Where has the fair play in sport gone?

A youth club football team I once played for encapsulated all that is best in sport. 

We played strictly for the fun of it and, unlike most teams today, we did not wear ourselves out during training.

To be honest, we did no training whatsoever because we found that playing one or two competitive matches a week was enough to keep everyone fit.

Our team was Flottergate Youth Club FC, which had several eccentric players best described as eccentric.

Our centre half used to smoke a pipe throughout the course of a game. He had a superb sense of timing and always managed to remove the pipe from his mouth before heading the ball.

I wore spectacles because contact lenses had not been invented then. If the ball came towards my head, I simply ducked out of the way.

Our centre forward did not have visual problems but he also refused to head the ball because he was frightened of disturbing his trendy Bill Haley kiss curl.

If it rained during a match, I used to don a mackintosh and if it was muddy, our left-back always pulled on a pair of waterproof cycle leggings.

Some people might consider playing football in a mackintosh a little bit unorthodox, but I could never see the point of getting needlessly soaked to the skin.

Our left winger often went missing during a match. If he spotted a girl he fancied, he simply ran off the pitch to do a spot of wooing. I reckon he had more sense than the rest of us put together.

Flottergate Youth Club didn’t win a game during the three years I played for them, but the manager was not sacked because he owned the only football we possessed and no-one could afford to buy another.

The current sporting world could learn a lot from the way the Flottergate Youth Club football team conducted its affairs.

I don’t suppose, though, that we shall ever see Marc Pugh, one of the honest ones, sprinting down the wing in a mackintosh.

GEOFFREY LINDLEY

Clayford Avenue, Ferndown

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