I’ve been thinking a lot recently about my childhood. I don’t know if it’s because I now have kids of my own or whether it’s because I’ve got back in touch with a few folk from primary school through Facebook but it’s certainly on my mind.

And do you know what strikes me more than anything about that time? The sheer amount of football I played. I’m not talking a game of seven and by on a sunny night when our parents had kicked us out of the house. I’m talking from the age of about five years old playing at least 2 hours of football a night and even more on weekends if the weather was good enough. Even at the age of 18 I was playing 3-4 hours of football on weeknights. My sudden stop when I fell out with/lost contact with they guys during the year I turned 19 basically explains where my gut came from.

Being five years old and the tallest in my class meant that any time I played football you could almost guarantee I would be in goals at some point. We used to play on a huge strip of grass beside my parents house. On one edge there was a swing park and we used the rest of the grass as a huge pitch. To this day I’ve never worked out why we always placed the goals where we did. On one side the hill fell away and was covered in bushes and nettles and about 20 yards in we placed the goals. The other side of the pitch ran all the way up to the road which was about another 100 yards away. The only rules we used with regards to pitch markings was the goal line and the outer boundaries of the park for the sides. If it went passed that it was either a goal or out of bounds but you could keep playing even of the ball went all the way up to the main road.

As with most groups of kids playing in the street the age range usually ran from about fives years old right up until twelve. Any older than that and they found something better to do or better players to play with. We were always in awe of the older players. Brian and Stevie were brilliant and I remember rumours that they had scouts out looking at them later in their football life. At least one of the guys we played with ended up having a trial for Chelsea although I can’t for the life of me remember his name. One guy was just huge. Even at that age you could tell he was going to be tall and when a kid gets the nick name ‘Sherman’ it doesn’t come as a surprise that he ended up playing and coaching for the EK Pirates american football team.

I won’t lie. I was never what you would call a fantastic player. I had great reflexes and my time in between the sticks was spent shot-blocking with the occasional amazing dive across the goal mouth to the tip the ball by for a corner kick. I couldn’t hold on to a ball and to this day I don’t have the confidence to run with it either.

One summers day both myself and my mate Billy were playing at a bit of grass at the end of my street and were convinced that a scout was watching us. We spent hours afterwards wondering who he was from and what fantastic shot or save would have caught his eye. Years later I found out that the guy was actually my neighbours son who was visiting but had been locked out whilst my neighbour was out. He laughed when I told him our story after all those years.

Then came the day we were dreading for a while. The local council sold off our ‘football pitch’ and they built sheltered housing for the elderly on it. We would have to walk twice the distance to our school in order to get to a red ash hockey pitch we could use instead. Needless to say we didn’t go there. We started playing on the hill at the end of my street. Even when we were chased by the police we still went back. The council ended up planting additional flower beds so that we couldn’t actually get a large enough area to play on… We still found a way though.

As the years moved on I finally made it into P6 and they decided to start the school football team back up. At that point we were playing most of our football at school in the loading bay below the school kitchen. It was about a quarter of the size of a 5-a-side pitch and we managed to play 10v10 on there at times. Shots on goal could come in from just about anywhere and at any time so my reflexes were getting a good work out but any time we moved up onto the full size pitch I was useless. I don’t know if it was because I wasn’t used to the size of the goals or if it was that I was that small I could only touch the cross bar if I took a run at it but I went from being a really good keeper to being someone that folk insisted not be allowed anywhere near the goals. I was always a good reader of the game even of I wasn’t the best actual player so I did eventually get the hang of playing 11-a-side on the full size pitch.

The school football team was run by three parents. Mr Paxton, Mr Clapperton and Mr McLaughlin. I have very vague memories of Mr McLaughlin playing for Dumfermline or some other lower division team that I’d heard of but never paid any attention to but Mr Paxton didn’t really know what to do. I was 10 years old at the time so what do I know about managing a team though. When Mr McLaughlin was involved we did circuit training and practiced dead ball situations but when it was just Mr Paxton we played 5′s in the Main hall or took penalties for the fun of it with our outfield players taking turns in goal. Craig McPhee, our captain in P7, took his turn in goals one evening only for the ball to be hit that hard that he broke his wrist against the bench we used as a goal. I’ll keep the rose tinted spectacles off. We were rubbish. I think there were something like 10 teams in the league we played in and the only one we could beat was The Murray Primary School and we loved going there for a game. It was the only school in East Kilbride that had a grass pitch at that point so it felt like we were playing at the end of our street.

We had some outstanding players in that team that year and to this day I don’t understand how we didn’t manage to do better. Craig Purden was possibly the best goal keeper in the league and in James Madden we had one of the best central midfielders as well but the rest of the team couldn’t hold back the opposition. We tried hard and we did have good players but without direction and any tactical know how the end results were usually inevitable. We were also threatened several times with complaints and recommendations that we be kicked out the league. Why you may ask were we receiving this sort of welcome? We had the ‘cheek’ to have a girl play for our team apparently. Usually there was no bother before a game and the schools were very good with providing some sort of separate changing facility for Catrina but by the end of the game and they’d seen how good she was the complaints usually started.

When i joined the team I moved from being a goal keeper to playing at right back. I still don’t know why I was put there as I could never keep up the pace and run up and down the wing like the other full backs we played against and I was never happy with our central defenders. They were good players but they struggled to play as a team and at times forgot that without linesmen you can’t pull the offside trap unless the player is that far offside the ref can spot it from half way across the pitch. So we went from them not communicating very well to both stepping out at the perfect time had we had linesmen giving the attacker that few yards head start that we could barely afford giving the speed of our defence. We leaked goals constantly and in one game a guy called Speedy ripped us to shreds whenever he decided to try and get past us. It was only Craig’s skills that stopped the number of goals we lost heading into double figures I think.

We ended up second bottom of the league that year.

Tags: football, kids, nostalgia, school, youth

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 1:02 pm and is filed under Every Day Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.