Play All The Way

Before the Preston game, the weather had been fair enough that Holbeck Moor was fit to traverse directly on the walk to the ground. I was struck, as I often am going across there, by the stark perspective shift at once again being at ground level on a football pitch having now not played an eleven-a-side match in earnest for a good thirty years. The pitch there is of the same quality as those I played on as a youth — pitted and scarred, endless divots and grassless goalmouths trodden to ruin by a full season of anxiously pacing ‘keepers, goalmouth scrambles, and agricultural clearances. But the lines seemed to have been freshly painted white, which made those recollections feel all the more vivid — a reminder that football is a game played with real feet on the real ground with a real ball.

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