There should be a support group – some kind of weekly talking-shop to discuss the trials and tribulations of lower league captaincy because it’s definitely the hardest job this town has to offer.
Sure, there’s more pressure in the Premier League or Division 1. Captaining Teddy Hall’s 1st XV means you’re never short of expectation from your college peers. But with that expectation comes hordes of over-keen players, practically beating down the selection door. Rarely will one have to contemplate turning up with twelve men and trying to work out whether to go with a six-man pack or no wings. As Worcester’s football skipper, you can be pretty sure that if you organise a training session people will come to it. As St. Anne’s thirds football skipper, there’s a real danger that without a cacophony of emails, texts and shouting you’ll barely have half a team.
The lower divisions and reserves leagues are the true test of the art of captaincy. Forget Mike Bassett, a better primer for the skills required could be a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. Tactics and strategy can wait for when you’ve persuaded people to actually get on the pitch.
The week always starts with optimism: a cheery email on Tuesday, a few positive replies and a whole bunch of dissembling, but there are always enough vague yeses for a team to start to take shape in your head. Come the day before, though, and worry – that all too familiar companion – sets in. It often seems to be momentum at work: one person drops out, that solitary individual turns into six, and after the deluge it’s just you and that keen foreign-exchange student who first picked up a rugby ball eight days ago.
So the pressganging begins, cornering people you’ve never spoken to purely on the basis that they look like they’d be handy in a ruck and immediately and shamelessly turning the conversation to tomorrow’s match. This is, among other things, a sure-fire way to cultivate a reputation as a bore.
No matter how hard you try things inevitably seem to devolve to 1pm outside the lodge, surveying the outflow from lunch and hollering across the quad at likely-looking candidates. If you’re unlucky you won’t get a quorum (loosely defined as about eleven for rugby and around eight for football), and will have to put on your best poker-voice as you embark upon that ever-guilt-ridden game of ‘cancellation chicken’. If you’re lucky you have an hour in which to fashion something approaching a coherent side out of a ragtag bunch that would make your local pub side look like the All Blacks. Props out wide, a grumpy regular first-team flanker shoehorned in at fly-half to give a semblance of defensive strength, and something nearing negative-fitness levels.
However, the great unsaid in the above is that the entire thing is a rollicking good laugh. Matches, when they’re on, have a level of unshackled wonder that the 1st teams of this world can only dream of. Almost anything can happen – my personal favourite from last term being the beanpole football winger who was, very much against his will, forced into a rugby shirt and then left the field with a hat-trick of notable brilliance and the promise of three pitchers in Bridge. Glorious.
