I am terrible at football - but love playing. Can I change my game completely in my mid-30s?

If I told you I have played football for 15 years, you’d probably assume that I’m decent. Unfortunately, I am not. I have three left feet and a not-very-convincing shot on goal. Despite how many years I have put into the sport, these things show little to no improvement.

I play football for the joy of it: the rush of the first whistle; the exhilaration of making a successful tackle or a clever pass; and the feeling of all fears and concerns melting away the moment the game starts. So until recently, the fact that I’m so bad at it occurred to me as, at worst, incidental. I grew up at a time when football was largely considered a men’s sport. In the 90s, there were about 80 girls’ football clubs in England (there are more than 12,000 now); there wasn’t a women’s premier league until 1994; and by the time I was in my 20s, boring jokes about women knowing the offside rule were wheeled out with disappointing regularity. As someone who still remembers the feeling of getting kicked off the pitch by the boys as soon as I entered year 3, I’ve always just felt blessed to play.

But after a while, I did start to find it a bit depressing being so comically awful at something that I love. I’m fed up with starting team after team for beginners, only to watch all those who have never kicked a ball before get better than me by the end of the season.

So this year, I wondered if I could break the cycle: could someone like me – a player so awful at football that if you watched me play you would truly, honestly, gasp – ever get any better? Is getting better at sport something that can happen in your mid-30s, after you’ve had kids, especially if it’s something you’ve thrown hours into but at which you seem to be cosmically ungifted? I decided I would try.

“It’s going to be a battle,” says my coach during our first phone call. It’s a sunny day in August and I’m sitting in the garden with my dog curled at my feet, but I suddenly feel a shadow of a cloud pass over. At least he’s honest, I think.

I know Wayne Phillips from his work with women’s teams, and I’ve always been impressed with how far he can take players. Phillips asks me to come to our first session with a few ideas on my strengths and weaknesses. I come with mostly weaknesses: I can’t cross or shoot properly; I freeze whenever I have to make a basic judgment call under pressure; and I can’t run very fast while keeping the ball. I am good at anticipating where the ball will go, and getting there in good time. I also think I’m a good team player, always cheering on my team and getting overly excited at even the most lukewarm attempt from one of my teammates on goal.

Phillips believes that someone’s footballing ability can be broken down into a few core principles. First is their physicality: are they fast? Strong? Prone to injury? Then their technical skill – how well they pass, dribble, shoot and tackle. Social attributes are just as important: I’ve played many a football match where a skilled player refuses to pass, and find it frustratingly similar to that episode of Frozen Planet where huge bison find themselves demolished by a pack of wolves because they just don’t know how to work together. Finally, there’s a player’s psychology: their resilience, concentration and ability to manage their emotions.

We agree to a strict schedule of training: one-on-one coaching sessions once a week, alongside group training and weekly matches. Phillips will map my progress, and make a plan tailored to my strengths and weaknesses. I promise to work on my strength and fitness.

In our first session, we do a drill where I have to dribble and turn, but I can barely keep hold of the ball. We begin a short set of drills on tricks to deceive and misdirect. First up: the Cruyff turn, in which you plant one leg and start off as if you’re going to run in one direction, while sneakily tapping the ball the other way. We practice step-overs, too, as well as simple feints. I fail terribly at everything.

By the end of our first session, I decide it’s all been pitched at a cruelly unrealistic standard. I pray Phillips feels the same, and that we can just stick to dribbling and passing in our future sessions.

They say in therapy that the reason you think you’re there is never the actual reason. Same, too, with football training. I thought I was coming to tighten up on some core skills. But three weeks in, I’m learning that the real reason I’m here is that I’ve painted myself into a little corner, and it’s prevented me from progressing.

I’ve often treated football like an uninterested lover: happy to say I’m in it for the laughs, and too nervous to take my problems with it seriously, for fear of being let down. I’ve always played in defence, because I decided it was a reactive and less technical position, where I could barge and shove my way to decent results, without finessing my footwork. Taking the ball forward, trying to score or set up a goal – I’ve always assumed these were jobs for somebody else.

Phillips picks up on this straight away. He notices how I don’t know how to receive the ball in anything other than the most basic stance: square on, and moving in a straight line. To be good, he explains, you have to create angles; to receive and pass from any position on the pitch, and to take the ball in surprising directions. So we begin to work on expanding my repertoire. Wayne gets me to practise receiving the ball on my back foot so I can quickly turn with it. He teaches me the concept of a reverse pass: where you send the ball at an almost impossible-seeming and counterintuitive angle at the last moment. Gradually I learn how to receive a pass while in motion, rather than standing still.

At group training, I get to try out these new skills. We also work on me learning how to attack, which is where my mind really starts to expand. I learn to pin my opponent back to stop them from getting the ball, rather than waiting for them to get it. These concepts are all exciting and new, and I tell myself that if I can nail them, good things will come.

