As befitting the reasoned, restrained and refined mature voice among the psycho-babble and caterwauling on Tibs News, Fifty Shades of May has changed down a gear to take in the delights of Vets football.
For those of you wondering, Vets football is not played by guys who charge you £200 to file your guinea pig’s teeth, fit a lampshade on your dog to stop it licking its privates, or put their hands up a cow’s backside
Vets is short for Veterans football, the homely refuge for the gentleman player of senior years.
It’s the last Hoorah! for players, that last trip to Vegas before pipe, slippers and Connect Four in the nursing home.
As somebody forced to retire through injury two years ago, Fifty Shades shouldn’t decry Vets football. After all, if a trapped sciatic nerve didn’t give him unearthly gyp, he would probably be strutting his funky stuff in it now.
The scary thing is that the lower age limit for vets’ football is 35. Just think about that for a moment. At the age of 35 you are considered a Veteran.
Some people are only hitting their stride at that age. Consider those you could potentially be lining up against if they opted to play Veterans football; David Beckham (37), Javier Zanetti (39), Paul Scholes (38) and Ryan Giggs, the Daddy at 39.
That’s not counting the keepers like Brad Freidel, Mark Schwazer, David James and Jussi Jaaskelainen who risk first-degree burns by blowing out their birthday cake candles.
Jean-Pierre Meersseman, the Belgian director general of AC Milan’s Milan Lab, recognised as the best medical team in football should know a thing or two about this sort of thing
After all, they managed to stretch Paolo Maldini’s career like Silly Putty into its 40s, along with others such as Alessandro Costacurta, Franco Baresi, Cafu and Serginho.
The Belgian was brought in by Milan after they bought a very costly pup in the shape of Argentine midfielder Fernando Redondo.
Meersseman’s philosophy sounds like Californian twaddle when he says: “Physical wholeness is the daughter of three mothers; equilibrium, endurance and co-ordination,” and in through the door of the Milan Lab have come flaky innovations such as biochemistry, chiropractice, neurology, psychology, kinesiology. And checking teeth.
In the same way gypsies at Appleby horse fair will check a horse’s teeth before buying, so Meersseman checks incoming players’ gnashers on the strength of his belief that teeth reveal the human skeletal composition.
That’s all very well, and that task is made much easier by the majority of veteran players who take their teeth out at night and plonk them in a tumbler-full of water and a Steradent tablet on the bedside table.
The Vets in the game Fifty Shades watched would scoff at such innovation, although their concession to pre-match preparation does allow you to track a game down easily.
You know you are approaching a Vets’ football match some time before you get there.
You don’t need the olfactory senses of an African Hunting Dog to stand down-wind and catch on the air the mixed scent of Ralgex, Deep Heat and Wintergreen.
Pre-match warm-up tends to be an attempt to touch toes that probably haven’t been visible over a bought-and-paid-for paunch for several years.
A Vets football match is a study of the fantastic shapes and forms the human body can take. The lumps under some players’ shirts suggest they could be involved in human trafficking as there appears to be a small Romanian refugee hiding up there.
In contrast, the most dangerous players are those who have kept themselves trim, fit and svelte even into their forties.
By living a monastic lifestyle that has involved no alcohol, burgers or other delicious fatty-fat-fat foods, and probably involving no fun other than a game of Scrabble, they have managed to keep their body fat down to a minimum, to the point where you would see more meat on a butcher’s pencil.
Unlike many of the others on the field, these guys can actually run.
But while they can run, one thing they cannot hide is the erosion of their skills, the tax that time has wrought on their ability.
Common to Vets is a first-touch that was once pure silk but is now rougher than a hessian potato sack and watching players struggling to recall their skills is like watching somebody rummage around in the kitchen drawer for a torch when the lights have gone out.
Several free-kicks were awarded in promising positions, but any hopes that a wise and canny brain might be able to conjure up a swerving, dipping dervish of a set piece were dashed. The free-kicks were under-powered, mainly because anything longer than a five-yard run-up was likely to have the taker gasping for breath.
All this, of course, was played to a musical accompaniment of hamstrings twanging away like a Slash guitar solo.
Fifty Shades’ description might have you thinking that Vets football is all a bit sad, a collection of desperate men trying to recapture a youth that had escaped long ago and was living in Rio on the proceeds.
But it’s not; it’s a strangely uplifting and reassuring experience. These guys play because they love football. They probably pay a heavy price on Sundays and Mondays in terms of aches and pains, and every week they wonder whether the tweaks and twinges, and stiffness is worth it.
Perhaps this is where the heart of football really is. Not at Old Trafford, Nou Camp or the San Siro, but at the local rec.
Veterans football is where the sacred flame of football continues to burn.
But only because they haven’t enough puff left to blow it out.
By John May
Twitter: @maisy68
