Sometimes when you poke a dead horse with a pointy stick a miracle occurs and it springs back to life.
Thus it is with Fifty Shades of May. There it was, lying dead in a ditch when the two weasels who run this site, Luke and Scott, took the pointed stick to it and brought it back to life.
A quick word of introduction. Fifty Shades of May (or FSOM) was produced by me, John May. After years spent working in provincial sports journalism I went to work for BBC Sport in London.
When the BBC decided to move its sports department to Salford, as a true Son of the South who believes t’North begins the other side of Winchester, the world of cobbled streets, whippets, flat caps and black pudding was not for me.
Luckily, the incestuous world of journalism came to my rescue and an old colleague on the Southern Daily Echo offered me the chance to set up and run the Sports Journalism course at Solent University in Southampton, which is where Scott and Luke came under my tutelage.
Being a bit of a gobs****, FSOM is right up my street as it offers me the opportunity to pontificate and cast my opinions on sporting matters to a wider audience than four walls and the muppets down the pub.
There are things I need to get off my chest and you might feel inclined to listen and share them.
You might not agree with what I have to say but I don’t give a tinker’s cuss whether you do or not. There’s no point in being gifted an opinion column if you don’t have an opinion.
So here goes.
Grassroots football
I give recreational, 11-a-side, grass roots football 10 years, 15 max.
Grassroots football is dying on its a*** and we should be very concerned.
The first question that poses is where future professional players will come from?
Very few, if any, pro footballers spring up from Sunday League football these days.
The professional game ruthlessly looks after itself as academies hoover up the talent so the guys and girls who trot out to play on Sunday mornings are – frankly – those who aren’t going to make the grade as Premier League stars. But that doesn’t deter them, and as they plough though the mud, they can still think that guy in the cap and track cost on the touchline is a pro scout.
We should be concerned about the demise of the grassroots game for another and basic reason – it is a vital part of our sporting fabric and heritage.
The Football Association will happily and glibly tell you there are more people plying football than ever before, and the flip charts and powerpoints they will trot out to prove that, might bell be right.
But the FA are playing a numbers game, There has been a great and welcome uptake in the female game, which has swelled numbers but while the FA claim more people are playing, you need to ask what type of game.
Poor grassroots pitches and facilities
Perhaps having seen the writing on the wall theselves, the FA happily inves money on all-weather pitches, A smart, spanky pair of 4G artificial pitches can be marked out to each host two short-sided games. There is some value in this. It does get more kids playing and the nature of the game means those kids will all get more touches of the ball than I did as a schoolboy left winger when there were games I would risk exposure on the on the barren, windswept steppes, seeing the ball only when a sharp gust of wind blew it in my direction by accident.
Up and down the country you will see artificial, pitches springing up, may of them council-operated but with generous funding from the FA. Let’s face it, no cash-strapped council is going to refuse a dollop of cash to help fund leisure facilities.
The problem is that their other facilities are pretty much left to their own devices. Lack of money for pitch maintenance means Sunday League players march out on to pitches that are marginally worse than Great War battlefield while they face competition for access to the changing facilities from chemical warfare scientists
What middle-aged man, with Sunday pub-lunch pressure from the missus and kids will put himself through that when he can pop along to his local midweek five-a-side league where he can play a game with lots of touches of the ball, luxuriate in a hot, clean shower and complete his evening with a pint in the bar?
Credit: X/@savegrassroots
Dwindling numbers at grassroots level
More people might be playing but there is less football available. Forty years ago in the Southampton area, you could pick to plonk your team in the City of Southampton Sunday Football League, the Commercial Houses League (ostensibly for ‘business’ teams), the New Forest League and the Meon Valley League, all thriving competitions.
There was also the Wednesday League, a legacy of when towns had early midweek closing and workers were expected to work Saturday. The Wednesday League was made of players who could skive or wangle a Wednesday afternoon off, such the Post Office, Hampshire Police, HM Customs, university and sixth-form college teams who entered to give callow, spotty 16-18 year-olds their first taste of proper men’s football.
That was all well and good until we faced the military teams who also entered, Royal Army Pay Corps at Worthy Down (we made the mistake of thinking that team was composed of spectacled pay-office clerks, without realising Army payroll was guarded and protected by the Military Police!) and 17 Port Regiment, Royal Engineers who smelled blood like Tiger sharks and in one notorious afternoon, put two of our players in hospital, one with a shattered upper-arm (the result of a Harald Schumacher-Patrick Battiston collision with a goalkeeper) and another with concussion.
Of those competitions, only the City of Southampton league survives.
If the FA tell us more people than over are playing, where has all the football gone, and why is it disappearing?
Social habits have changed, as previously hinted at, and with the huge shortage of referees (another story for another time) forcing many players to consider their limbs and safety, it may be no small wonder players are abandoning grassroots football quicker than you can say Costa Concordia.
Who from the next generation wants to be an administrator?
But perhaps the biggest threat is the lack of those prepared to run the game.
Grassroots football is staunchly amateur, another tradition of the game. The leagues are run and administered by unpaid officials (of which I am one) who give up evenings to meet to ensure there is a game for those who want it.
But having wanted it and got it, nobody wants to pick up the baton and take it on.
The youngest member of the management committee of the Southampton Sunday League is in his early 60s. Repeated appeals for new members fall on ears deafer than Beethoven’s, or embarrassed shuffling of feet and staring at shoes at the annual general meeting.
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon there is a marked reluctance to put something back into the game from those who have spent years enjoying it with no thought of what happens after them,
I don’t see any sign of that changing, especially while the FA are happy to play a numbers game apparently loaded against 11-a-side grassroots football.
So if in 10-15 years time you are walking your dog or watching hooded youths ride scrambling bikes across that big, grassy open space, pause and give a thought to what once went on there.
