A personal afternoon at the matches

A personal afternoon: Friday afternoon Alison and I were invited to be the special guests at a sports afternoon. Girls football, netball, volleyball, and a fairly emotional boy's football.
Football has been a minority interest in my life. I have always been aware of the emotional outpourings of fans cheated of 'their' win, but haven't ever been able to share it. I'd rather tie knots and sniff the poisons of antifouling.

However, the speed and enthusiasm on an afternoon when rain threatened to pour on us but never did led to a very satisfactory performance by the blue team, even though I was sure the red team had won, even though it was obvious that the blue team had the speed and sheer dominance to get the goals. Quite some speed, too.
The goal and penalty lines were drawn in the hard earth of the pitch, and the sides were up to the referee to judge. In the whole game there were no bones broken, but skin agains harsh sand is not pleasant, and once or twice there were words, shouts, gestures and fists exchanged in relation to tackling and off side rules.
The girls netball was fast, and furious. I remembered some of the rules. It isn't basketball, but the ball flew from one end to the other rapidly, and the red team won. At one point a volunteer shinned up the pole to straighten the net.
This is filled with enthusiasm and huge amounts of screaming, whistling and shouting. Pretty much the same the world over.
At the end, there was a girls' tug-of-war and a boys' tug-of-war. Both of them won although the rules I clearly remember  weren't quite clear. In my rotund youth I was anchor for the winning team most of the time.


If only a physics teacher would tell them about trajectories and relative pressures, and a biology teacher explain what happens to bones when you stress them. That's for the UK, not for Tanzania.
At the end a number of medals were shared out, and retrieved to share out among the next winning team. Cups were awarded to the football teams, and team chants followed, and we all went back home for supper before the sun dropped below the horizon.
Brilliant afternoon.
Shaking hands with the prizewinners was our task: I felt like the Duke of Edinburgh until I realised that he would have something imperially witty to say about the competition and the competitors.