Our boys took one hell of a beating

On Sunday our under-11 football team headed in from the sticks to take on the big city teams in the prefectural finals. This photo shows the very formal nature of the closing ceremony at Hiroshima Stadium. Mercifully the speeches were short.

The local Chugoku Shinbun newspaper covered the competition. Leading up to the tournament they published pictures of the eight teams that had qualified for the finals with accompanying blurb. Seven of the teams were immaculately kitted out, arms folded, intense stares to a man. They looked formidable. One team was ragged - a jumbled assortment of uniforms, arms hanging loosely by their sides, staring somewhere off into the middle distance. That team was ours.

The blurb for seven of the teams talked of never-give-up attitudes, training regimes, experience in previous competitions, and using a combination of teamwork, covering, speed, and skill to aim for ultimate victory. One team talked of snow hampering training, but they would try hard. Their motto was, “Work hard at study and sports, and take care of your friends!” The opposition must have been quaking in their size-4 boots. As I read, I must admit my quaking was of the fatherly pride variety. We would show those city slickers a thing or two.

Parents gathered in clusters in the old Hiroshima Stadium with its peeling paintwork and impossibly small seats (all spectators should bring one buttock only, please). The teams marched into the stadium. Seven teams marched in time, well-drilled, in straight lines. Our team sort of lurched its way in like a drunken snake. With the players staring around them, seemingly in awe of the size of the stadium, all pretence of a "march" was soon abandoned. A sergeant-major would have had a fit.

The stadium brought back memories for me of the dawn of professional football in Japan in the early nineties. Wonderful memories of a missed Gary Lineker penalty, an international match in the Asian games between Hong Kong and Uzbekistan (official attendance 2500, actual attendance 43 including players and coaching staff), and of a long-haired Czech playing for the local Hiroshima San Frecce team who, in a fit of pique, got his foot wedged tight in an advertising hoarding after kicking a hole in it. When he realized what an arse he looked, he panicked, lost his balance and fell. Eventually he was rescued but minus his boot. I was reminded of a scene from “Jaws”. The San Frecce crowd looked on in breathless wonder at the exotic entertainment.

Sunday was, of course, a far more important event for me than any of these distant memories. My son, Yuji, was one of the boys in from the country. Here he is (looking so small) limbering up before kick-off in an effort to shake off the "drunken snake" hangover.


To cut a long story short, on the day, experience, covering, speed and skill were somewhat superior to our mantra of “taking care of your friends” and we got thumped 7-0. As the result became more obvious with every passing second, the spectators in our group took to gentle self-deprecation.

“It’s too warm”, said a smiling mum as the icy wind whipped around our ankles. “If we’d had three foot of snow the city kids wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

“Look at our lads. Attention spans of a bunch of monkeys down on a recce from the mountains.”

“Just as well we didn’t win. The Championship final is in Yamaguchi. And some of us don’t have passports.”

Vanquished in the prefectural finals, but this ragged bunch are still North Hiroshima Champions.