Sunday In The Park

Every Sunday morning thousands of men up and down the country drag themselves out of their beds and head for the park or recreation ground to play Sunday League football. Some of these men are young and fit; many have left their youth behind many years ago and many have only a passing acquaintance with fitness. Some of these men can play a bit; many...well, you get the idea.

With the previous night's Match Of The Day still fresh in their minds, these men dream of emulating Luis Suarez in the penalty area, bossing the midfield like Yaya Toure, of making heroic tackles like John Terry, or pulling off dramatic penalty saves like Joe Hart. The reality is somewhat different.

Dream...

...reality.

The thing about Sunday league football is that it is, in theory at least, exactly the same game as that played in the Premier League: in exactly the same way as literature is exactly the same whether it is a classic novel by Charles Dickens or a self published work by a semi-literate madman from a sink estate.

Premier League matches are played on immaculately manicured pitches tended by an army of groundstaff; Sunday football is played on patches of scruffy grass better suited for growing vegetables. With all of the wet weather we have been experiencing in recent weeks, most parks and recs have been out of action, but I recall the frustration many years ago when I played Sunday football, of having games postponed on Friday evening because of a little overnight rain only for Sunday to dawn dry and bright with the pitches in perfect condition but deemed unplayable due to rain 48 hours earlier. Contrarily one would sometimes arrive on a Sunday morning to find that overnight rain had turned the pitch into a paddy field, that ducks were swimming in a puddle in one goalmouth but despite which the game was on.

Premier League...

 

...Sunday League

Premier League footballers change in luxuriously appointed rooms with state of the art facilities; Sunday league footballers are grateful to have anywhere to change. Again, when I played Sunday football the facilities were variable. At places like Hainault Forest they were quite good; at our home venue at Wanstead Flats they could best be described as adequate; at some venues they were little better than barns. In fact at one ground we called home, Sutton's Manor near Stapleford Tawney, the dressing rooms were a barn.

Premier League...

...Sunday League.

Sutton's Manor is now a private psychiatric hospital, but back in the 1980's it was a rambling manor house with lots of open space, some of which was marked out as football pitches. As our football club had been unable to find a pitch with our local council (well I assume we did not get one, I am still waiting for Havering Council to tell me if my application was successful), we were grateful to find a pitch at Sutton's. Unlike a pitch with the local council, teams had to mark out their own pitches and supply their own goalposts, so one Saturday morning, armed with pegs, twine and a line marking machine, we marked out a pitch. One of our team, one Jerry Moffat, a carpenter by trade, arrived with some lengths of wood and a couple of hours later we had a pitch complete with bespoke goalposts.

The pitches at Sutton's each had distinguishing features. One had overhanging trees so that a long, high ball down one flank might have its progress retarded by low hanging branches. Another had goalposts that bore only a passing acquaintance to normal dimensions. I well recall playing in goal on that pitch; despite my lack of inches I can jump and put my hand over a regulation crossbar, but try as I might with this one I could only just reach the underside of the bar, it must have been a good six inches too high! One Sunday we arrived to find that a tractor had been driven across our pitch leaving two long, shallow trenches. Common sense prevailed and a non-aggression pact was introduced when the ball went in a trench so that one player could extract it before play recommenced.

It seems that council run pitches are deteriorating these days, though. Used by thousands of amateur teams each week, these pitches are in an "abhorrent state" say the Football Association. Pitches are not only currently waterlogged after heavy rain but are also suffering from overuse and a lack of maintenance, in part caused by local government cutbacks. According to Sport England about  1.8 million people play football each week and about 80% do so on council owned pitches that were once heavily subsidised, however budget cuts mean that the cost of hiring a pitch has gone up by as much as 300%.

 

Sunday in the park; typical Sunday League action.

That 1.8 million figure is well down on the 2.14 million that Sport England reported were playing the game as recently as 2007. This decline in playing numbers has no single cause; busier lifestyles, weekend working and other distractions are just some of the factors. The increased cost of running a team (in 2001 a survey by the Grassroots Football Show estimated that the annual cost was around £2,000 and that is likely to be considerably more now), the loss of referees (many of whom have given up the game because of poor player discipline) and a shortfall in facilities are other key reasons. Just as budget constraints mean that local councils have had to cut down on pitch maintenance, many are also selling off playing fields. In my local area for instance, Oldchurch Park, which once boasted numerous football and cricket pitches is now the site of Queens Hospital, while the plot where its predecessor, Oldchurch Hospital, stood is now a housing estate.

Hackney Marshes, perhaps the most iconic Sunday League venue of them all.

Despite the costs, running a Sunday team these days must be easier than it was when I did, if only for the fact that everyone has a mobile phone! One of the biggest obstacles I faced in running a Sunday team  was making sure everyone knew where and when we were playing and actually getting them there. On one occasion we all met up alright but our convoy of cars became separated en route to the ground. Critically the one vehicle that never made it contained our goalkeeper and our main goalscorer; it will probably come as little surprise then that we lost (10-1).

In fact the stress and strain of getting the game on in the first place seriously distracted from my enjoyment of playing on a Sunday. I'll admit to having been no more than an ordinary player; if I had one strength though it was my versatility (I was able to perform equally well - or poorly, in a variety of positions); I played in goal, at left and right back, in midfield and as a forward. On one memorable occasion I managed to notch two goals by half-time but when we were awarded a penalty in the second half my dreams of a hat-trick were shattered when I sent the goalkeeper the wrong way from the spot only to put the ball wide of the post. On another occasion, playing in goal against a team from three divisions above us, I was having a storming game despite the driving rain and had kept the score to 3-0 at the break. One of my team-mates confided in an opponent who had said how well I was playing that I didn't normally play in goal. This appeared to galvanise the opposition who scored a further seven in the second 45 minutes.

After a number of years of struggle in the Barking & District Sunday League Division Three (the bottom division of five), Parkstone FC, for that was us, actually managed to attract some better players, including one Jon Bates who had played Isthmian League football with Barking. He scored 24 goals in 16 games for us that season. It was to prove our final season however as a number of players announced that they would leave in the summer. Faced with trying to recruit new players together with the cost and the time involved I decided to jack it in. Our last hurrah was a double header, played after the season had officially ended and only then because our opponents were in the running for promotion. It was played on a Sunday afternoon and we were forced to field a number of "ringers" one of who had already played on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning! We lost the first game by a single goal and the second 5-3, a game in which I made one goal and scored two. Being Sunday football of course, neither of my goals were particularly orthodox. One was direct from a corner that went through at waist height and eluded everyone before creeping in at the far post, and the second was a penalty. My spot-kick was pushed out by the 'keeper; the ball landed about half way between us. Both me and the 'keeper, and the ball ended up in the net.

It may be understandable that the number of people playing Sunday football is falling, but the game is such a part of the fabric of English life I truly hope that the decline can be arrested or reversed.