January Window

Начало книги

I hate Christmas. I’m almost forty years old and it seems that I’ve hated it for more than half my life. I used to play professional football and I now coach others to do the same, so Christmas is a time of year I associate with a fixture list that’s as crowded as Hamleys toy shop. It means early-morning training on frostbitten pitches, niggling hamstrings that don’t have time to be properly rested, boozed-up fans expecting much more of their team than seems reasonable — to say nothing of the high expectations entertained by an unforgiving club owner or chairman — and so-called easy games against bottom-of-the-table chumps that can end up biting your arse.

This year is no different. We play Chelsea away on Boxing Day with the result that early on Christmas morning when ninety-nine per cent of the country is busy opening presents, going to church, watching the telly in front of a nice fire, or just getting pissed, we’re at our training ground in Hangman’s Wood, Thurrock. Two days later, on the twenty-eighth, we’re away again, to Newcastle, before a New Year’s Day game at home to Tottenham Hotspur. Three games in six days. That’s not sport, that’s a fucking ironman triathlon. When people who are involved in professional football talk about the beautiful game, they generally don’t include the Christmas holidays. And whenever I remember that Boy’s Own story about a friendly football match in no man’s land during the First World War between British and German soldiers, I think to myself, yeah, I’d like to see them try that without a goalkeeper who’s properly fit and fielding a lazy cunt of a midfield centre who’s hoping to get transferred to another club for double his already stratospheric wages during the January window.

Читать дальше →