Single Parenthood & I: My last game before the pandemic

It was strange to go back through my photos and find that I could remember something quite specific about a match that turned out to be significant, for me.

I have been to a lot of football matches over the years, but there have also been periods of my life when I barely saw any. For a couple of years I worked in a betting shop, and that required working every Saturday. When I was slightly older, in my late twenties and early thirties, I didn’t really have a team locally and couldn’t be bothered to travel. Other times I was myself playing on Saturdays. I’ve had periods of my life when I’ve done home and away with one team, and others when I had something more pressing to do.

And then, at 43, these kids started appearing.

That was essentially how I became an armchair supporter. It’s not that you can’t take a baby to a football match. I would do so occasionally myself. It’s more that it is such a palaver that it’s effectively a waste of time. And in my case when the first one had just stopped being a baby, a second baby appeared. Ta-daaa. And that was me effectively out of the equation for another two years.

Now, I should point out that this all was a decision that I made. No-one was forcing me to stay home most Saturdays throughout the football season. Ultimately, being a parent—whether single or not—means making these decisions for a few years. There’s only so much energy one can expend, after all. The good news there is that freedom starts to return after they hit a certain age, all the more so when you can be more or less certain that they won’t shit themselves in public and require immediate cleaning up.

This weekend is the end of the first week of March, and people have started posting to social media about the last games they went to before the pandemic. I knew I could check—even if just going as a fan I’ll take a couple of photos to remind myself I was there—but I knew it probably wouldn’t be from that particular weekend. I simply wasn’t going matches at that time in the same way that I do now.

I scrolled back on my phone to March 2020, and of course there was nothing there. The last game that I have a photographic record of was the Isthmian League Premier Division match between Worthing and Cheshunt on the 25th January 2020. In one sense, I have no recollection of this game. I had to look up the final score—2-0 to Worthing—and I’d even forgotten that Cheshunt had two players sent off, but for me the match was automatically memorable for something else that happened.

A couple of weeks earlier, I’d been standing outside a hotel in Prague smoking a cigarette, reading a story about how a virus had been causing some concern in a market in Wuhan, China. But this was still a bit of a distance from my mind. I wanted an afternoon out with older kid. It’s important to not make the older one feel forgotten with all the attention that the younger ones need as babies and toddlers.

Behind one of the goals at Woodside Road there is a small patch of grass, and on this particular Saturday afternoon there were a group of kids, a couple of whom were teenagers, using it to kick a ball around. Older was desperate to join them, and I didn’t really have much of an excuse. Another smaller kid—possibly smaller than mine—was already kind of playing along. I was going to have to ask them, wasn’t I?

It wasn’t so much that I was intimidated by this as more like “do I have to?”, but one of the first things that you lose upon parenthood is 90% of your shame, so I walked over to the oldest-looking of the kids. “Uh, excuse me, my kid would really love to kick that ball about with you guys for a bit. Would that be possible? Do go easy on him but let me know if he gets annoying.”

I mean, I wasn’t expecting him to pull blade on me and start showing me Gamergate videos or anything, but I was a teenage lad once, and I know how contrary and annoying they can be in the pursuit of a laugh from their mates, but even allowing for that I was surprised by his response. “Yeah! Sure!”, he said brightly, and so off Older ran into the middle of their game.

Of course, he didn’t have the first idea what he was doing, tearing around in circles in the vague pursuit of the ball. But the older kids knew the score. They let him—and the other kid—feel involved, going down theatrically for the lulz under his comically ineffectual ‘challenges’. After a few minutes he ran back over to me, beaming.

The kids, it turned out, were alright. And this sort of thing has repeated itself a few times over the years. Younger kids love playing with older kids. It makes them feel like bigger kids themselves. And older kids are surprisingly happy to indulge them. More than once I’ve found myself almost taken aback by the kindness of older kids when it comes to putting up with my two over last few years. It’s a thought I always hold in my head whenever I see articles by elderly opinionistas judging younger people harshly.

There would be one match the following September on a roped-off park pitch in Southwick. After that my camera remains blank for football matches until the start of August 2021. And it feels like prehistory, doesn’t it? The further we get in time from the pandemic the more it feels like a very boring and in several respects completely unbelievable disaster movie.

Clapping for the NHS? Matthew Le Tissier turning into a conspiracy theorist? Getting a 99-year-old man to do 100 laps of his garden so the public would pay for his family’s swanky new jacuzzi and then killing off the character on a holiday paid for by… Who wrote this nonsense? If you want to suspend my disbelief, you’ll have to do better than that.

The last Premier League match played was a 4-0 win for Leicester City against Aston Villa on the 9th March. By the time play resumed on the 17th June the stands were empty. Things wouldn’t return to normal for another seven months and for many people they never really did return to much like ‘normal’. January 2020 may only be five years ago, but in some respects it already feels like a bygone age.