Tackling the weight of our own expectations

I played 7-a-side football yesterday. I've loved playing football for the last 30 years or so. Back in the early days I'd turn up to football training an hour or so before it started to shine my Beckham inspired red Adidas Predator football boots. It was always a bit of a fruitless task as within seconds of taking to the punishing mud fields of the Scottish Borders, they'd be caked in mud.

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I've always been a bit of a self-proclaimed poacher. I loved toeing the line between shouldering responsibility for outscoring the opposition and shamelessly hogging the limelight. It's probably fair to say I've always set myself an impossibly high bar. When the goals began to dry up and game time became quite few and far between in my high school football team, I'd be incredibly hard on myself even though I was still putting in hours and hours of practice in week after week.

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I hadn't for a minute considered the simple fact that I'd probably just hit the peak of my ability and while I might make incremental changes here or there, I was never going to hit the level my dreams and expectations strived for to play for my boyhood heroes Heart of Midlothian. I think if I'd clocked that earlier then perhaps I would have enjoyed the game for what it was more rather than associating every time I kicked a ball with a failure to be on the same level as those I was playing alongside, one or two of whom would go on to achieve long careers in the game.

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Fast forward 20 years or so and while I've long since accepted I wasn't going to be Scotland's answer to David Beckham, I still get the same buzz from playing football as I did all those years ago. It's hard not to come across as incredibly sad writing this next bit, but for the benefit of transparency, I still wake up far too early the morning of a game and spend a good 15-20 minutes trying to decide which strip I'm going to wear that day. 9 times out of 10 it will be a Hearts strip, and on the odd occasion an AFC Wimbledon or Scotland shirt if I'm trying to avoid a slagging for turning up to play in a full kit at the age of 35.

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Another pre-match feature these days is watching some motivational TV with my morning porridge, usually along the lines of Match of the Day to see if I can pick up any last-minute tips or at the very least, a point of discussion to small talk with my teammates before kick-off. This week it was the International break so there was no Match of the Day. Instead, I reverted back to watching the end of a David Beckham Disney+ documentary I'd started sometime last year. In it he tries to help a young team from London avoid relegation.

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In the episode I watched, a young striker had narrowly missed the opportunity to score a last-minute equaliser for his team against the league leaders and he was completely heartbroken at the end. His manager and teammates rallied around him to assure him it wasn't his fault, but he looked like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.

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Watching it, I felt sorry for him and part of me knew the feeling, albeit on a smaller scale. I'm still frequently critical of my performance if I've had a poor game as though I've cost my team a World Cup when the reality is it's just a comedians kickabout on a Sunday morning and the majority haven't got a clue what the score is. I sometimes wish I was that relaxed about it, but considering the competitive side of the game has been engrained in me for the last 30 years or so, it's hard to rewire it now.

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I didn't play great yesterday, my first touch was hopeless, my passing was wild, I nearly broke a finger again in my short stint in goals, and the only saving grace was I'd scored a couple of scrappy goals. The goals only marginally managed to paper over the cracks of the rest of my performance as I'd hit about 40 shots directly at the goalkeeper. It would be easy to point the nearly broken finger at the hot weather, but I decided to lay the blame solely on my own doorstep rather than trying to go Dutch and get Global Warming to shoulder 50% of the blame.

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Anyway, my team were 11-12 down with about 10 seconds to go in a game we'd been trailing throughout when a ball over the top from the goalkeeper landed at my feet. One on one with the opposition goalkeeper, this was my shot at redemption. If I'd hit the back of the net then surely none of my teammates would remember the questionable display that had come before it. Dragging back my right leg and wrapping my hideous luminous yellow Puma boot around the sized 5 mitre, the ball effortlessly sailed into the top left corner...of the goalkeeper's gloves. A weak shot which summed up my game.

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I felt like that kid at the end of the Beckham documentary after he'd missed the opportunity to earn his team a draw. Obviously it wasn't quite as bad as the Disney cameras or football royalty weren't anywhere near our game, but the feeling of letting my teammates and myself down was on par.

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All too often I put an unhealthy amount of emphasis on a bad performance or a missed opportunity and completely gloss over the point of playing- having fun and keeping fit doing a sport I love. I'd love to say I'm just like this about football, but to be honest I'm probably like this in most areas of my life, football just seems like the easiest example. If nerves got the better of me and I performed badly at an exam at school, I'd be hard on myself. If I had a work project that could have gone better, I'd be hard on myself. If a relationship broke down, I'd be hard on myself. If I went out to the shops and forgot to pick up milk, I'd be hard on myself.

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It's as tiring as it is ridiculous but I think it's just my brain striving for perfection when in life we're rarely, if ever, going to achieve perfection. Many of us have to work really hard to feel content and happy with how we navigate through life and it's all too easy to forget that most things aren't nearly as important as we make them out to be.

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If we fail an exam, it's not the end of the world and there's so many more paths open to us. If a work project doesn't go well, learn from it and ask for feedback so you know how to improve for next time. If a relationship breaks down, as much blame as you might put on yourself, realise it's a two-way street and if one or both of you aren't happy then sometimes there's not a lot you can do. If you forget to get milk, just go back out and get some. If you miss an important shot at football, ask yourself how important it actually is in the grand scheme of things and either use it to fuel your next game, or just cast your mind back to why you're doing it in the first place.

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I wasn't a professional footballer at the age of 5, I just loved playing the game with my friends without the stress or weight of expectation that I started putting on myself in later life. Nobody else put that weight on me, if I'm honest it wasn't really a weight at all, it was all in my head and amassed from years of worrying that I wasn't going to succeed and gradually bemoaning my limited ability when others flourished.

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The passion is still the same today, I still mostly wear the same colour of football shirt, I still wake up early with excitement and anticipation of what awaits. That passion will never go away, I just need to remember that much like cleaning my boots at the start of a game, I need to clean my mind at the end to get rid of the worry and self-doubt that can gather like mud and can make me forget the beauty that lies underneath.