It is hard not to miss Sunday League’s golden era
Jim White recalls bittersweet days of dodgy kits, dodging your subs and trying to recall the ringer’s name for the ref
The Wizards had folded under the inescapable pressures of growing old together
The new football season is here. And for the amateur hacker, the impending sense of alarm is gathering pace. Anyone who has ever tried to organise a Sunday league team will recognise it. I still get flashbacks of the organisational panic that used to grip me at this time of the year. Will we have sufficient players? Is there enough in the bank account to finance that new kit in Milan colours that our preening centre-forward insists is a pre-requisite of him not joining the lot down the road? Plus did anyone actually fill in the paperwork to register us for the local league?
It is all there in a wonderful new book by Ewan Flynn called We Are Sunday League. For 10 years he organised his mates into a side that competed in the Edmonton Sunday League in north London. They were called The Wizards, which, he admits was a rather impoverished name given that their pub team rivals were called things like Zenit St Whetstone and Athletico Bill Plough. That’s the thing about Sunday football: the nomenclature is invariably more imaginative than the passing.
Anyone who has played the game at a lowly level will be familiar with the issues Flynn faced in his time as captain/secretary of the Wizards. For example, the practical drawbacks of responding to the inevitable, last-minute hangover shortage of personnel by calling on an unregistered player then realising that, to comply with the team sheet you have supplied to the referee, you have to refer to them by the name on the paperwork.
“Halfway through calling out their real name, you would remember you were supposed to be calling them something else and try to adapt mid-shout,’’ says Flynn. ‘‘It got worse when a player playing under someone else’s name got booked and couldn’t remember the name he had been told before the game started.”
When I met Flynn, he said his ambition for the book was to see someone reading it on the Tube. If he had seen me doing just that, he would have caught me snorting with laughter, unable to control myself at the recognition of the world he brings to the page.
But the sad thing is, the way things are going, the pool of those who will nod in appreciation of his prose will grow ever smaller. In a postscript, after the Wizards folded under the inescapable pressures of growing old together, he calls up the Edmonton Sunday League secretary to thank him for his efforts.
At its peak in the Fifties, there were dozens of teams drawn from this small area of suburbia, divided into over 10 divisions. Even when the Wizards joined 15 years ago there were six. This season there are two. And the secretary fears it will not be around for its centenary in 2024.
Fewer and fewer are engaging in organised 11-a-side football. Time poor, these days we prefer five-a-side at the Power League, where you can just turn up, without matching kit, referees or paperwork. It does not matter if your goalie is a ringer, or you met your midfielder maestro in the car park just before kickoff. No game is cancelled because the pitch is waterlogged or the council forgot to mark the goal line.
There you can have a kickaround without the need to organise a kitwashing rota or collect subs (as Flynn recounts, there is always someone who forgets their wallet; usually the same person).
It’s much easier these days, more modern. Though reading Flynn’s lovely nostalgic account, you cannot help feeling those who play the new way are missing out on a bittersweet experience. We Are Sunday League by Ewan Flynn, Pitch Publishing £9.99