The Inside Forward - Facilities

At the bottom of the football ladder, below the Irish team, below the Airtricity league, down another couple of rungs and then just beneath that you’ll find the AUL league where the pitches are rough and the players rougher. The bench is just a bench and the first aid consists of a bucket of icy water and a magic sponge.

This is where teams are considered a bit smug and fancy if they possess a few bibs and cones for their pre-game exercises - my teammates prefer a freshly lit fag as a warm up. Teams with more than two match balls are eyed with suspicion, since the likelihood is that they stole a few from previous opponents, the club’s lettering hastily crossed out and rewritten in permanent ink by the new owners. I’ve actually seen team names carved into the leather with a knife to counter this.

After the match, ninety minutes of battling away in single digit temperatures with pouring rain driven into my face the first thing I want is a warm shower. This is when it really hits home what a low level I’m playing at as such luxury is hard to come by. Having said that the dazzling array of pavilions, crumbling club houses, lorry containers, garden sheds and road lay-bys offered up by clubs as a place to change is remarkable.

I’ve come to the point where I’m satisfied with a 40 foot container with a few seats. Coat hooks are a bonus and a window that isn’t boarded up brightens the mood enormously. More than 10 chairs is helpful but us seasoned players who’ve been around the block a few times know the clubs where it’s a good idea to get in first and nab one of the couple of seats strewn across the muddy floor. Miss out and the next option is to change in the car, sometimes the only option at many clubs.

Any more than this such as a permanent building with a roof and functioning plumbing puts the club right up there as a decent place to visit. At the top of the tree is a hot water shower, the perfect cure for those frozen hands that can barely undo boot laces at full time.

Exceeding all hopes and dreams, the shining beacon of changing rooms, is our annual visit to a local club which borrows facilities from the local University. This means not only piping hot, spacious showers but luxurious under-bench heating and painted white walls that aren’t smeared with mud or possibly something more sinister. There’s even a massage table but unfortunately, and somewhat predictably, no masseuse.

As for our gaff, well we’re somewhere at the upper end of the scale. We’ve a nice brick clubhouse and clean changing rooms with benches. When the gas is on we’ve running hot water, initially. Although the only showers are in the home dressing room so the away team have to traipse through in their towels and share, a strange experience when you’ve been kicking lumps out of each other 10 minutes earlier.

Somewhat uniquely our place also features a giant, hole-free fence protecting the parked cars from wayward shots, always something to bear in mind when parking at any ground. This still didn’t stop one of our so-called strikers looping a particularly awful effort 40 feet up over the barrier and down again plum in the middle of a visiting player’s windscreen. Thankfully our ball wasn’t punctured by the cracked glass.

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