17. WHEN SATURDAY’S GONE By Jonaldo

Hand Grenades

Previously I described my talent for being in the right place at the right time to notch typical Jonaldo goals. I mentioned I don’t exclusively score easy goals either, and in all honesty, it has to be said with a modicum of humility that I tend to make most goals I score look easy. But I don’t go out there just thinking I will play the role of the Fox in the Box. I enter the arena fired up by something the great Bill Shankly said. Not to me, obviously, but to Kevin Keegan. He once told him to let off hand grenades all over the pitch. And that’s my philosophy. I always intend to give my opponents a tough time.

None of my opponents ever say post match that it felt like I had let off hand grenades. The only player who has received a comment along those explosive lines was Losing Derek when he turned up in a tight shirt one week which didn’t flatter him at all and showed he was carrying a lot of extra poundage. When he tumbled and fell on the edge of the penalty area, Southey remarked that it had started an earthquake in Scotland! But it’s rare for me to leave the pitch thinking that I hadn’t followed Shankly’s advice.

At times my partner laughs at how seriously I take the football.

‘It’s just a bunch of old men kicking a ball about,’ she says contemptuously. But that’s ridiculous and rather ill informed. Last week, for instance, two of the twenty-two players were only in their fifties.

She finds it incredulous that, for instance, I once, in the last minute of a game with the score at two all, put my head to a cross where others wouldn’t to notch the winner. I didn’t actually see it hit the back of the net as my nose was busted having made contact with the back of Derek O’ Connor’s bonce. Bryan lifted my face off the artificial turf and delightedly informed me I had scored the winner as the final whistle blew. When I got gingerly to my feet with blood pouring down my face, Mars Bar Derrick helped clean me up and administer smelling salts from the First-Aid Box. Only then was I able to fully absorb the beauty and thrill of it all. Moments like that cannot be bought. They can only be achieved through the application of skill and more than a touch of bravery.

My partner, and some others, wonder if I am off my tree injuring myself to simply impress a bunch of over-the-hill footballers. But that is simply nonsense. Everything in life is relative. Professional footballers don’t entertain such ludicrous logic. A striker for West Ham United wouldn’t think if the chance came to notch the winner against Chelsea, that he better not as he might get hurt and if he scored it would only impress about 50,000 dyed in the wool Hammers fans and about a million other viewers who don’t like Chelsea. But that leaves about 59 million other people in the UK who won’t give a fig as well as everyone of a billion people in China etc, etc. Jeez, with that sort of attitude there would be no cut and thrust in football at all, at any level.

I’m sorry, but my gander is up now. When Geoff Hurst scored his hat-trick to win England the World Cup in 1966, I bet he never thought that he was slogging his guts out for nothing because although every football fan in the world along with millions of casual observers would be impressed with his feat that on the Planet Zog somewhere in outer space the whole population of 67 billion would think sod all of it.

Everything is relative. When I am playing, that is my world indeed the universe at that moment. Anyone who has seriously played the game will know exactly what I mean.