Shot at Glory

No matter what level you play at, a cup final is a moment to enjoy – and a chance to mimic the pros, with club ties and even a pre-match warm-up.

- Sean Cole

For a few weeks in February and March, the Warley and District Sunday League’s Ranger Trophy was all that mattered to me and my team-mates at Sporting Dudley FC. As a group of largely unremarkable recreational footballers, this is the closest many of us will get to enjoying a modicum of glory, no matter how fleeting or ultimately insignificant.

The cliches that surround Sunday morning football are plentiful and largely well-founded. Awful, boggy pitches, hungover players, the struggle to scrape together a bare starting XI, attritional matches and occasionally laughable mistakes. Despite these shortcomings, weekends would seem empty without it.

Even in the scrappiest of encounters, there will be moments that bear just a passing resemblance to the elite football we desperately try to emulate – a slick counter-attacking move, a perfectly weighted throughball, a crisply struck half-volley. It’s enough to keep everyone coming back for more. The build up to our cup final was the ultimate example. From having ten or 12 players at training, there were now 20. Players who hadn’t been seen for ages suddenly resurfaced, each straining to be involved, invigorated by the prospect of pretending, just for a day, that their dreams of success weren’t so misplaced after all. With a heavy heart, the manager was forced to trim the squad down to 16.