TERRA magazine: For One Evening in 2017, I Was Magic

If you were to write a scouting report for me as a footballer it would go something a little like this:

“Central midfielder (sometimes right-back, sometimes goes in goal when he’s knackered). Scans regularly, though does not seem to be looking for anything in particular when he does. Lacks pace over first five yards and also all subsequent yards. Communication poor. Perfect first touch three times out of ten times. Tall but grew up wearing glasses so is afraid to actually head the ball. Passes OK but you really need to be tuned into where he’s going to be sending it because it’s clear very often even he doesn’t know. Can’t believe I’m writing this on a scouting report, but: lackadaisical. Curious positive: his movement is so strange and erratic that he is essentially unmarkable, so literally always in space. Would suit a team made up of 10 other freaks — have we got any more Mesut Özils lying around? — who would play together like aliens. Grading: U.”

I know all this. This is why my job is ‘typing’.

Except for one perfect sunny evening in 2017, where something weird happened: I was good. Really good. I was like, ‘Send Wenger down to have a look at him’ good, for no reason, out of nowhere, and not a second of it has been repeated since.

Weavers Fields sits on a slight slope behind Brick Lane. It is not the kind of park people particularly flock to when London is sunny, and it is not flat-enough or has-actual-goals-on-it-enough to be cursed with a particularly organised sport-after-work culture either. Weavers Fields sighs on a different frequency: topless men of indeterminate ages cracking open a can with their backs turned against spiky bushes, children playing indecipherable games that mostly involve ‘running’, nervous office workers who should never have moved to east London walking briskly home with one of those calorie-counter microwave meals. It is, then, the perfect place to have an impromptu jumpers-for-goalposts, it-doesn’t-matter-if-you’re-good kickabout after work of an evening which, for one glorious summer, we did every Wednesday.

The first ball went over the top and, for some reason, I shifted out to the left wing, had a lightning turn of pace I’ve never had before or since, cushioned the ball with the outside of my boot then surged forward for a quick whipped low cross to make it 1-0. OK, cool. Maybe chill out for a bit and go in goal. But no: as I trotted back the ball came to me again and, floating into an abstract CAM position, I held back a defender, made to turn left and actually turned right, rolled a perfect run-onto-it pass out to the wing then burst into the box to finish with a neat low corner drive. 2-0. Inexplicable. Everyone who had seen me play badly for weeks now looked at me in awe. An Eric Cantona-ian shrug. I don’t know either.

Sometimes the universe reaches out to tap you on the shoulder. The beam of the light that exists outside the ether shines itself on you alone. Some people know this feeling to be God, or what they know to be God, some pumping and pulsating ever-present universe-filling everything, an all-encompassing mecha-mind from where the scratch that caused the itch that caused our life first came from, that sees all and watches all from afar, never meddling only nudging. Millennia of faith have been poured into understanding that which it is that lies out there in the unending dark and, though I am an atheist in principle, I still quietly believe there to be something, some latent energy of good and evil, stirring beyond in the gunmetal cold. When I’ve lost my keys or lost my phone or had a particularly bad year of mental health, my lips will murmur in a silent prayer aimed up high beyond: Help me find what I have lost. I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I’ll be good, I promise. And one day for some reason that intent said back: Let’s make him really good at football for absolutely no reason at all. For a maximum of 70 minutes. Go on, it’ll be a laugh.

And I was glorious. I wove through two huge defenders who worked in performance marketing or accounting or whatever and spun out to the left wing while simultaneously zipping a pass out to the right. I floated all across the attacking three — for some reason, even though I am profoundly right-footed, I suddenly had a wand of a left that day, so stuck to the chalk on the other side of the pitch before — zoom — switching right and running the flank from there, occasionally popping up in the middle to make cute defence-splitting balls with the outside of my foot. I formed a Cole–Yorke mindmeld with Oscar, a guy I sort of worked with a little bit sometimes, all no-look passes and an unspoken simpatico we could never have developed in our day-to-day, and we both ran ourselves into the ground bagging four, five, six goals each. My white T-shirt slicked to my body which is how I learned that if you work hard on a football pitch it can do that. Everyone was quiet. They were watching something holy happen, maybe; they were watching, for a moment, a divine thrum through me, down through the black shorts I panic-bought in an airport when I realised I had nothing to swim in, in the Umbro boots that even Umbro doesn’t remember they discontinued in 2008, through a scuffed Nike ball from two seasons ago that kept having to be re-pumped.

I was a middlingly-fine shot-stopping goalkeeper as a child, and I once scored a goal at 7-a-side directly off a corner, but beyond that I have spent decades barely being able to kick a football from the penalty spot to the goal line. Then, suddenly and without warning, this happens. Do you know how peculiar this feels? It feels amazing, obviously, but also so jarring you might be sick. Sometimes I watch footballers, galloping on technicolor pitches in the middle of a humid World Cup, and just think: They must feel unbelievable. Imagine how good it feels to ping a corner onto Gabriel Magalhães’ head when you were actually aiming at his head? To deck a penalty exactly where you were actually wanting it to go? Mortals though we are, we do not know the true high of Kylian Mbappé as he streaks like lightning beyond a defence, but sometimes — on Weavers Fields, for a second, as the sun sets and the sweat starts to feel cold on your skin — you can almost, almost taste it.

At the pub afterwards I gazed at the city as it lowered itself into the purple hazy lull of a July evening well-spent. Skyscrapers glittered out beyond me. As people peeled away, on bikes or running for dusty late-night buses, every one of them extended a dap to me and said: You were unbelievable today. And I know I was, yeah. But so were you. So were all of you. Rasping a football low across some unkempt grass with the boys then deleting a lager top afterwards — that’s what it is to be alive. And for about two hours, once, in 2017, I was more alive than anyone.

Tried to kick a ball back to some kids in a park recently. They were a hundred yards away and it took me three goes.

Lo, And Then It Was Over. And Lo, It Has Never Been Back.

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Words: Joel Golby

Images: Dan Evans