A 7.30 am meet time is met by all as the class of 21/22 embark on their second GPSFA tour. The parents seem a lot more settled this time since all the girls came back unscathed from their first tour. I mean, it’s not like we would have forgotten about any of them, is it?! Typically, Father Tomo is in bits, wailing away into Mother Tomo’s shoulder and turning endless numbers of Kleenexes into sodden messes of tears. Tomo is asked to say goodbye but declines, “I don’t want to start him off again.”

The first stop is after a long five-minute journey to Beaconsfield Services where a lovely Google Maps shortcut through the countryside brings us to our first obstacle, a tunnel with a height limit of 2 metres. Driving a minibus that stands 2.05 metres tall isn’t going to work, so it forces a twenty-three-point turn in the farmyard beforehand. Beaconsfield Services is Coach Jess’s favourite since it appears to be the only service station in the South of England and Wales that contains both a McDonalds AND a KFC, meaning she gets to have two meals in one stop. The girls aren’t disappointed after having it described as ‘the best services in England’ and wander around in amazement without even spending a penny, it seems.

We journey on for five minutes to Wembley Stadium where we’re greeted by the news that the traditional minibus-friendly car park is currently a building site, which forces the second twenty-three-point turn inside two hours. Thankfully, we make it to our stadium tour on time, where we’re mixed in with other members of the public. The tour guide recognises our tracksuit from previous years and gives us a fantastic experience of Wembley. As always, our guide invites us to hear the acoustics of the stadium by getting us to shout “HELLO WEMBLEY” into the void. He informs us that we’ve now broken a world record for volume thanks to Poppy’s level of noise as the windows of the hospitality suites around the arena reverberate and cling on for dear life.

Following this, we take another five-minute journey to South Mimms services to eat our lunches ahead of today’s game. On the way, the girls are overjoyed that Coach Katie has finally brought her cable which means they can make the Spotify playlist they’ve been asking to make for several weeks. It’s a big disappointment as they ask for ‘Toxic’ and then struggle to find five more, mostly Ed Sheeran, songs to make up the rest of the twenty-four-minute playlist. We arrive at South Mimms services where Coach Katie patiently waits for the forever- last people off the bus, The Slingers, to get their lunchboxes to bring inside. After a quick walk across the car park, the twins kindly inform her that Aaliyah has been left behind and safely locked in the minibus without her knowledge. After reading this, the parents might be a bit more nervous about the coaches taking them on tour next time.

After another five-minute journey, we arrive at May and Baker Sports Club for our fixture against Barking & Dagenham. Our top away fans, the Rosenbergs, are covered in black and yellow face paint and Father Slinger has chucked a couple of yellow and black flares onto the pitch as he carries out his battle cry. Missing, is Father Tomo, who has been kept in the car and ordered to pull himself together and stop blubbing as he only saw Tomo eight hours earlier. His punishment is that he misses his chance to run the line.

Barking & Dagenham are always tough opposition in more ways than one. They don’t disappoint this year and contain a number of players that dwarf even our resident giant, Paige. The hosts punch the ball around the pitch, switching play with ease and shooting from distance. They press aggressively and clear the ball from danger effectively which puts them firmly in control throughout. The visitors give a very good account of themselves and compete well for all but the first five minutes of the second half where we allow the hosts to double their score and a free kick later on makes the score an emphatic 0-7. Attendance is fourteen away fans (with Buddy in the car).

Top scores are given to Aaliyah in goal who has shaken off her abandonment in the minibus earlier to make a number of significant saves and rightly draws specific praise from the opposition parents after the match. Tomo and Sassy are solid in defence and battle well to reduce B & D’s chances. The most impressive part of Sassy’s display is the fact that she falls over just once, deep into the second half, which means she spends more time on her feet to defend resolutely. In midfield, Paige and Izzy work incredibly hard to close down their opponents and are in a constant battle to turn them away from our goal. All of the girls’ efforts mean that there is only one B & D shot after the sixth goal, a huge upturn in performance defensively, and that was the seventh goal.

