Locker Room: By January you always knew. At least by January your parents always knew. You knew earlier. You knew on Christmas morning (at about 4:23am) whether you had any use for whatever sports-related gifts were deposited under the tree . By January those things were either slightly threadbare from constant use or they were still pristine in their uselessness.
I've never really understood all the ritual moaning that goes on about the supposed crime against consumerism that replica football jerseys are supposed to be. Seeing kids out on the streets this January in their Dubs jerseys, their Man U jerseys and lately, their Munster jerseys seems to me like a symbol of liberation.
Back in the day before mankind had been blessed by the invention of the replica jersey small children were forced to sally forth to play in all manner of embarrassing get ups, most of which was designed for wear by cheesy chat-show hosts.
It's still frightening to recall the horror of first having to present yourself on the street in your "smart" new Christmas jumper designed to last you for at least another two Christmases and then having to return home from a few hours of freedom only to have the new jumper inspected for any signs that you have been playing in it. Is that a grass stain? (Grass stains if scrubbed for all eternity were known never to come out. The only thing worse was to fall into a pool of crude oil.) Is that mud/blood/cider/ horsehair/ crude oil etc etc.
Kids have been freed from all that. The replica jersey (often stitched and sewn by somebody of the child's own age) can be grafted on to the child in January and apart from brief confiscations for service requirements which don't go beyond rinsing and drying, the child may be left in the replica jersey until the following Christmas or the edition of a new replica jersey in colours favoured by the child.
Like the introduction of affordable leather footballs or at least affordable footballs which don't blow away if a passing cat should fart in their direction, this is a good thing. The child today is better equipped and better dressed for his brief journey from aspiration into resigned obesity.
They don't know they're born. When young people engage me in important philosophical debate as to the relative merits of the Pro Evolution soccer series on PlayStation versus the Fifa series I'm always inclined to smile wisely and tell them that whatever they may feel about either game they are blessed to live in times of such opulence. They are living the dream. The first soccer game I ever owned was Super Soccer Striker, an airily hyperbolic title bestowed on a diversion which lacked strikers, soccer or superness. This, though, was back in a time before the Trade Descriptions Act.
The field of play was about 18in long and 8in wide and divided up into little squares drawn on to the cardboard. It was a time before the licensing of player images was commonplace so unless your favourite player was called Tiddlywink and looked (uncannily) like a tiddlywink you were required to use your imagination.
The mention of the word tiddlywink at this point is in fact misleading and may cause the casual reader to imagine that Super Soccer Striker involved at least some of the thrills, skills and whiteknuckle rollercoaster ride, adrenalin-pumping excitement of the actual game of tiddlywinks. Emphatically it did not contain any of these things. Your tiddlywink was passive. He was unflicked. He moved by virtue of whatever cards you drew when it was your turn. You might draw a card which said Short Pass and the tiddlywink could then be moved three squares to the left as you scrunched your eyes and tried hard to hear the crowd roar.
What tension! Having played for perhaps 14 hours of Supper Soccer Striker Stalemate you might find yourself drawing an incredible series of Dribble and Long Pass cards which brought you into the opposition penalty area with the goal at your mercy. You were in what Howard Wilkinson would have called POMO, or the Position of Maximum Opportunity. And then you might draw three short pass cards in a row prompting an outbreak of what Jack Charlton would have called fannying aboot.
Super Soccer Striker was succeeded in our collection by a game which involved eternal battle between the shiny hard plastic Samba Boys of Brazil (all Caucasians) and Manchester United (similarly composed racially). The name of this ingenious game escapes me but it was probably called All Fun and Games Till Somebody Loses an Eye.
The players were affixed to a little plastic pitch like small statues of the saints. Instead of regular feet their legs ended in a small hard spherical arrangement which was melded onto a little spring which in turn disappeared into the board in the centre of a concave little divot which enable the player to " control" the ball. Because of the unfeasibly large size of the players' lowermost limbs it was impossible to accommodate 11-a-side teams on the pitch. Brazil and Man U pragmatically opted for nine-a-side.
The ball, lethally, was a small steel ball bearing which could be propelled at some force merely by placing one's index finger on the head of the player "in possession" and then bending his body back against the tension of the spring. Lifting the finger permitted the player to spring back into his saintly and erect pose and forced the steel ball bearing to fly at quite some speed out of the divot below the player's feet/grotesque plastic sphere towards the goal/eye/knuckles/ gaping mouth of your opponent. The Provos interred the last surviving editions of this game in concrete at the request of John de Chastelain.
Finally after years of wearing bad jumpers and avoiding wrestling promotions which took place on grass or in crude oil slicks one might be rewarded with - ta da - Subbuteo.
Subbuteo was more of a lifestyle than a mere soccer game. From the moment you opened your Club Edition Box with its standard complement of two teams (Everton and bloody Man Utd) you were living a life of aspiration. On the cover of the box the green felt pitch which you now held in your hands looked like a genuine field of dreams, steam pressed, it seemed, on to a custom-built table and illuminated by floodlights which could be purchased and powered by stout batteries for night games of brief duration.
There were photographers and kitmen (but no greasy agents) who could be purchased and placed along the sidelines to add to the authenticity of the thing.
Your parents' lack of a custom-built table upon which to lay out the sacred Subbuteo pitch was critical, though. There was little point in investing in photographers or kitmen if they were to suffer the same fate as full backs and wingers and anyone else who strayed out near the sidelines, being crushed as you knelt on them in your rush to position yourself nicely for some hot flick to kick action.
Many hours were spent repairing the hapless victims of such accidents. Cheaper glues had the catastrophic, surgically irreparable effect of causing the players' feet and lower legs to melt into the spongy sort of goo which made them shorter than Billy Bremner and forced them to sway a little like George Best after a good night.
Bostik was your only man for such surgical emergencies and many were the hours happily spent in the "physio room" repairing broken Subbuteo men while inhaling that dizzily intoxicating glue and conjuring up imaginary little news items about the injury crisis at Goodison where four "wide men" were suffering the increasingly common but distressing injury of leg breaks in both knees, the metatarsal injury of the time.
Say what you like about replica jerseys, Pro Evolution Soccer or Fifa 07. None of them are dangerously addictive or likely to lead to a downward spiral which ends in sports journalism.
