Sunday, June 28, 2009

Aches and strains

My left big toe is sore. My right achilles tendon is swollen. My knees are stiff, and the right one is grazed. I can hardly see straight I'm so tired. And my head is hot. I've got that Sunday evening feeling back. The feeling of pain and contentment, that so punctuated my 20s and early 30s; and I love it.

For the second Sunday running, I've been on my FA Level 1 coaching course at Wilmslow High School. The coach is a proper football geezer called Bill Prendergast, who's been at Crewe Alex and Manchester City. He has similar values to me on kids football and brings a real element of fun to the sessions.

While the lessons on the rules of football and how to operate at junior football level are classroom based, most of the time is spent being subjects in the other 22 coaches drills. It is absolutely brilliant fun. The others are either young blokes about my age who want to help the clubs their children play for, or even younger lads who are keen as mustard and brilliant at football.

Each of us was given a training routine from the FA course handbook to run, starting with a gentle warm up called "traffic lights".

My session involved getting 12 volunteers to play "three pots in" or "three and in" or "Wembley" as we knew it as kids, on four separate pitches, coned off my me. It should have been so simple, but I over complicated it, confused the rest of the players and had to run through it all again. I think part of the problem was I was 19th out of 22 and the rest of them were mentally shot. And I didn't really understand the pitch diagrams in the book.

We're being assesed independently next week, so we have to get it right in every regard. Starting with a session plan.

We drew our running order today for next week's big test. I'm 20th. Wish me luck.

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