P.J. Davitt's Blog, page 14

Chapter One

Crippling pain shoots through my right ankle. Pain like I have never experienced before in my life. Rising fear replaces the adrenaline surging around my body. One second focusing on scoring a goal, the next trying to avoid looking down at my shattered ankle and the anxious faces of Wolston’s medical staff and team mates crowding around me.

I know what the boys are thinking.

Counting their blessings it’s me and not them lying there on the turf.

Dad kisses my forehead in the ambulance as paramedics fit the oxygen mask. Mum cries by my hospital bedside a few hours later after I come round from surgery.

Doctors can repair shattered bones and ligaments, but what about the numbness of missing the thing you love? The thing you’ve done everyday for the previous eleven years of your life.

Playing with a sponge ball in the living room, weaving in and out of cushions, turning the sofa into AC Milan’s famous defence for one night, playing with mates in the park, school teams in cup finals, Wolston Rovers in that famous sky blue kit.

Life becomes one endless battle to rebuild my shattered right leg. Weeks on crutches, rehab sessions with club physios and specialists.

Mum and Dad learning the art of walking on eggshells around a timebomb in their midst. Offers of help met with anger and resentment.

It was monotonous. I hated my world and everything in it, from the physical torture to those dark thoughts and black moods. The self-doubt and the sick sensation my dream was over.

Now here I am. 12 months later having to play the game of my life. Eight years in Wolston’s academy and it all comes down to the next 90 minutes.

Not that it should have, you understand. No way. I’d been cruising towards that scholarship contract and a giant step towards the big time ever since Rovers first spotted me.

Mighty Rovers. My club, Dad’s club. The team I first fell in love with when he took me to watch them play Liverpool as a five-year-old. If I close my eyes I’m back there again. Holding his hand tightly as we weave between the crowds, squeeze through the turnstile to climb those steep steps that seemed to go on forever towards the back of the West Stand.

And there it is. That first sight of the lush football pitch bathed in brilliant sunshine. The most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It still is, even now at 16. Wolston’s home is like a drug to me and I’m hooked.

‘David, for the last time will you get in the car.’

‘Don’t panic, Dad, we’ve got plenty of time. Bopper told us to report to The Lodge for one.’

I slam the passenger door shut and pull the headphones over my ears. I’m in no mood for Dad’s pre-match pep talk today.

What does Bop always say?

Get yourself mentally right, visualise your runs into channels, springing their offside trap, outwitting their keeper. Now repeat the mantra. Focus. Focus.

Bopper French. Wolston’s Under-16s coach. The man guiding Rovers to the brink of an academy league title. The same man who carried me off the pitch last March screaming in agony.

Bop is more than a football coach. He’s a mentor.

‘Look Shawsy, I believe in you,’ I remember him saying after one more average display during my comeback from injury. ‘The other coaches believe in you, your team mates still believe in you.’

‘My confidence’s shot to bits, Bop.’

‘You’re the most natural goalscorer we’ve got here in the academy. You don’t lose that, injury or no injury. You have to give your body time to adjust, get minutes under your belt. Find your match sharpness.’

Five games without a goal. I’d never fired so many blanks in a row. My brain was sharp as ever, I knew what I had to do and where I needed to be on a pitch, but the signals just weren’t getting through to the rest of my body or my wrecked right ankle.

I’ve never been a streaky striker. I didn’t run hot and cold before my world was turned upside down.

The tears and the tantrums start again, rows with my old man over the littlest things, constant atmospheres at home as my dream slipped away.

I know the numbers. All the lads know the numbers. Wolston recruit eight or nine first year scholars each summer. By my age, clubs were on the look out for players from all over, and I mean home and abroad, so what chance a striker with a dodgy ankle who had lost a yard of pace and couldn’t score goals anymore?

You know as well as I do.

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Chapter Two

I bail early from the post match title-winning party. I’m in the mood for a wake.

Joy and elation soon dissolve into anger; my hatred for Duncan reaches new levels by the time I wander into one of the hospitality suites at Wolston’s stadium, Lowfield Road, for our ‘celebration’ dinner.

I feel robbed. The euphoria of scoring the winner lasting barely the time it took to reach the centre-circle, right about when the substitutes’ board with ‘number nine’ appeared.

