ABOVE HEAD HEIGHT

Papers, Talksport and Amazon this week have been revealing the excitement of "five-a-side" football in a book called "Above Head Height" by James Brown and published by Quercus. It is one of those books we could all write, based on our personal experiences with the wonderful game. James' book has managed to get him on the public stage and fair does to him.

The book was sparked by the untimely death of a footballing colleague, James Kyllo, who played regularly with James and others. They were all there at his funeral, a motley crew who met on Wednesday evenings for 5-a-side and Sundays for 9-a-side. It didn't really matter about numbers, so long as the sides were even. Sometimes they played indoors on wood, sometimes outside on astro and occasionally on grass. This short clip is quite funny!
http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/row-zed/best-5-side-goal-you-6198819

Which brings me to "our" Walking Football at Penistone Church FC, which began about a year ago and is still hanging in there. James from PCFC ran the first series of meetings on the club's astro and was given funds by Sheffield and Hallamshire FA to establish Walking Football at one of their clubs. This is part of the FA's mission, spreading the great game to all corners of the country.

Fair enough, the funds bought a strip (black and white striped shirts and black shorts), some balls and cones and bibs; all vital stuff to run a game of casual small-sided football. But the FA wanted more than just casual play, the point being that we would enter tournaments and makes the whole affair bigger, justifying the TV advertisement sponsored by Barclays-you may have seen it?

We tried quite hard to get numbers, advertising in local shop windows and at the club, but Walking Football is aimed at 50+ year olds so numbers varied from 4 to 12. Sadly, there was never a regular group large enough to say we were going to make waves in the 5-a-side tournaments at Rotherham or Doncaster. Actually we did play at a couple of tournaments but these seemed a little bit too competitive for us elderly gentlemen so we agreed to keep it low key.
We have cut back our ambitions playing only friendly games once a week at 4pm. This is just right for us retired folk but of  course we might be missing out on some "youngsters" (50 year olds??) who might be at work at 4pm on a Thursday.

So the new tournament kit is not used and we wear our own clothing, enough layers to keep the Pennine weather out of our blood. We don't really know everybodies' surnames and certainly don't know one another well enough to use nicknames, snatched christian names are just about appropriate. There's Steve the Professor, Brian the Jock and Patrick, who last week turned up for the first time, a professional brass player, he lasted about 35 minutes before he pulled a calf muscle. That might have been because this was the first time he had got above a jog for years. He didn't warm up mind you,none of us did, reckoning our long experience did not warrant such trivialities. Believe me walking football uses muscles we haven't discovered for decades.

I could write a book about this, but it has already been done by James; nip out and get the book. It's cheaper on Amazon by the way.