Sunday League, Challengers, and the Intimacy of Sport
How Challengers (2024) made me rethink my love for Football
My love for football wasn’t as fun or sexy as Tashi, Art and Patrick’s adulation of tennis in Challengers.
I started playing football in year 5. I started with athletics, my older sister’s teacher noticed something and thought I would be a good fit for our primary school team. I started out with five aside on our local astroturf and the rest was history.
I watched Challengers when it debuted, accompanied by two friends. I was enrapt by the stunning cast and the well executed whiplash between past and present. It wasn’t until my second watch (this weekend) in which I focused on a specific theme - intimacy.
In one of Tashi’s first interactions with the homoerotic pair, she describes her complicated love story with tennis. She explained how she views tennis matches as a relationship, a temporary bond of intimacy formed between her and her opponent.
My first thought when I saw this in the cinema was bore. I mean honestly, who participates in a physically gruelling and mentally taxing sport only for their deduction of it to be fanciful poetry. I couldn’t believe it!
Until the second watch.
Something about Tashi’s extended metaphor regarding tennis and intimacy ignited a set of memories in me.
I hardly played beautiful football. The highest accolade I’ve received was being top scorer for my local Sunday league team and representing West Ham for my school at 2 tournaments. If you know anything about Sunday League football, it is seldom beautiful and poetic. It venerates grit, power and aggression.
Unlike Tashi, the intimacy I found in sport was not against my opponent; it was with the subject itself. Whenever I was having a good game, was when I was feeling in tune with the football itself. There would be an invisible string connecting the ball to my right foot, and on stellar days, a slightly thinner string making my left foot equally as magical.
Perhaps it’s contingent on the position you play, but there is a wealth of intimacy to be found between you and a football when you do it just right.
I was a winger and my strength was my speed. Once my dad taught me to keep an arm out to protect the ball at my feet and my body from bigger defenders, it also became my power. I became difficult to bully off the ball when funning at the opposition full speed. It took me a while to find my rhythm with the football outside of just running with it.
My coaches used to yell at me to have composure. Often I would beat the offside trap, beat my defender and be one-on-one with the keeper. In my first season, I had a woeful conversion rate in those scenarios. I would panic, I didn’t understand what to do next.
I didn’t understand the ball. Where to strike the ball for maximum efficiency, what part of my foot I should use to strike the ball. Did the attacking scenario call for me to thump the ball with my laces or caress it with the inside of my foot or guide it as best as I could with the outside of my boot?
My coach pulled me aside one training session and showed me how to love the football. How to remain calm when it was just me, the ball and the goal. He taught me how to treat the goalkeeper as a non-factor, which she would be, so long as I understood the ball and how it required me to handle it in the attacking situation.
Admittedly, I was not always a good sportswoman. I’ve traded a handful of snide remarks with the fullbacks that have marked me, I’ve been guilty of cheap elbows and leaving a foot dangling as a response to harsh tackles that I felt went unpunished by the referee. Ergo, it is no surprise that intimacy was rarely shared between my opponents and I.
But sometimes, game respects game. And I watched individual players in awe when they delivered incredible performances.
Defensive players who were sharp, able to beat me to any 50/50 and always knew how to give me just enough space to make me dither on the ball and come sliding in to take possession ever so cleanly.
Midfield maestros who kept their head on a constant swivel. Who could manoeuvre their way out of the tightest spaces, barrelling through defences and conducting line breaking passes.
And strikers, my favourite.
Watching a good striker can make you fall in love with football. Even the most casual fan can get enrapt by the emotions of the sport when watching a brilliant striker put on a clinic of a performance. Mbappe, World Cup Final 2022, Didier Drobga Champions League Final 2012, Ronaldo Nazario World Cup Final 2002 even Harry Kane on his day at White Hart Lane.
When you witness these performances first hand, whether it’s at Sunday League, Academy or professional level, you’re rendered speechless. It’s the same for watching people be really good at anything. I think it’s quite intimate, yes they are delivering for a specific goal. But in a way, it feels like they are performing for you.
Football has always been personal to me. It’s something I held dearly; due to my struggles with anxiety I refused to let anyone bar my family watch me play. Friends would request but I would say no because it was too intimate. I had to let them into the intimacy of my sport, to allow them to see me doing something I adored. I think that is a vulnerable thing and it requires confidence. To allow people you respect to watch and dissect your performance.
I have an aversion to embarrassment and I feared letting people watch me just to disappoint them. Letting those people down would be devastating and I think the roots of that fear are in intimacy across varying contexts.
In Summary
I have always had an affinity for beautiful things, much like Tashi in Challengers.
As I have previously mentioned, I rarely played beautiful football but I love watching beautiful football. It is why Eden Hazard is one of my Premier League greats, despite me being a lifelong Manchester United fan (and critic).
Watching Hazard was watching poetry in motion. Agile, adept, skilful, quick, intelligent. He took all of the beautiful parts of football and packaged them into his game. The ball was always in submission to him, connected to his feet and his brain, moving in alignment with every feint and twist and turn.
This is why it is imperative that we watch football with our eyes. There are some things that statistics cannot convey, and one of those is the intimacy of the sport that only the very best are able to capture.
The invisible string connecting the football to your foot on the days when it all just clicks is real asf, always feel most confident and comfortable when I play with you 🙌 Talented babe