A young footballer has encountered many difficulties by the time he reaches the ranks of the minor grade. He has endured unknown verbal abuse from auld lads in their fifties living out their lives through the gossans. They have survived the horrors of puberty (some of them anyway) and now are talking the talk of the big man, even if all they’re still shaving on a Saturday night is bum fluff and they’ve got nowhere to go.

In the smaller clubs, you could be approached at age 15 to enter the murky world of minor footballer. As a 15 year old, you are in awe of these big hulking 17-18 year olds each with the very small beginnings of a beer belly. They talk about women in a way you wouldn’t hear on a German satellite channel and you move closer to pick up tips, even though you’ll have no guinea pigs to practise with for another couple of years and it’s debatable whether even they have practised such things either.

They are probably listening to such musical geniuses as Chimera, Slipknot, Slayer, Spineshank and Sepultura, while you are buried in your auld fellas’ 70s vinyl collection of Rory Gallagher, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Pink Floyd etc, and declaring that rock died when Kurt Cobain exited planet rock with a bang.

You see them walking moodily around the school, yelling abuse at teachers you’re still afraid of. You watch in frustration as the girls in your year, especially the one you fancy, almost throws herself at the six foot one midfielder. A rage builds inside of you that you can't let out till you're at home in your bedroom and your mammy wonders have you been drinking too much Ovaltine at night.

Does this sound like the screenplay of an American teen movie? It does to me. But has this story happened to you? Well, some people are blessed with all the right moves from the day you first see daylight, though it’ll comfort the rest of the pack that almost everybody got their arses clattered when just a few seconds outside the auld lassie by some monstrous midwife whose beard would be the envy of Ronnie Drew.

The star minor footballer is one that is respected by old and young alike. He is the great white hope of the parish, the fella who'll bring back the county title when he gets to senior grade, barring he gets lured by some ‘foreign’ soccer team from Dublin who then bounce him on to….(whisper it on a GAA lovers website…E n g l a n d).

Cue screams and howls of protests from the auld bucks at the counter who mutter to themselves that the pup was never any good and neither was his father. ‘Sure didn’t I go on the blanket for Ireland lad. That’s right, I camped out for JP2’s visit to Knock in 1979. What's wrong with the youth these days? If I said I was going to play pansy football in England to my father, God, Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Holy Ghost have mercy on him, he’d have taken me two legs off with a scythe and boiled them for the Christmas dinner. He always said to me never play 'Tan' football.’

So you have a lot to live up to. As you begin to go to the minor training sessions, a strange thing occurs. Those same lads that are eighteen or so, begin to recognise you at school and grunt a greeting towards you as you walk nervously past them down the corridor, waiting for the obligatory psycho that’s ready to pounce on you and drag you into an empty room for a ‘chat’. You remember that this same psycho lad used to come around to your house on a Saturday, while at national school, and you spent hundreds of hours defending your home made fort from imaginary Klingons or some such foreigners.

However, with the big lads noticing you, the ‘one’ begins to as well. She comes up and actually talks to you. Her eyelids start fluttering, the shy grin, and the fidgeting of the hair nearly makes you run for a bucket of water to cool down with. You stutter like a diesel car on a frosty morning as you talk about how the science teacher is such a bastard for having giving out to the ‘one’ for bad test results. Then…awkward silence …

This awkward terrified silence is like sitting in a dentist’s knowing you have to get three teeth pulled. You begin to sweat like Christy Moore as you panic about the next topic of conversation. And then the question you have to ask her… are you going out on Saturday night?

A surprised glance at you confirms your fears that it was the wrong question, but she tries to remain cool.
‘Of course I am.’ ‘Why?’
‘Well I thought we might meet up at the nightclub.’
‘But there’s not a hope we’ll get in.’
‘Sure we’ll try it’, you say, beginning to get courage back.
‘We’ll see, it’s only Tuesday after all. See you in the next class.’

You have a Homer Simpson ‘d’oh’ moment as you realise you have asked her not only three days too early, but about two years at least. And there is the small matter of the Championship derby match on the Sunday morning you could be making your debut in.

The days go by and you’re unsure what the situation is. It's improved wholesale when on Friday morning she sits next to you in Religion class and you shrug modestly to the rest of your gang as they look on with gobdaw mouths open. You’re asked to read a section of the Bible by the bored teacher and you begin to stutter while reading passages about Mary Magdalene, as the ‘one's’ leg and yours touch accidentally, or maybe purposely.

So by now you are on Cloud Twenty, never mind number Nine and you know that something has got to give, either the bird or the football. Now, at any other age it would be a foregone conclusion that you would ignore the match and go out with the girl, but at 15 or 16, the aul’ brain is still not functioning in that kind of way. Remember you have only played under 12 football three years earlier. What are you to do?

You decide the pride of the jersey and the parish is more important than a victory trophy in the line of a lovebite and you approach the ‘one’ cautiously. You tell her you forgot you had a match on Sunday morning and you can’t go out the night before. You wait for the slap, or worse, the tears, but they don’t come. You’re relieved to see she has a relieved look on the face and you arrange to go out some other time.

Fast forward to Sunday morning and the big match. You’re nervous as a kitten togging out in the dressing room. Some of the fellas look suspiciously hungover, though they're not supposed to be drinking. You put on the jersey and try to remain calm as the trainer goes bananas in front of you talking about pride in the parish and all that guff.

You walk out onto the field and take your position. You note your opposite number is six inches taller than you. Despair sets in, how are you supposed to beat this lad? You see your daddy and mammy looking at you with pride or maybe worry from the sideline. Your mother makes the Sign of the Cross. Now you’re really worried. Are you a condemned soldier on his way to Gallipoli?

But then salvation of a sort. You hear someone shouting good luck to you from another direction. You scan the crowd for a messenger of hope, and you see her. The ‘One’ is there with the parish jersey on. She gives you a smile and a thumbs up and you’re walking on sunshine. You give her a wave and your marker looks at you with disgust, but you don’t care. This fella would probably be more interested in the internal workings of a Massey Ferguson 165 than a member of the opposite sex.

But then you're distracted by cheers and shouts. The referee is about to throw up the ball, he goes for it and the game is on.

You’re a Minor footballer now…