kick off!

At the regular after school football club that I take Rumi to, a parent remarked that football is a great activity allowing for physical exercise and building teamwork skills and there is nothing bad about it at all. It occurred to me that the only downside is excessive competitiveness. In a capitalist society we are constantly surrounded by a polarising logic of winners and losers and this can be very destructive. This binary logic pervades much of society and manifests in various situations - eg male/female, right/wrong black/white etc so that we are often blinded to what is really happening and to the possibilities that exist or can be brought into existence.

This spectacular situation often means that many people get left out or excluded from football and sports in general. Having been recently diagnosed with ME/CFS myself and becoming disabled over the last year, I know how this feels. It also means that I can start to miss out on activities with friends, family,including my children - as events seldom cater for inclusivity...

.... and so it also occurred to me that 3 sided football would be the perfect antidote to this situation !... and so I emailed round some fellow "reproductive workers"- friends of mine with kids, and friends of Rumi's parents and I was very happy when a few people responded favourably.. . and so we organised the first game in Cambridge for Sunday 20th Sept 2015!

We managed to borrow some cones for goal posts from my own housing association and headed down to Parkers Piece with Rumi and Zevi. It was only when we got there that I remembered we had forgotten a football! So we went back, got them and returned. It was all getting to be too much for me, with parking the car and having to get the boys and these cones to the field, but luckily Jolyon, Jackson and his crew had arrived and Jolyon managed to balance the 9 cones and carry them to the field while kicking the 2 footballs in front of him ...We met up en-route and found the rest of the players ! We divided ourselves into 3 teams - the 2 adults were the first 2 captains (an ageist bias?) the teams were: The Lion Heads (Jolyon and Eleanor), Golden Eagles (Jackson and Rumi) and Skull Duggers (James, Zevi and me) !

Incidently when Jolyon had asked about what colours to wear, he had suggested red, white and blue teams. I remembered the experimental "quantum chromodynamic" scoring system and so suggested red blue and yellow or green. When I got ready, Rumi was in blue, Zevi in red and I was in green - this was entirely "coincidental" The colours on the pitch at the start of the match were interestingly red, blue, yellow, green and black!

We had to discuss the new scoring system and this took a little time for us all to understand. We played 3 halves (or thirds) of 5-10 minutes each. After the first half (third!) Guy, Rosa, Evie and Caleb joined us. One of the most interesting things while playing was how as an adult/parent, I was much more aware of the team dynamics not just in my own team but other teams too. After the game we discussed alternative scoring methods - I drew on the quantum chromodynamic ideas from d3fc - and suggested we score each other on friendliness, competitiveness and inventiveness! Some of the other players thought it be more fun to score ourselves - I think in future games it would be fun to look at how to combine qualitative and quantitative methods of scoring.