The Inside Forward - Conditions

Everyone loves complaining about the weather. It’s either too cold, too warm, too wet, too dry, too windy, too sunny, not sunny enough. But as long as the elements remain one notch below catastrophic, us amateur footballers, some willingly, others less so, will take to the field at the weekend to do battle against each other.

It’s not always the players who can be a bit unenthusiastic to run around in adverse conditions. Whilst cowering in the dressing room this season on a wet and windy afternoon I had a nice view of the referee do everything in his power to get the game called off. He stringently checked the nets, every stretch of marshy pitch and even asked the keeper if he was able to actually kick the ball out of the penalty box against the howling wind. When both managers finally convinced him to go ahead and he couldn’t think up a good enough reason for it not to, he hid in the dressing room until 10 minutes after scheduled kick off time, maybe in the hope we’d give in and go home.

At the other end of the scale was a referee who was so eager to play a game on a clear and frosty Sunday morning, not even a rock solid frozen pitch would deter him. He declared the sun would be up over the hedge soon so we’d give it ten minutes and reassess things. Needless to say the mercury stayed sub-zero and we trotted off home, some of us frustrated that we’d stayed away from the pub the night before, others secretly delighted that they hadn’t.

Allowing the game to go ahead in freezing conditions brings its own hazards though. In junior leagues my manager would advise us to wear our mother’s tights to stay warm. Most of us weighed up the benefits versus the consequences of being spotted by the opposition wearing hosiery and opted for cold legs instead. This explains why our left back was seen at full time warming up his toes in the manager’s cup of tea.

Occasionally though, Cork being Cork, all the elements will combine and for such a sustained period that games are called off for weeks on end, leaving us without a match for months. The weekly ritual will repeat itself over and again: go to training, look forward to the match, get the cancellation, wait until the following week.

It can get to the point where everyone wants to play so much we’re prepared to go out in anything, especially if we’ve travelled all the way to North Cork early on a Sunday morning. This is why we’ve seen sights such as the referee running for shelter in a neighbouring hedge when the pouring rain turned into a violent hailstorm. At times like these it seems a long way to go until the warm and pleasant spring games come along, when the grass grows back between each fixture and the subs don’t need to shelter inside the clubhouse to stay dry any more.