Young boys playing league football.

Every good boy deserves fruit, but what about the rotten apples? I wonder, because some of the junior boys were caught without a lunch pass and some of them went to the top of the town for a burger and shared a UDL with some cobbers in the car park.

So?

Nothing sinister there, just high spirits and cola.

Boys will be boys and young footballers will be boysier.

Give a puppy a rag doll and he'll rip the stuffing out of it.

Tease him with an old sock and he'll vault to the top of the hills hoist to tear it down.

Adolescent footballers and over-excited pups.
Not too dissimilar.

You can give a pip-squeak kid a pair of strides you'd like him to grow into, but the reality is he's going to drag the cuffs through the mud until he's grown into them.

Is there really the need to air those dirty cuffs in public?

What then?

Make them come out in their kit at the end of the game to pick up papers?

Make them clean their teammates boots or take a dip at 4.a.m. on a wintery wind-swept beach? Fine them? Ground them?

Do we have to shame them? Publicly? In print?

Surely those column inches would be better spent advising us of Valentino Rossi's pole position at San Wherever-the-hell-it-is..

How about we leave them to do what we did.

Make their own mistakes, savour life on their own terms, on their own turf, in their own time. Hale and hearty without headlines hindering their happiness and hardening their hearts.

We've all dragged our cuffs through the mud, but learnt from our mistakes.

Cut these kids some slacks and they too will learn to take life in their strides.

League.

These kids are like peaches and plums picked prematurely.

Let them ripen organically, not in the harsh halogen heat of a hydroponic headline.

I'm Billy and I'm boiling.