Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Watching my kids grow up, there came a time when soft play and the company of mum and dad just wasn’t enough. They needed action, they needed excitement and for my boys this meant … football.
Football matters to some kids, it especially mattered for my two boys and I like it because it has taught them discipline, teamwork and they are learning how to win and lose gracefully and how to keep fit and healthy.
Last Saturday morning, in the blistering heat, my two sons excitedly got ready for their first football match of the season for Juventus Bahrain. I packed enough ice cold water and ion-enriched drinks to hopefully keep dehydration at bay.
Their freshly-washed kit was ready and I had sprayed their shin-guards and gloves with a year’s supply of Febreeze after taking their kits out of my car into the laundry room after a recent hot and sweaty training session. Parenting has its obvious challenges, but parenting two sons who are both goalkeepers sometimes tests my motherly skills.
It is said that the goalkeeper is the loneliest man on the football pitch. Any other player can make a mistake, miss an open goal, give the ball away in the middle of the park and it may not affect the game. But if one of my sons drops the ball, my heart skips a beat. Any one player on the pitch can misplace a pass and it’s generally no big deal, but when the goalie slips up and the other team scores … that’s a big deal.
For the younger one, Leo, playing in the J Academy’s U10s I didn’t worry too much about possible injuries but when my 14-year-old son, Luke, faced ridiculously large and towering U16s, I resisted the urge to ask for a copy of the opposition’s birth certificates and to tell the son to be careful.
Goalkeepers tend to have a unique mental make-up because they actually enjoy throwing their body at the feet of an oncoming striker. As a result, mothers of goalkeepers need one thing money can’t buy … similar nerves of steel.