Just five minutes later, we arrive at the Holiday Inn in Hemel Hempstead, ready to unpack and finally stop moving. The girls vote to twist rather than stick with the same rooms from Swansea. 227 houses Sassy and Izzy, 229 contains Ava and Sonic, 230 hosts Aaliyah and Maybe it’s Maybelline, 231 plays host to the Slingers and Poppy while 232 welcomes Tomo and Paige. The first task is to unpack and be changed ready for the all-you-can-eat buffet downstairs in fifteen minutes, which 227 and 232 manage in sixteen, thus losing an attitude point in their DREAM marks.

The buffet is incredibly good value for money but it’s important that no eating marks are dropped by overfilling your plate. Aaliyah is determined to not drop a single point in the next three days and powers through an unpleasant portion of cauliflower. Ava is like-minded and eats the courgette slices in her pasta in spite of her hatred of them. Sonic leaves two chicken legs looking like they’ve been dipped in a tank of hungry piranhas; the girls ask whether she has to eat the bones as well, but this is unnecessary as they’re inedible.

Room scores are judged after dinner. 230, 231, and 232 remember lots of the requirements from Swansea and achieve perfect scores. 227 leave their light on and 229 leave their light on too as well as leaving the toilet seat up and the bathroom door open to have points deducted. Diaries are completed with showers in between and it appears it’s been such a long day that most of them have forgotten that they’d been to Wembley earlier on. The girls are sent to bed after a discussion of what constitutes an emergency should they decide they need to knock on Coach Ed or Coach Katie’s door. Virtually anything they can think of they are told is not an emergency so they are to leave their elders in peace until they are awoken at 9am.

Giving the scores out for the day, Coach Ed reflects on the emotional rollercoaster he’s had with Poppy over the past six months. After being firmly in eleventh place of the Coach’s Favourites Championship for many weeks at the start of the season, she’s defied the odds with a mixture of hard work in training, solid performances in matches, good company off the pitch and not calling him Ed Sheeran to rise to the Champions League places of the CFC. Her first room score in Swansea was a 0 and today it’s a 10. She’s achieved a perfect 10 in her attitude and eating scores and she’s worked hard on her diary and in today’s game. She even single-handedly broke the Wembley volume record this morning. Coach Ed goes to bed with hope of what is to come due to the new-found mutual respect between the two.

Friday

*KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK…KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK…KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK*

Why is someone knocking on my door? This makes no sense. No-one ever knocks on my bedroom door. WAIT! I’m looking after children. Quick, answer the door. No, stop, you can’t answer the door like that, put some clothes on. Oh, no, what could have happened? What’s the emergency?! [opens door to see Poppy standing there].

“Do we have to change into our match kit now or do we wear what we want?”
[Closes door with barely an answer. Checks the time. Nearly two hours before wake-up time. Poppy is immediately relegated to eleventh place in the CFC.]

Upon exchanging notes with Coach Katie at the agreed wake-up time of 9am, it transpires that I wasn’t the only coach that was woken up without emergency. Coach Katie was woken at 6.30 am and 7am beforehand. From this point on, Poppy will go by a new name. As she is loud, aggressive (on the pitch) and has no qualms about waking you up early in the morning, she will now be referred to as The Cockerel. She is instantly deducted a point for each unnecessary wake-up call and since The Cockerel and Maybelline were found to be room- swapping, they receive another deduction for that, too. The Coaches are in a no-messing situation and also deduct a point off rooms 229 and 232, since they decided to be nosey and ended up getting themselves shut out of their room. And they wonder why we never let them have their room keys for themselves.

Breakfast is another all-you-can-eat affair. While the Slingers are asking the chef to fling sausages into their mouths like a trainer at SeaWorld flings fish into the mouths of Sea Lions, the rest of the team take a more civilised approach and eat at the table. Coach Ed rates the boys’ plates and deducts points all over the place as they leave whole slices of toast and rashers of bacon. Incredibly, they explain that Bob has already told them their scores and they’ve barely been touched, much like their breakfasts. They are lying, of course. The girls have no such problems and tuck almost everything away in large quantities. Izzy drops the second and final eating point of the tour by leaving a bit of toast which she didn’t manage to smother in Nutella (the only way she’ll eat bread apparently).

