The Twilight Years

in boxin, they say any given person has only a certain number of fights in him.

as i have just returned from a rare evenin out, i must say i'm quite happy to have watched the rather badly-edited million dollar baby. i'm also glad that a childhood friend came all the way from luton to visit the den of the wolf.

still it does fuck all to soothe the pain of an old beaten dog.

i missed a penalty that knocked us out of the final of a minor competition i won two years ago with a different team. i sent it hard and fast to the keeper's top right but he knew. the man just saw it comin. i didn't know what i did wrong. when the dust settled and the floodlights went, it occurred to me that maybe i didn't do anythin wrong after all. maybe i just ain't got it anymore.

i like to think of myself as a pretty accomplished player. the beautiful game had given me so much in the past ten years. sometimes i remember it all as if it were yesterday i bought those ugly reebok boots. when i first saw steve mcmanaman in euro96 shimmyin past them dutch plonkers and how i would run to my garden and try to do the same with the motionless road skittles i nicked (and was almost arrested for). when i would take the same shot over and over again with my left because i couldn't cross with it and how the neighbour was most unhappy when i did succeed in liftin it high above the fence. when i would clean my boots religiously like they were made from my own skin as leather. when i would go to bed and dribble in my sleep and dream of puttin an overheard volley past peter schmeichel.

somewhere in that boyish eagerness, i got good. i had a violent shot with my right and an exquisite curl with my left (because i was hittin it wrong). i could head the ball harder than most players could kick it. people say that the best thing i had was that i could run like the wind. i sometimes think i break the sound barrier each time they i go down that right flank. i used to be able to pin 100m in 11secs tops but the most wonderful thing i had was actually heart. i was 52kg of pure heart. i had enough heart in me give two hundred heart transplants. in the 93rd minute i'd be runnin as if we're gonna score three more before the whistle when we're already down 2-0 and by mother mary i believed it. once we were down 3-0 at the breather in a match and i put four past the keeper in the second half. i never once believed in that match we would lose. sometimes when i did lose hope even my team-mates wouldn't let me. bob would pass the ball to me in defence and say "zee, take this now and score." and i almost always did or burst a lung tryin.

fast forward to the present, and all that heart just comes second to charcoal lungs and creaky joints. i can't run 40yards without lookin like i just had seven orgasms. demonio #7 was not only to mark my shirt but the number of minutes i could last before bein subbed. one might say it's just a fitness problem but that's just bein kind. you don't need fitness to play that 30yard ball accurately. you don't need fitness to plant the header beyond the keeper's reach. and most of all, you don't need fitness to score a penalty.

for a wolf who once played over four shadows under stadium floodlights, those glorious days seem more and more distant each time i play a stray pass. i feel like the chinese paul gascoigne. each time i underhit a ball, it hurts me twice as much knowin how i used to hit it. and each time i overhit a ball, it hurts me twice again knowin how i used to have that velvet touch.

as patrick said to me last night in an attempt to console, "sometimes i can see glimpses... a touch here and there." well mate, i see glimpses too. a flash of sublimeness here and there maybe. but everythin else in between i see just shadows.

oh where is my nan when i need her. i ain't got no more fights left in me, really.

ciao.

_________________________________________________________

Word Of The Wolf today is celerity \suh-LAIR-uh-tee\,

noun:
Rapidity of motion or action; quickness; swiftness.

"In the celerity of ageing, many athletes are not allowed to forget that the day they are past their prime is unceremoniously sooner than they think they know."

________________________________________________________
Celerity is from Latin celeritas, from celer, "swift." It is related to accelerate.