Remember The Old School Yard? Street Football Rules
Remember the good old days, when all you had to worry about was whether or not you had a football and whether your mates were playing out?!
I’m sure we’ve all grown up kicking a ball around in the streets, or local park, or even the back lane. If it was the back lane, our garage doors were the goal posts. A luxury really, as we had an actual pretend bar.
No arguing over whether it was too high or it would have gone in or not! If it was the park, ‘jumpers for goal posts’ and all that, we would sometimes drag council bins over to become make-shift goal posts. I remember in the school yard, we sometimes had to resort to using a tennis ball, as no-one had brought in a ‘proper’ sized footy.
Unbeknownst to us, a tennis ball was excellent for honing our ball control, and when next we used a larger ball, skills became so much easier after having got used to a smaller ball. On occasion, the tennis ball would split in half, but this didn’t deter us, because using a halved tennis ball became hilarious, as you could deliberately kick the ball in the ‘wrong’ direction, so that it curled around in a large arc, and get to where you originally intended to kick it! You had to be there!
If there wasn’t even a broken tennis ball – fear not – as we invented ‘coke football. ’ We’d pinch a decent-sized piece of coke from the caretaker’s pile of fuel for feeding the boiler, and we had an endless supply of ‘footballs’. If the piece split and broke under a crunching tackle, there was a large heap of the stuff to keep us supplied!