After a quick stop-off upstairs and Izzy’s regular question of “Can we go in each other’s rooms?” the team are whisked away on a five-minute journey to a game of Footgolf at Little Hay Golf Complex. The teams are as follows; Churchdown Village Junior School vs Rooms 462 (230 + 232) vs Rooms 456 (227 + 229). Sonic gets off to a slow start and is seen repeatedly drilling the ball over the top of the first couple of holes before being told it’s the lower number of shots that wins in Footgolf. There’s an impressive display of logic and ‘putting’ skills on show throughout the group and many of them come within range of achieving par. The final scores are counted and averaged and put Churchdown Village Junior School in 1st place with a notable performance from Millie Slinger who finishes just 2 under par. Aaliyah and Izzy win the Rooms 462 and 456 competitions respectively and Sassy doesn’t fall over, perhaps the greatest victory of all on the slippery golf course. 

After a quick lunch at McDonalds, Izzy finally gets her answer to the eternal question of “Can we go in each other’s rooms?” as the girls are given an hour to hang out in each other’s abodes. The evening game against St Albans at Oaklands College is the shortest journey of the tour, although the distance between the hotel and the gate is almost doubled by the journey from the gate to the football pitch. The Rosenbergs are once again in their yellow and black face paint, Father Slinger is banging a huge yellow and black drum singing ‘Marching on Together’ and Father Tomo is once again being held behind in the car unless he agrees to not read out the soppy poem he has written about how proud he is of the girls. Again, he misses his chance to run the line.

The pitch is bathed in beautiful evening sunshine and Gloucester put together, without doubt, their best performance of the season. And St Albans are no pushover. Earlier in the season they put four past us in thirty minutes but on this day they can’t overcome the infectious, relentless pressing the Gloucester girls enact on them. Aaliyah catches almost anything that comes her way. Sassy, Tomo and Maybelline are proper no-nonsense defenders throughout, and Sassy doesn’t even fall over once. Izzy, Ava and Paige win the ball quickly and aggressively and feed our attackers on a regular basis. The Cockerel is played in three positions in forty minutes and shows fighting spirit in all of them. The Slingers attack their opponents as if they’ve hidden sausages behind their shin pads as they block them off, battle for the ball and take them on at will. And as for Sonic, let’s just say, that after scoring four goals with her exhilarating speed, they’ll be dancing on the streets of Coney Hill tonight. She’s joined on the scoresheet by Ava who, earlier on the sideline, noted that no-one supports Sonic on her runs and that when she comes on she’ll do just that. On one of Sonic’s customary runs, Ava indeed does keep pace and is able to finish off the goalkeeper’s spill from her shot. Final score 1-5, attendance is sixteen away fans (with Buddy in the car).

A quick shower and Izzy asking if they’re allowed in each other’s rooms and Coach Ed saying no precedes a celebratory all-you-can-eat buffet at the hotel. The girls show no sign of losing their appetite in spite of the buffet breakfast and McDonalds during the day as not a single eating point is dropped again. Sonic eats a chicken leg for every goal she scored and the Slingers drink a glass of squash for every defender they nibbled at, which results in them taking multiple trips to the toilet later on.

The evening’s entertainment is ten-pin bowling at Hollywood Bowl in Watford. The social secretary (Izzy) has the idea of a Year 5 lane and a Year 6 lane which goes down well. Midway through, a quick calculation of the average score per lane sees the older age group take an early lead. “It’s not our fault we’re losing,” The Cockerel caws whilst simultaneously misunderstanding how the scores have come about. The younger lane finishes first and Millie has achieved her second victory of the day with a score of 85. The older lane are neck and neck with the final roll of the ball and they finish with triple winners in Izzy, Tomo and Paige, with scores of 88.

The room scores reveal a slump in maintenance all round. 227 have a crumpled duvet and dirt in the sink. 229 have left bags on the table and the shower curtain still drawn. 230 have one duvet not tucked in. 232 also have a crumpled duvet. 231 looks like a disaster zone as they have the high crimes of leaving a light on, leaving the bath mat on the floor, leaving two towels on the bed and of course, having a crumpled duvet.

Coach Katie has been impressed by the diaries so far but has discovered twin-like diary entries from the twins for Thursday, so they’re separated and encouraged to be themselves for Friday. Attitude points remain high for all apart from The Cockerel. Generous and well-deserved match scores of 8s and 9s are given out as a result of the outstanding performance from earlier on. Sonic even scores a 10 from Coach Katie. The girls go to bed and within ten minutes there isn’t a sound from their rooms. Even The Cockerel has called it a night.

