The Ottawa Internationals’ Icebreaker Tournament

When I was a player and a coach in Ottawa, the second weekend of the season was always a moment of dread. This was the time when Ottawa International Soccer Club ramped up its collective guilt messaging about needing volunteers to help with the fundraising campaigns, and would I – and the team of which I was part – care to donate a day to run a stall or referee small-sided games or stand around signing autographs for people who were too disinterested to care. (In my time there, I signed precisely one autograph – for someone who thought I was Beau Bridges; even now, the memory makes me curl my toes in horror.) As a parent, the same sense of foreboding is front and centre; this time, however, it is the knowledge I have to give up a full day to watch four or five 30-minute games, with 90 minutes in between, chatting with people I only vaguely know about subjects in which I am only semi-literate, all the while making sure that Ottawacker doesn’t kill himself playing British Bulldog or climbing an electricity pylon, or gorge on ice cream and cakes at the bake sale stand. This particular tournament is also, of course, the inspiration for one of Edvard Munch’s better known paintings.

This year, of course, there was the added issue of his having been sick for the entire week. He awoke this morning with a slight wheeze in his chest, but the coughing had stopped and he looked undeniably healthy. I tried to convince him of the contrary, but he wasn’t having any of it, so, with the sun high in the sky, the sunscreen applied, the water bottles filled, and a large selection of coin denominations in my pocket, off we went to the Ottawa Business Park, otherwise known as Pylon Alley, for a day of soccer interspersed with mild electric shocks (were you to make the mistake of standing too close to one of the pylons).

The day was the predictable fiasco. It usually is. The sunscreen only works for the first three hours, after which it proves impossible to corral Ottawacker Jr., the team starts the day brightly, only to fade rapidly as the visits to the bake sale stand increase, the parents run out of conversational gambits and result to making illicit gestures to each other (the right hand raised to the chin followed by a couple of shakes is a favourite – indicating the time honoured “where is the nearest pub?”), and the club committee members start creeping up to unsuspecting parents to engage them in a conversation about the possibility of becoming a volunteer. (Thankfully, T&E, parents of Lucas, invited the parents and a bunch of the kids back to their house for one of the endless breaks, so they could cool off and swim, while the parents could explore the contents of their beer fridge.)

Ottawacker Jr.’s team was on a field on which there had been a delay in play; one of the young volunteer referees had insisted on playing a 60-minute game instead of a 30-minute game – and then compounded the error by taking a 20-minute break before the next match. Thus, two hours into the tournament, the teams were already running 50 minutes late. By the end of the day, the light was fading, the mosquitoes were biting, and the referees were still making a consistent number of incomprehensible decisions. Ah, the joys of tournament soccer.

Ottawacker Jr’s team lost three of the four games, and drew the other one. But he got to spend the day with his friends, had a couple of ice creams, managed to avoid hurting himself, and slept the night through, while Mrs. Ottawacker and I crashed on the sofa.