Brownian motion
Intermediate competition 19 May
So another weekend, another exhausting two days. Hot on the heels of the sleepless nights in Brighton I have put my body through the ringer for the honour of my city, talking of which I have some bad news for London, we got thrashed!
This is the point at which I normally insist on starting in the logical place, the beginning, but this time I should probably start with goalball itself.
Goalball is a sport played by blind athletes on an indoor 9/18 m court. Players remain at their respective ends and send the ball at each other, a bit like tennis. Only the ball stays on the ground and players use their bodies to block the ball and stop it getting into the goal, so it’s a bit more like giant air hockey. Although you shoot with an under-arm throw on the floor like tenpin bowling and defend by extending your body to lie full length on the floor like sleeping lions and you wear an eye-mask like your trying to sleep on a plain. Now I write it down it is a bit of a duck billed platypus of a sport, but it is fun and way more energetic than sleeping lions and eye-masks might suggest. The core actions in goalball are a squat thrust followed by a squat jump then an explosive run-up and throw before returning for the next squat thrust, all in under 10 seconds and repeated for up to 24 minutes, this is not a sport for dicky hearts or creaky joints. The goal is nine meters wide, there are three players on each team, the ball has a bell in it and players can feel tactile lines on the floor with their feet and the crowd have to be QUIET while the ball is in play.
I play for London Elephants GC, named because we train near Elephant and Castle station, not because we’re all over weight, and this weekend we headed up to Sheffield for the last tournament of the season. Normally tournaments are organised regionally but this one was a nationwide extravaganza. (BTW, nationwide extravaganza is the code name for my bank robbing operations.)
The club booked our accommodation for the Saturday night but I and a few other players chose to head up the night before and have a relaxed breakfast instead of traveling at the crack of dawn. This is where the weekend began, with three blind people meeting in a hotel and deciding to walk to the shops. Such a simple suggestion but one that required three phones looking up google maps, a four mile walk following directions from a receptionist and eventually me asking a random stranger for directions only to find that we had just past the shop we were looking for.
Duly armed with nutritional packed lunches for the competition days, consisting of sausage rolls, chocolate croissants and strawberries, we returned to our hotel where I discovered the coolest mirror in the world!
Our rooms were… compact, with no space spared for a whole bathroom we had loo and shower cubical with a sink between them. The shower smelt of blocked drains and my roommate and I decided that we would only smell worse tomorrow so there was no need to risk setting foot in there until we moved rooms. Above the sink, however, there were two mirrors at right-angles, in which I could make out three reflections of myself! Two acted as reflections of me but the middle one was a reflection of my reflections. I spent at least half an hour playing with the mirror, watching two reflections raise their right hand while the third raised the left, I even discovered that I could make two of my reflections do a high five or head butt each other.
After my distraction as a modern Narcissus we crossed the road to the much nicer Premier Inn to join our coach for dinner.
The next day started promisingly, back at the Premier Inn for £9.50 of all you can eat fry-up. (Hay, it’s an intermediate competition not elite, and a bigger belly stops the ball bouncing over you).
The rest of the day proved a little harder, losing our first two games. That said, we did win our third match of the day against Derbyshire Ducks. The Ducks like to celebrate goals and wins with a quacking sound, however, there is a law in the official rules of the game that specifically prohibits teams from making animal noises, needless to say I cheered them on in their other games by happily quacking, as someone not technically involved with those games I was allowed to quack in peace by the referees, what can I say, I’m a rebel.
With one win under our belts we headed back to the hotel to be reassigned rooms, shower and change before heading out for dinner. Having our room on the first night booked by a team mate and a room booked by our coach on the second, we naturally assumed we would get a fresh room… one with a shower that didn’t smell of drains… and yet against all odds, I was assigned the same room, complete with malodourous wash room that, against my better judgement, I used.
The team dinner was delicious and a reasonable amount of alcohol was consumed as is traditional at sporting functions. The night finished with me producing my spare white cane, a Frankenstein’s monster of a cane that I constructed for a comedy routine. it is about 6 feet long, towers over me when upright and can snag unsuspecting heels at ranges unheard of in the blind community.
Sunday was sadly similar to Saturday, leaving us to finish 5th from 6 in our group then 10th from 12 overall. This was a larger tournament than usual however we would normally expect to finish third from 6-8 teams in our regional league, so disappointing. To our dismay we found that our local rivals, Croislit Warriors finished higher than us in their respective group and hence beat us in the final standings. This hurt and has spurred us on to improve for next season.
Now I am home and feeling the bumps and bruises that are inevitable in a sport that involves diving on a wooden floor to block a ball with your body. So it’s Ibuprofen and bed for me.
So until next time, goodbye and goodnight
Goodbye