Sport in the Second Year

Cross Country

Now we were bigger and stronger, we ran further; the same course as before with a bit added on. It made little difference to me, plodding along in the middle. It just meant the speed merchants were further ahead and the gasping fatties were further behind.

Football 

The under 13’s football team lost. Every dog has its day, they say, and ours came with the win at Temple. Now we were back to being useless, even with Chiv in the team.

Rugby

Playing for the school rugby team was no consolation for missing out on the football team. Though I enjoyed the camaraderie of away trips to Sheerness and Gravesend, I didn’t really like Rugby. A lack of speed, strength, ability and aggression didn’t help, but Rugby is a fifteen a side game and mine was a body to make up the numbers. I didn’t really understand it either. When putting the ball in at line outs and scrums, if the ball wasn’t played dead centre it had to be retaken. So where was the advantage to the team in possession? And why couldn’t we put our smallest player in the line out and just lift him on shoulders to catch the ball? And I was useless at drop kicks. I just couldn’t get the timing right. If nobody was watching I’d sometimes try a sly one in the warm up but I rarely got it right. More often than not, I kicked fresh air. We had some decent players, notably Brian Lack, Raymond Wright, Robert Carrick and Richard Pascall, but they were fighting a losing battle with me and other makeweights in the team.

‘Unlucky Brian,’ or ‘well done Brian,’ we’d shout, each time Brian Lack attempted a penalty kick or a conversion. Then it was back to getting crushed in the scrums and trampled in the rucks. Although…

‘Well done, Lynch! Run! Run!’ Mister Charlesworth shouted when I intercepted a pass on a mud bath of a pitch at St. Georges. With a clear run to their posts from twenty five yards out, I set off at full gallop for my first try for the school team. Glory beckoned, but it wasn’t to be. In three strides I’d been flattened and dispossessed.

Shit!

In the gym

Instead of the usual monkey bars and vaulting horses, we had a game of football one day.

‘Hooray!’

‘Well done Lynch!’ said Mister Charlesworth, when I stuck a long leg out and made a last ditch, crunching tackle. A word of praise: wonderful; a single moment of glory that made up for so many disappointments.

In the changing rooms with Mister Charlesworth...

'Have you had a shower, boy?' 

'Yes Sir.'

'Then why's your hair dry? Go on, get in that shower!'

‘The rest of you make sure your hair is dry… all of it.'

‘Wahay!’ the boys jeered.

Mister Charlesworth grinned.

In the changing rooms without Mister Charlesworth…

Sooner or later, someone was going to get chucked out of the changing rooms, bollock bare. And so it came to pass that the laughing Stanley Slaughter got bundled out of the door by Brian Lack, Trevor Hickson and Raymond Wright. How we laughed when they pushed hard against the door, preventing Stan’s re-entry. The design of the walls outside the door screened the helpless Stan from three sides, but there was nothing he could do about his bare arse being open to the view of any girls coming out of the gym.