The volunteers who keep the scoreboard honest

Somebody has to run the clock, work the gate and sweep the stands afterwards. Mostly it is the same handful of people, and mostly nobody notices.

Every game you have ever watched at a community level was made possible by a small group of people doing unpaid administrative work in a cold building. Somebody unlocked the doors. Somebody ran the clock. Somebody counted the float in the cash box twice because the first count did not match.

The list of jobs is longer than it looks: timekeeping, the gate, the canteen, the music, the lost-and-found box that is mostly single gloves. Most of it is filled by parents who started when their own kids played and never quite stopped, which is why the average tenure is measured in decades rather than seasons.

The asking is the hard part. Clubs will tell you that recruiting volunteers is harder than recruiting players, and that the people already doing it are the least likely to say they need help.

If you have ever wondered how a season actually gets run, the answer is upstairs in the timekeeper box, and they would probably appreciate a hand.