Play on

A friend asked me last week if I could remember the date I finally stopped “having a kick about with my mates”.

He wanted to know when, and more importantly why, those endless afternoons spent flinging jumpers down for goalposts, playing ‘Cuppies’ and ‘Three and In’, were no more.

The tone in which he questioned me seemed despondent and desperate. As if deep down he hoped I would immediately snap back asking “What do you mean stopped?!” Before going on to unravel an in-depth description of my informal weekly playing habits; then maybe even inviting him round for an impromptu game of ‘heads and volleys’.

But he was quite right to presume the informal kick-about had long gone out of my life.

I tried to convince myself that a weekly game of five a-side with friends still counted. But I knew deep down that it didn’t. The ‘kick a round’ had been sacrificed to the grind of adulthood responsibility. Conformity had quashed my greatest avenue of self expression.

I was resigned to the fact that I could not remember the date that it all stopped. In contrast my friend knew his date exactly. It was 7 October 2005 and it seemed it had been scratched into his conscience for eternity.

Pied Piper

Saddened by my unexpected trip through nostalgia, I couldn’t wriggle from these thoughts as I found myself faced with thirty 5 to 11-year-old children at one of our FA Tesco Skills Centres.

As I watched one of my colleagues cajoling a group of children in his practice, I felt the urge to interrupt the session and preach about the joys of simply playing the game and how this pleasure, like it had with my friend, can disappear forever. But I quickly remembered the communication style of the manic street preacher wasn’t quite what we were looking for in our new approach to coaching children.

Instead I bided my time and I waited.

At the drinks break I sensed my chance and I asked a few of the children if they ever just ‘played out’.

“We do sometimes, but not much.”

“Sometimes Mum doesn’t let us,” explained Jon, 9.

What? No 20-a-side mob games on the park, where children of all sizes simply ‘joined in’? No games where the score finishes 21-19? And what about the World Cup Finals that finished with the floodlight failure of the Sun being substituted by the Moon and your star striker going in for his tea.

“They don’t let us play in the yard at school either,” replied Max, 10, bluntly.

Here were two boys at the height of their creative childhood potential, yet their attitude towards the kick-about was flat and cold. I couldn’t leave this alone. I had to ask them: ‘What do you do you when you go home after school or at the weekends?”

‘X-Box’

‘Nintendo Wii’

‘MSN’

Their emotionless answers went through my rose-tinted vision of childhood pursuits like bullets. Zinedine Zidane once stated: "Everything I achieved in football is due to playing football in the streets with my friends”. Eric Cantona admitted that the ‘kick a round’ gave him and his friends ‘a great sense of freedom and liberty.’

And it’s not just the French who seemed to benefit from ‘playing out’. Sir Tom Finney summed it up perfectly when he said: "Football united the kids. You didn't have to call for your mates; simply walking down the street bouncing a ball had the Pied Piper effect. We could all smell a game from 200 yards".

Society may be changing. And I might need to leave some of my own memories behind. But if those three seem to think there could be something positive about having a ‘kick-about’ for the future of the game, it might be worth us sitting up and taking notice.

And they weren’t that bad were they?