But it’s not an easy road. Most weeks, I play a match with my team and find it embarrassing when they ask me when they’re going to see the results of my training. Not yet, I say – but I leave out the part where I wonder if they ever will.

‘Can we have a chat?” I say to Phillips one Sunday before our usual session. We are little over a month into our training and I feel slightly childish coming with problems so soon, like a student who says she doesn’t understand the assignment before even trying.

But I have been trying, and I just seem to be getting worse. The group trainings that I once felt competent in now leave me feeling tragically behind. In matches, I feel I’ve got actively worse, making rookie errors and suddenly unable to shoot or pass in the right direction. I find it laughable that just a few weeks ago Phillips was teaching me new turns and tricks when I still can’t do basic things, such as keeping the ball after it’s been passed to me.

“You’re reinventing yourself,” says Phillips. “The process of improving requires setbacks.”

We move to our weekly drills, in which I am unable to pass a ball into the top-left corner of the pitch, unable to dribble around some cones and fall over my own feet when trying to receive a pass. None of this feels like reinvention, I think. It just feels like being worse.

But I try to keep something in mind. “The way you talk to yourself, it’s invasive,” says Phillips. “It seeps into all of your decision-making. I’m not telling you not to be critical, but all of this ‘I’m rubbish’ stuff? Just leave it at the door.”

That, at least, feels like something I can work on.

My friend has provided me with a new metaphor. It pertains to trumpet playing. Many good trumpet players, if they want to become professional, find themselves at a crossroads. At amateur levels, many student trumpeters are taught “a bit of a shitty mouth position” (as my friend Barbara puts it). This mouth position is called your embouchure, and if you want to go pro, it’s advisable to relearn it.

“It’s like you’re going through a process of fixing your embouchure,” Barbara tells me.

I take Barbara’s lesson home with me and eventually something clicks. I realise that over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to define the direction of play rather than just react to it. In the process of doing so, loads of my old footballing mistakes had crept back in.

A few years ago, when I played football in New York, I lamented that I could never receive the ball without it shooting off in some other direction. A teammate explained that my foot was too “hard” – so I had to learn to cushion the ball with my foot. This and other early errors had re-entered my gameplay. While my brain started focusing on new things, such as how to take a shot on goal, I stopped focusing on some of the elemental parts of passing, such as having my head and body over the ball. And in trying to think ahead, I stopped focusing on the basics, such as: don’t pass the ball right in front of your own goal; or, always receive the ball with the inside of your foot.

They say the first step to improving is realising you have a problem – and once I realise this, my game does improve. In one group session, I score a goal off a header. In a one-on-one, I start combining tricks in sequences: running with the ball, doing a step-over, turning, dragging the ball back with the centre of my foot before running off and doing a Cruyff turn. I learn to feint, double feint, double stepover. I even start wondering whether I should become a striker.

“I have to admit,” Phillips says, after a successful training session. “When I first saw you on the ball – the way you handled it – I thought, how am I going to deal with this?”. Looking at me now, he says he feels proud. “Every action you made today was clean,” he adds.

There was a period about four years ago when I decided I wanted to be a good footballer. After playing for more than a decade, I’d joined a very good seven-a-side team in New York and I wanted to be like them. So I started going to the park every day. I practised kick-ups, improving from barely being able to get the ball up off the ground, to one kick-up, to six or seven. I passed the ball against the wall relentlessly, trying to improve my passing and dribbling. I did this most days for a year. And even though I still wasn’t good at football, I did improve somewhat.

Since I started training with Phillips, time has been the elephant in the room. I was seven months out from giving birth to my second child when I contacted him, still breastfeeding, and more strapped for time than I’ve ever been. I can’t get better by throwing hours at something in the same way any more.

But during our last session, I am pleased to see that putting carefully cultivated hours in, wherever I can, has made the difference. We do a drill where I have to keep the ball and get past Phillips with it, by using my new skills of misdirection. I win almost every time.

“You take your life seriously,” says Phillips at the end of the session, which surprises me. He is talking about the fact that I’ve been running on my lunch break at work to get fitter, and going to yoga and the gym to stop myself from getting injured. These were things I felt I had to do, as an overcompensation for being bad. It’s nice to hear someone reframe it. When he puts it all together, it does suddenly feel impressive. “You know what goals you have for yourself. And you make them happen.”

To finish our work together, Phillips comes to watch me play in a match. It’s brutal – I play mixed five-a-side, which is fast-paced and relentless, and in this particular match all of the guys in the other team are about 6ft 3in and able to lob the ball at the net from a distance. It’s not quite the end I had in mind for my last match under Phillips’ supervision, but as I walk off the pitch, muddy boots in hand, I feel accomplished. Phillips is right. I might not be the best footballer, but I set myself the goal to get better, and in the end, maybe – just maybe! – I did it. That feels worth it.

Click here to read article