In Xanadu, Did Wilf Zaha

Living your childhood dreams.

There aren’t too many places in the world where you’d think Xanadu might be found, certainly not the London suburb where I found it for myself. Yet there it was, Coleridge’s stately pleasure-dome, climbing into the cloudless skies over Beckenham. Admittedly, it was well disguised. Strictly speaking, this was the indoor training ground of Crystal Palace Football Club’s academy: the dome was basically a big top for kicking a ball about in. But to enter it was to be transported into a place out of reverie, the belly of a great white whale, its generous skin stretched over gunmetal ribs. My 11-year-old son and his teammates were playing in a tournament under this lofty roof, not to mention the all-seeing eyes of the club’s coaches, who might – who knows? – invite one or more of them to come back again.

The boys were a little overawed but happy to be there. For at least one dad, though, the setting was ‘holy and enchanted’, just as in the poet’s fevered vision. In my distant and undistinguished playing days, I could never have imagined going through my paces in such snazzy surroundings. But like every boy who ever played football, it was my fantasy to have a trial at a big club. Inside Palace’s soaring Palm House, I gazed at the synthetic turf – it was verdant and toothsome – and felt like how a clapped-out carthorse must on seeing the happy hunting ground where he’s being put to grass. Oh, to kick up one’s hooves again like a stallion and gallop up and down this inviting paddock, one last time!

‘Holy’ is the right word, I think, and not only because of the familiar idea that football is a religion to its passionate fans. There was also something priestly about the caste of coaches in their fine vestments: grey tracksuits, relieved by gaudy epaulettes. They could have been the Vatican’s Swiss guard in athleisure. It might have been my imagination, but I swore they kept a fastidious distance from us outsiders, like men who know that once the crowds are gone, they will have this Sistine Chapel of sport all to themselves again.

Holy, also, because of the shriven hush which fell over our group of parents. We were given a briefing which banned us from filming, vaping or calling out to our children. As you probably know, there’s a problem in junior football about the way some adults ‘encourage’ their kids – or bollock them, or their opponents or the ref. As a society, we have thankfully woken up to the very real issue of absent fathers. But what are we going to do with the all-too-present fathers? The never-miss-a-moment merchants on the touchlines in their floor-length duvet coats, the blood vessels twitching at their temples like lugworms.

It turns out, you can tell how close you are to football’s rarefied heights by how quiet it is. As we watched from a balcony in museum-silence, only after a spirited passage of play did we allow ourselves a well-bred round of applause.

The whole experience of watching my son play, reminds me of when I used to turn out for my village team. I wasn’t keen on books as a teenager, but I read Goalkeepers Are Different, a novel by the great sportswriter Brian Glanville, in which his young goalie is scouted on the playing fields of Wormwood Scrubs. Ever since, I always hoped an unshaven stranger with a dog-eared notebook would step out from among a group of parents on the sidelines and ask to speak to my dad. The closest I came to the big time was a trial for Leatherhead FC, a non-league outfit who had been on a Cup run in 1975 and sensationally knocked out First Division Brighton with a goal by the gobby Chris Kelly, the ‘Leatherhead Lip’ as the tabloids termed him. It transpired that I was too old to play for the club’s Under-16s, and that was the end of that.

My son now plays on the Scrubs. Some of his teammates have been picked up by Palace, QPR and other league clubs. At his level of football, the excellent coaches plot tactics on boards and deliver grave, forgiving speeches about  – as it might be – making mistakes: ‘I did it myself this morning, lads. I put odd socks on: a Nike one and an Adidas one. But you know what? I put it right. I went and changed those socks.’

In Coleridge’s verses, Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome was full of fountains and incense-bearing trees. For their part, the ground staff at Palace’s training ground had laboured to produce ‘gardens bright with sinuous rills’ and blades of plastic grass measureless to man. But the Enormodome itself was a comfortless shell, like one of the poet’s caves of ice. Its pleasures were spartan and ascetic. There were loos but no refreshments. This wasn’t behind-the-scenes at a top club as I had once imagined it: steamy communal baths, hardmen in their stockinged feet with a B&H on the go, bottles of milk after training and a jeroboam of Pomagne to toast a Leatherhead-like FA Cup run.

My son and his mates lost two games and drew one. At the time of writing, I’m not aware that any of them have been asked back for training.

After the tournament, I tried to go pitch-side to collect my boy, only to find the coaches in their sacerdotal joggers barring the way. The sanctity of the chamber had to be preserved even after the spectacle was over. ‘Did the coaches talk to you?’ I asked my son as we were leaving. ‘No, but they shook our hands.’

Of course they did. They had to remain detached; they’ve seen too much heartache. The dirigible overhead seemed to sag a little, though its unsleeping electronic sensors would have registered no change. Like Coleridge, I had dreamed my Xanadu into being – ‘I would build that dome in air’ – but this unforgiving pavilion was no place for dreamers. In my mind’s eye, it was already deflating, a shrivelled soufflé. But nevermind: I had a trial at a Premier League club and they can’t take that away from me! Away from my son, sorry.