Gone to the wall
Words: Tom Reed
Images: Urban Goals
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
England was once a country of bouncing balls.
Balls bouncing off walls, off garages, off shins and into gardens.
“Can I have my ball back mister?” was our anthem for a doomed youth.
Now, you’ll struggle to see a kid playing the working class wall game.
Not the cage stuff with its formal enclosure but the real deal, where footy comes with a peril of a ball stuck under a car or run over in a slow-motion death roll.
If the best players emerge from the cages these days, then a golden generation of council estate ballers were lost in the era of pre-90s concrete kicks.
The little princes of the shimmy, the shoulder drop and the pillow soft first touch.
There was frankly nothing else to do, back in the day and England’s football obsession can be directly linked to a fear of having to walk round Dorothy Perkins with our mums.
There was no real alternative to a kick-around, no personal computers till the late 80’s and even then, the tape decks took too long to load, came with a chilling noise and were liable to crash.
©Urban Goals/ Michael Kirkham. Barrow-in-Furness.
Walls became our friends and and a street-football, free-time pursuit was passed down through generations.
No-one knows who chalked the goalposts onto the wall in my court but in doing so, created an arena for football till it got dark and often after that too.
When the chalk had faded with the seasons, it would be topped up again, mysteriously, meaning we always had something to aim for.
The fact that we lived on a “court”, not a road or a street was all the evidence we needed that it was meant for sport.
Home became alien and the bricks, familiar.
Whole summers were lost to headers and volleys, the street football game that lives up to its name and where teeing someone up for a sumptuous smack, sans bounce was almost as good as the finish itself.
Being in goal was like a lifer plotting to break free from the nick and waiting for that one opportunity to escape.
Round our way, spooning a volley over the wall meant you were straight between the sticks.
After you had gone and found the ball in the impenetrable jungle of a garden behind, mind you, while the goalie tasted freedom with a devil-may-care attitude to going straight back in, like all good jailbirds.
©Urban Goals/ Michael Kirkham. Shadwell, London.
We found new ways to sneak into the garden and avoiding apologising to the “grumpy old git” after stopping bothering to knock after a few times.
Why go through the whole charade when it was going to happen all over again?
The panic of World Cup singles, the ultimate test of any footballer, when all your mates are through and there’s only two of you left.
All against all, a goalie kick into the mano e mano melee and the potential for a “goal-hanger” to knock you out.
“Red arse” or as we called it “tin soldiers” the naively sadistic game where you lined up on the wall and someone toe-punted the ball at whatever body part they could target.
Flinching meant you were a wimp and therefore “out” and no-one wanted to be cast into that dark abyss of being out.
Standing still meant a sub-concussion or worse, as we stood straight on, a ball to the nads.
It was just our luck that a lorry driver lived in our court and would bring his truck home, which meant the fear of a football crushed under jumbo tyres.
For some reason, there was always a ball with half its patches missing but that thing would be guarded with our lives.
We never saw a Mitre Delta, only in magazines.
Indiana Jones had nothing on a kid sprinting towards a moving lorry, with a last-gasp caress of the sole of the foot to send it to safety.
©Urban Goals/ Michael Kirkham. Short Strand. Belfast.
Less care for its saviour but that was football.
A game of “squash” that meant you had to hit the ball off the wall, lining up one after another but with only a limited amount of touches.
“One touch” squash was a killer because if you hit the ball first time it could be sliced and miss the large target in front. Leaving the ball to roll to its natural end could mean the kind of snooker that Jimmy White would struggle to get out of.
Sometimes the ball would wedge under a parked car, which meant mustering a chimney-sweep like ability to squeeze into tight spaces and emerging covered in about as much filth.
You could play on your own with a wall and a ball, side foot, outside of the foot, set yourself up and pretend you were Gazza.
The sound of the ball reverberating was a call to arms in the days before the internet, you could just hear the thud and know there was someone to play with.
Now, many kids stay indoors, parents terrified of threats that might or might not exist. We had all the moral panic of muggers and wrong ‘uns in our day but looked after each other with a fierce abandon.
Everyone needed their mate for a game of doubles. There was always a bottle of cheap pop to share, thirstily.
You’d play with older lads and learn as you went, the main skill growth coming from keeping the ball moving and going for hours.
©Urban Goals/ Michael Kirkham. Woodhouse, Leeds.
Michael Kirkham’s Urban Goals project captures the last remaining vestiges of a dying art in the street. He’s been all over the country taking photos of three-quarter rectangles etched on walls but is now running out of urban goals to snap.
“What I’ve seen everywhere is that the streets have been forgotten by the government and when kids actually get a ball out, it’s frowned upon. There’s too many ‘no ball games’ signs and not enough urban goals going up which is a shame” he says.
Maybe we can link the dying of the white chalk to a civic retreat happening in a nation which doesn’t resound to the noise of bouncing balls, windows slamming and grumpy old gits tutting anymore?
As our town centres decline, cinemas and leisure centres close, the cult of the individual sees kids lose that instinct to go out and make their own playgrounds with ball and wall.
And we wonder why England lack match winners at top level, when children are thrown into academies and soccer schools, instead of finding their own way and the street smarts needed to be the last one standing at World Cup singles.
Johan Cruyff didn’t invent the turn named after him, the streets did and was being done years before, except only children and net curtain twitchers were there to see.
Maybe the way to truly reclaim the streets is to get the chalk out again, encourage kids out and don’t moan when they make a noise?
Here’s to my mate Mark who wouldn’t shy away from a scissor kick on concrete, even though he knew his mum would leather him for ripping his jeans and jumper when he got home.
His palms grazed but would heal and he could get out of going in goal.
Result.
©Urban Goals/ Michael Kirkham. Tranmere, Birkenhead.
Tom Reed is Terrace Edition Editor and can be found X: @tomreedwriting
Urban Goals is an ongoing project and can be found on X : @urbangoals and Instagram : @urban_goals.
The Urban Goals website is www.urbangoals.com
