Euro 2024: We'll play into the night
Words: Tom Reed
Cover Image: Han Balk
Stadium image: Floyd Heubel.
We’re young enough for back-yard kick-arounds but our kids look at us like we are old men.
Our knees creak with each trapped ball but the first touch is there and we can side-foot a pass in a straight line as we were taught.
“Football mad he is”- a line to describe near enough every boy in the 1980’s.
Back then, there was nothing else to do but play football. The Saturday morning cartoons finished early and we would be out of the door, not to be seen till night. Our parents were either too busy or didn’t care where we went, there was no worry.
Michael Brown had a Tomytronic 3D video game which you looked into with its built-in goggles but it left you blinking virtual spaceships and longing to track the familiar flight of a football.
All we needed was that ball, never the plastic flyaway versions but a leather football, its patches worn down to nothing but achieving the perfect weight for a header or a volley.
We’d assemble through word of mouth on the local field, which was small enough not to swamp us but big enough to give us total space from everything outside.
Kids in trainers that were one kick away from falling apart, it didn’t matter what you had on, because being there counted. If someone didn’t turn up we’d go and “knock” for them with an efficient a rap on the door as the “old bill” would make.
15-a-side wasn’t unusual and by mid-afternoon, the older lads would join in. They’d never knock us off the ball but a nutmeg or a Cruyff would show us what we needed when the time came to go to other estates and take the game to them.
If one team surged ahead in the goals, or started to dominate, one or two players on the team in the lead would swap over to the losing side to even things out. We had an innate sense of a fair fight.
There was no joy in a team with superior resources hammering another.
After all, how could we brag about a diving header or an arrowed finish into the bottom corner that skirted someone’s Benetton jumper, if the other team were out on their feet and demoralised?
When there was a break, because the ball had been smacked into the road, we’d stop for a drink and watch a daredevil charge in front of a moving car to poke the ball to safety.
There would always be a bottle of cheap pop on hand, and everyone got a sip. If you swigged too much you’d be chirped at but no-one returned to the fray too thirsty.
We’d sit down on the raised mounds as the older lads did their thing with drag backs and drops of the shoulders, the orange flare of a lit cigarette the only light, bar the sun’s red descent.
We had been begun to be sold an adult vision of the world with Candy Liverpool kits for washing machines we had no interest in and Holsten Spurs shirts for beer we couldn’t drink but international football trumped anything from the first division.
Marco van Basten was the player everyone wanted to be, demolishing our England in Euro ’88 with a hat-trick for Holland that had Peter Shilton startled, in his zigzag Umbro goalie shirt that was supposed to do similar to strikers.
van Basten’s first goal for the Dutch in Düsseldorf was as bewildering as that Tomytronic, off balance control with his left and back to goal, feint onto his right, faking a shot, before switching to his southpaw again and slotting past Shilton.
We couldn’t give a toss about patriotic identities lumbered on us in later life, because the best team had won and there wasn’t much more to say. Lineker and Hoddle had hit the post but Gullit glided past us and van Basten hit his shots clean.
Then came a young lad called Gascoigne who gave two fingers to the teachers telling him to side foot and decided to dribble, giving us impetus to carry the ball into the darkness and beyond.
Now parents are scared of letting their kids out and the children watch Manchester City cane the opposition into submission. If we were younger we’d have packed up and gone home, sick of an unfair scrap and knowing that defeat would come every time we turned up.
A global pandemic more scary than any organism from the film “the Blob” didn’t bring the game together. Instead, businessmen betrayed our childhoods by continuing to plot for a European Super League and celebrations in grounds are stifled due to robot referees operating on 80’s home computer technology we’d have laughed at back then.
The pitches we played on have been concreted over, sold off or left to go to seed.
Disallowed dreams, grazed memories.
For one fleeting Summer, old kids and young kids like Mbappe and Ronaldo will shed the corporate shells of their club tracksuits to go out and play like like they did when their trainers were one kick from falling apart.
When a scoring chance comes, the stands will be grass mounds, the floodlights nothing more than the orange flare of a lit cigarette and the goal will go in like it was against a wall.
We’ll play on into the night, for it will soon be morning.
©Floyd Heubel/ Terrace Edition.
