loved the experience of being able to just watch him train and play, and not being responsible for eleven little boys' boot laces and bumped heads, and social distancing, not to mention actually trying to keep them focussed on the training exercise in progress. And I loved watching a really, really good coach at work. It was genuinely inspirational to see how he kept the boys attention, kept them working hard, didn't suffer any nonsense, and yet still allowed them enough of a free rein that they were having fun and laughing.
But, enough about me, back to LittleBear. After a nervous wait, during which it turned out Norwich City FC mis-typed my email address and therefore didn't send us the all-important invitation, my little boy has been asked to join their Player Development Centre. I am absolutely over the moon for him, but it has now opened a huge can of worms for us. Because football clubs are ruthless. They have no loyalty, they have only the desire to be the best and coach the best. And year on year, they assess who "the best" are, from their existing children and any others they scout, and they "let go" the ones who don't make the cut. Some day, LittleBear will be "let go". It could be after one year, two years, five years or ten. But it will happen, and we need to prepare him for that, and for the fact that it doesn't matter. Because he isn't Lionel Messi, and he never will be, but that's OK. He doesn't have to be the best, he just needs to be himself, and he can love football and play football and have a brilliant time no matter what level he reaches.
Which is how we generated our Football Hierarchy - people who live, breathe and love football, but have stopped at different steps along the playing scale:
Coach A: plays grassroots football, coaches grassroots football, loves the game passionately but never played anywhere above grassroots.
Coach W: coaches grassroots football and in his younger days played for a non-league side. Genuinely talented, loves the game but never came close to a professional career in it.
Junior Brown: plays for Scunthorpe, has had a successful but not stellar career pootling up and down the lower reaches of the English league system. Outside the clubs he's played for, has anyone heard of him?
PE teacher: former professional footballer for a second-tier club, former football manager, now LittleBear's PE teacher. A man who made a career out of football at a fairly high level, but probably hasn't been heard of by most of the country.
James Tarkowski: a stalwart of the Burnley Premiership team, with two international caps to his name, but still hardly a household name.
Marcus Rashford: Man United superstar, England superstar, champion of children, and man everyone (in the UK) has heard of.
Lionel Messi: there's only one Lionel Messi.
Each one of them reached a point where they knew they were not going to be Lionel Messi (except Lionel Messi, don't be pedantic). But each one of them kept playing, kept enjoying the game. Each one of them will have been "let go" at some point in their playing life, and each one of them will have carried on anyway, playing and training and enjoying the game without being Lionel Messi. The end of one path isn't the end of everything. And for every player who reached even the modest heights of Scunthorpe United, a thousand children didn't. And most of those thousands of children who love football will never rise above the lowest rung in our Football Hierarchy, but they will still play football and love it.
So this is the conversation we've been having with LittleBear, and he has helped craft the Football Hierarchy, in an attempt to make sure he sees and feels and knows the value of playing football just for fun. An attempt to help him see the huge numbers of people who play and love football without it being a career. And while it's brilliant to have been invited to join a big club's youth development scheme, at some point that will end, and it won't be a reflection on him, and it won't change how much we love him or how proud we are of him. And nobody becomes Lionel Messi.
Meanwhile, I'm still super happy for my little Claret and Blue Canary**.
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| Someone at NCFC will probably be quite cross about this |
* Note: LittleBear's name is not Tarquin, and he does not play the Euphonium.
** For those who don't pay eagle-eyed attention to English football, The Bear family's beloved Burnley play in claret and blue, while Norwich City FC are nicknamed the Canaries, with said bird on their crest.
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