Saturday

There was no cockle-doodle-dooing from The Cockerel this morning. Three attitude points lost yesterday seems to have taught her a lesson. All the girls are awake in some fashion when the doors are knocked, apart from Tomo and Paige who can barely muster a grunt when they’re told to be ready in their match kit in twenty minutes. The Slingers both start and stop brushing their teeth with their electric toothbrush in perfect unison. Right on cue, The Social Secretary asks if they can go into each other’s rooms once they’re changed and ready. The answer is an incredulous, “No.”

Perfect tens are scored at breakfast without any fuss whatsoever. The Slingers are devastated to see that they had eaten the last of the sausages yesterday and are left with the replacement chipolatas which clearly neither are a fan of as they’ve not put any on their plate and also haven’t asked the chef to chuck them into their mouths from behind the counter. As the girls finish off, the room inspections are completed. Paige’s last-ditch reach to turn the light switch off like an all-action heroine is in vain as she left her hairbrush on the bed. 227 have left their light on and have still not managed to uncrumple a duvet. 231 have clearly given up/learned nothing as all their problems from the night before are still there, plus they left the toilet seat up. 229 and 230 finish on a perfect ten though. The housekeeping people entering a room as spick and span as 230 must feel like they’d already cleaned it. Coach Ed tells them that one of the girls has kept a tight ship and remembered everything they learned in Wales, from a zero on the first room inspection to a ten today. “Maybe she’s born with it?” wonders one. “Maybe it’s Maybelline?” wonders the other.

The only attitude point of the day is dropped as Sassy does, what is known in the GPSFA as, ‘a Myatt’ and leaves her purple towel from home in her room. We head out for our final match against Woking. The Cockerel has sprung to life and treats the team to her tour guide of the motorway, picking out such breathtaking sights as ‘a round thing’ and ‘a blue car on the right.’ It seems to annoy her team-mates but the coaches secretly find it very funny for both of the above reasons. She rises to tenth place in the CFC. 

We have beautiful weather once again for the match and we arrive to find all three main GPSFA squads at the same location, which gives today’s occasion even more of a family feel. The Rosenbergs are decked out in yellow and black face paint again and Father Slinger has brought a giant black and yellow flag to plant in the middle of the pitch should we win. Father Tomo is in a tug of war with Mother Tomo over a patchwork quilt that he has knitted for the team. He thinks the girls will love it. She thinks it’s going to embarrass Tomo in front of her mates. He starts to cry again. She tells him that if he doesn’t stop weeping then he’ll miss out on running the line once more.

Gloucester start way off the pace and Woking hit the post in the first twenty seconds. We start to grow into the game more as time passes by with Tomo and Sassy battling to keep the ball away from our goal as much as possible and doing a fine job of it too. The first half is marked by easily the top two saves of Aaliyah’s season with full stretch stops both vertically and horizontally to keep the score at 0-0. Woking are well organised as always and are tough to break through as no shots are attempted by the visitors. Disaster strikes in the fifteenth minute as Sassy finally falls over for the first time, well, in this match at least. Woking go into the break 2-0 ahead from a powerful finish and then some slack defending allowing them to drift through on the edge of half time.

Gloucester manage to compete in the second half but Woking go 3-0 up after a free kick is floated in which evades everyone and their fourth comes from an intercepted goal kick. It never feels that Gloucester were truly out of the game as they still manage to keep in touch. Paige has her best game of the tour with a commanding performance in midfield, sweeping up any stray attackers and covering for defenders when required. Sonic finally creates a chance towards the end as she bursts past a couple of Woking defenders but flashes her shot past the post so quickly that Ava hasn’t even been able to reach it this time. Final score: 4-0 to Woking. Attendance is seventeen away fans (Buddy has finally been let out of the car).

The journey home goes between extremes of silence and loudness as we make a final stop at Reading Services. Coach Jess beams with pride as we tell her that nearly all of the squad choose a KFC. Her work this season is almost done. The girls have added a few more songs to the playlist which now takes it to over an hour. Coach Katie tallies up the DREAM marks ahead of the prizegiving ceremony next week and we’re astounded by the improvement from Wales. The final act is to drop the girls off an hour earlier than planned with everyone looking forward to an early night, not eating a buffet, and no cockerels waking them up in the morning.