Last Season Between the Sticks

Dave Pring had been the Plough and Harrow's goalkeeper for so long that nobody at the club could say, with confidence, who had been in goal before him. There was a rumour it was his brother. There was another rumour that the club had been founded around him, like a pearl around grit. He was fifty-one. He was, by some distance, the oldest player in the Wessex Sunday Combination Division Three, and every August he told the manager, a bloke called Ned who ran a carpet shop, that this was the last season. "You said that last year, Dave." "I meant it last year." "You said it the year before." "Meant it then and all." The thing about a Sunday keeper is that he's the one who has to turn up. Outfield players drift. A striker has a stag do in Prague and there's a lad from the pub who'll fill in. But nobody fills in in goal. Nobody wants to. So the keeper turns up, in the rain, on a pitch behind a sewage works with a slope so bad that one half is played uphill, and he turns up when he's got a cold and when his daughter's got a netball tournament and when, if he was honest, his knees have been telling him for three seasons that this is a young man's game. His knees were right. He knew that. Where he'd once gone down to a low shot like something folding, he now went down like something being lowered. There'd been a goal in October, a tame thing that trickled under him, and the lad who scored it had looked almost embarrassed. But a keeper of fifty-one has something a keeper of twenty-two doesn't, which is that he's seen every shot. He knows when a striker's going to go across him because the striker's hips say so. He knows the lad who's going to try and chip him, because that lad has a look. He doesn't dive much any more. He's just already there. The last game of the season was against the Fox, who they hated, and who needed the win to go up. Sleet. Ned's carpet-shop van doing the kit run because the club's had died.

Nil-nil with ten minutes to go and the Fox got a penalty. Soft. Their striker, a kid of about twenty with the sort of haircut that costs money, put the ball down and did his routine, and Dave stood on his line and watched the hips. The kid went left. Dave was already there. He didn't so much save it as be in the way, and it hit his chest, and he fell on it, and lay in the sleet holding it while eleven men in the wrong colours swore at the sky. Afterwards, in the Plough, Ned bought him a pint and said, "So. Next season." "That's me done." "Dave." "I'm fifty-one, Ned." "You said that last year." Dave drank half the pint. His knee, under the table, was making its opinion known. Across the bar the kid with the haircut was staring into his drink like it had personally let him down. "Fifty-two next year," Dave said. "Same thing, really." Ned wrote something in his book.