“A seventy plus strong group meeting for five hours every single week stopped dead in its tracks. Leagues shut down, Venues mothballed. Walking footballers who discovered this new game just a few short years ago will feel the sense of ‘wasted’ or ‘lost’ time keener than most. All footballing is finite but when you’re into your sixth, seventh and eighth decade you know that you’re in extra time already. Clock ticking. Nobody wants to be on hold for very long. Two weeks away on holiday can be keenly felt by some.
The cause? A pernicious killer that’s escaped out of a ‘wet market’ in Wuhan (a city of ten million people I’d never heard of before) to threaten not just our game – trivial in comparison, I guess – but to disrupt (or worse) the lives of those that had been playing it to keep healthy, to stave off the ageing process.
Lockdown means locked out. Of a world you’d come to quite like. A world of familiar faces, of some jovial banter and light hearted associations. Pounds piling on. Sure some try to keep up a modicum of exercise and mobility, but how many get truly breathless like they do when playing a strenuous walking game?
We adapt. Paint the fence, or a door, dig the garden and make our period of ‘house arrest’ as productive as possible but without the structure of an organised walking football week we find the thought ‘what day is it?’ entering our heads more often. Weekends come and go. Not quite as quickly as they once did.
No Saturday and Sunday diversion from the ‘proper’ game to occupy our thoughts. The trainers start to gather dust, the plans you’d made go further and further onto the back burner, no end in sight yet and who knows when? The creative thinkers try to find ways of engaging, now the ball isn’t doing the talking. Old photographs to jog the memory, words from yesterday and many days before when the cares we have today didn’t remotely feature anywhere in our collective consciousness.
You might start to see the efforts of teammates trying to make you laugh with videos and jokes online. Sometimes they succeed, other times Tumbleweed appears in a mental image and blows down a deserted main street in my mind. But thank goodness for ‘online’. Where would we be without it?
We say ‘keep well’ and ‘stay well’ when such sentiments went unspoken in the very recent past. Most are genuinely concerned about their contemporaries, some of whom, maybe most, have underlying conditions which make them more vulnerable to Covid-19. Because that’s what this is all about. We should be nervous, even afraid.
One day we’ll be back in our groups all over these islands, until then we’ll grin and bear the lack of a game. I feel much more sorry for housebound children missing THEIR friends and their education. Parents who will be worrying about wages, mortgages and paying that big bill that’s just arrived. And of course, the catastrophic loss of life. Lost to this pernicious killer disease that came out of a bloody ‘wet’ market in a place I’d never heard of.
Let’s count our blessings eh? Walking football won’t be going anywhere apart from coming back. One day. We can wait, a little while at least.”