Pick the lock

That's coaching. Or at least that's what coaching means to me. Football is just the language we all happen to speak. The job is persuading somebody to believe in a version of themselves they haven't met yet.

The strange thing is, I believe every word when I'm saying it to them.

When my business started going under, I became surprisingly good at pretending. I'd leave the house as though I was going to work and drive towards the office, but sometimes I'd just keep driving. I'd watch my phone light up on the passenger seat and convince myself I'd ring them back in five minutes. Five minutes became half an hour. Half an hour became lunchtime.

Eventually, it'd get late enough that I could "justify" parking outside the pub.

I told myself I was thinking. Planning. Working things out.

Truth was, I was hiding.

The loss of the business hurt more than I can really put into words. I'd spent fifteen years in the trade, eight of them building something with my own name above the door, and then it was gone. Some of it was bad luck. Some of it was other people's mistakes. Some of it was me.

Football, however, was one of the few things I could still make myself do. Not always, but often enough. For a couple of hours every Tuesday and Thursday, I got to stop being the bloke whose business was collapsing.

I got to be useful.

People think coaching youth football is about cones and bibs. So did I. And, to be fair, there are a fucking lot of cones and bibs. But it's also far more than that.

One of my lads reached a point where just leaving the house for school became an impossibility, so football was miles beyond him. Months passed without me seeing him. Everything came through his dad, who still turned up every Tuesday evening to help me coach.

Imagine that. Standing in front of fifteen other lads, trying to help them become better footballers, while knowing your own boy can't get himself through the school gates.

Genuinely... what a bloke.

At one point, I asked him to pass a message on to his son for me. I told him we'd have a deal: if he could get himself to school, I'd get myself to work. We'd help each other.

I never heard anything back.

Then there's my captain, one of the loveliest kids you'll ever meet. He got caught up in something that should never have happened. The details aren't mine to tell, but afterwards I watched the confidence drain out of him like somebody had quietly pulled the plug out of a bath.

At first, I thought it'd come back. Kids are resilient, aren't they? One good game, one good tackle, one good laugh with his mates, a goal. Anything.

Eventually, the decline seemed to stop, which was something, but the climb back hadn't started either. Every week I found myself trying to convince him that the upslope could start there. One good session becomes two. Two become a month. A month becomes the player he already is underneath all of this.

I believe that. I just don't know how to help him believe it.

Sometimes it's impossible to know whether to pick the lock or kick the fucking door down.

I've wondered whether the captain's armband has become another weight he's carrying. I gave it to him because I believed in him, but there are times when I've wondered whether the kindest thing I could do would be to take it away. Not as a punishment; far from it. As permission.

Permission to stop feeling like a dozen pairs of eyes are looking to him for a while, and just be free to play again.