Finding his feet

LittleBear's footballing adventures at the tail-end of 2018 were not one hundred percent filled with joy. In fact, I spent a large portion of the Christmas holidays wondering how I could return him to a state of loving playing again, or whether we were going to have to give up on being in a team if it caused him so much distress.

We talked about it a bit, about how amazing he is when he's confident, and how he mustn't let himself feel defeated. We read books about football and about footballers, and compared his emotional response to losing to that expressed by Raheem Sterling, Jordan Pickford and Harry Maguire. Not because those are particularly his favourite players, but because we happen to have acquired books about them*. It appears to have genuinely helped to discover that players he watched playing at the World Cup suffered disappointment, setback and loss in lower league teams, but they didn't give up.

Football training for his team started last weekend, and he was my determined demon again, playing with and against his friends, constantly on the go, constantly running, constantly battling for the ball. I began to feel a sprinkling of hope that a rest and a break from playing football had been what he needed to bring back a bit of his confidence.

Then we had training last night. And in the mini-match at the end, his side let a goal in (not through any particular fault of his) and there was my LittleBear, standing in the corner of the pitch, tears pouring down his cheeks, while his coach crouched beside him to give him a cuddle and convince him not to give up.

My heart sank. The hoped-for resilience was looking like an illusion already, having lasted less than a week. Even conceding a goal in training was too much for him. I went to bed dreading today's match. My only ray of hope this morning was that LittleBear was excited about playing and looking forward to the match.

And?

It went better than I could have imagined. LittleBear scored the first goal, and in defence put in an utterly brilliant sliding dive across the goal mouth to push the ball wide of the post and deny the opposition a goal. And, despite going behind, my boy didn't droop, didn't cry, didn't give up, but ran and ran and ran, and tackled, and dribbled, and turned, and shot, and cleared. And I was so very, very proud of my Player of the Week. Not because of his goal, not because of the final score-line, but because he kept trying and enjoyed himself. I have spent the rest of the day on cloud nine, because I had my happy, confident, awesome little footballer back.

So just for now, for today, I don't have to wonder whether letting him play football is the right thing to do. The pure joy on his face, his pride in himself, his delight in skipping round defenders, spinning away from them and sprinting into the box, all of those things were enough to tell me I can't keep him away from his game.

It was almost enough to make up for the cat poo on the carpet this morning.


* LittleBear participates in a "Book Savings Club" at school. He saves 50p a week, and at the end of the term gets the chance to spend his savings on books that the club have managed to buy in bulk (and therefore at a discount. He came home with two footballer biographies and has utterly fallen in love with reading them.