Come in number nine. Your time is up.

Okay. I know what you’re thinking.

Poor old Dave Shaw, is that violins I can hear in the background? Look at the bigger picture. Bop wanted to tighten up things in midfield, run the clock down.

Fine. I understand all that. I don’t need a refresher from the coaching manual. But why me?

Didn’t my goal prove once and for all I was over my ankle injury?

Bopper put his arms around me back in the dressing room, maybe the fact I was sat there forcing a smile through a grimace had given the game away.

I listened as he explained his reasons. We’d won a title. I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I was being self-centred and selfish.

Dave Shaw to a tee; the individual in the team.

So be it then, guilty as charged, but sat in the midst of all the bedlam I felt detached. Alone even.

Wolston’s hierarchy turns up to mark our achievement. Chairman Bryan Roe, first team manager Mark Peacock and Rob Duncan sit at the top table, the mastermind behind the latest triumph smugly holding court. This is another feather in his cap.

I pick at a five course meal. Mum and Dad probably putting their offspring’s dark mood down to sheer exhaustion as the last dregs of adrenaline drain from my body.

Duncan’s after-dinner speech is the final straw. Not for me. I make my excuses to Mum and Dad as the Scot stands to address the gathering and tell them I need some air. A favourite bolt hole beckons.

I manage to sweet talk a security guard into letting me wander out of the function room and through an emergency exit door leading to the stadium concourse. He buys the same cover story as my parents. I make my way down one of the gangways from the Sky Blue Stand, across the gravel track that borders the pitch and up the emergency steps into the West Stand behind one of the goals.

I want to sit in our family seats at the front of the upper tier. The same place Dad took me to watch Liverpool. The place we had season tickets practically every year since.

All those happy memories, maybe the odd bad one as well, this was Wolston after all. Those classic games, goals, songs, celebrations.

It was nearly midnight. The pitch is in total darkness. Only the lights from the hospitality suite in the Sky Blue Stand illuminate the ground on the near side.

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Chapter Three

Dad gets the silent treatment for the rest of the night. If I’m being honest the initial shock while he plots my career doesn’t last long.

I have other things to think about, like the biggest decision of my life. Tales of RAF heroism can wait as I lie on my bed well into the early hours.

Mum and Dad just want the best for their only son, like any parent. I know that. They want to see me run out in that sky blue shirt as badly as I do, but this was the real world, not some comic book fantasy. I was a teenager in a small town. The football universe didn’t begin and end at Lowfield Road.

Face it, Wolston don’t want me. Or at least that’s how it felt even before Mr Evatt’s surprise visit. If Rob Duncan doesn’t think I can cut it then what next? Now I have a Plan B.

Rejection from Rovers is going to sting every bit as much as being carried off that pitch with a broken ankle.

Give me the tears, the self-doubt, the hurt, anything but a lifetime of regrets knowing the only club I ever wanted to play for doesn’t want me. But at least Chapel’s offer can take the edge off that pain, better than giving up on the dream.

It means I can aim higher than running around with my mates on a Sunday morning. I don’t want university and all that entails. Mum probably does, but she knows me well enough to realise that constitutes failure; a kick in the stomach, an admission her son is settling for second best.

Even before Evatt turned my world upside down I was starting to confront the alternatives. The nearest professional club to Wolston is a good 40 miles away, a lower league outfit with lower league resources and their own youth side to pick from.

There are exit trials for other cast-offs, lads who have been released like me. Thrust together in makeshift teams full of boys desperate to impress watching coaches who turn up hoping to find a gem that has fallen through the net. It was a lottery and I didn’t fancy my chances of holding a winning ticket.

Non league football is another option, training twice a week alongside college, hoping to get spotted by a professional team. Some hope. Clubs all across the country churn out hundreds of teenage rejects like me. How many take a punt on someone released by Wolston now scoring the odd goal in front of a handful of fans?

Dad discovers me the following morning still fully-dressed lying on top of my bed after finally drifting off to sleep.

‘Restless night, lad?’

‘It’s a lot to take in.’

I wanted answers but he couldn’t really give me any. Duncan is the only man who could and that meeting isn’t for another week. At least we can make our peace over Evatt’s bombshell visit.

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