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The pitch where we were playing football, sorry the field, when we finally found it, was behind some derelict induartial buildings and no matter where you stood there was a nasty smell of burning rubber. All lower league matches are played within the in sight delerlict buildings, it must be in a rule book somewhere.
The club house or to give it its proper name, that place over there, was an old nissan hut that had once been used to keep pigs in. At some point the pigs must have complained about it so the local football club got it.
If I had thought that the changing rooms were cold when I put my kit on I had not anticipated running out onto the pitch, it was like running headlong into a refrigerator. "It's far too cold to play." I protested to the team captain. He could not hear however as he did not put his deaf aid in while playing. " We're glad to have you too." he said. His lip reading was obviously not very good.
The captain pointed to a place on the field and told me that was my spot. It seemed to me much like any other part of the field. I assumed that the rest of the team knew what they were doing and had a quick look round at the other yellow jumpers, I began to wonder how true this assumption was.There did seem to be alot of us for a game of football.
I was jumping up and down waving my arms in a vain attempt to try to get a bit warmer. I decided to count the crowd, there were seven and one dog. Suddenly someone shouted at me, Its yours ! What is I thought, looking round to see if the ball was rolling along the ground towards me. With a thwack the ball it came out of the sky and hit me hard in the chest, without thinking I just grabbed hold of it.
It is one of those strange oddities of life is that in moments of impending disaster time seems to slow down to a crawl, you have extremely complicated thoughts in what is only a few seconds. Somewhere deep in the back of my mind I could see images from my memory, from the depths of my mind a message was trying to get through.
The memory was as clear as day, I was a small, cold, wet, muddy boy standing in the middle of the school playing field, the teacher was blowing his whistle, pointing at me shouting ' Handball ', the humilation, the free kick to the opposing side, the loss of the match and all my fault. Unhappy school memories however was not the message I was trying to recall, it all had to do with !!!
Before my thoughts had chance to wander any further down memory lane, a large shoulder with a twenty five stone man attached to it crashed into my stomach.
I lay on the ground completely winded, perhaps a better description of way I felt just then was totally dead. I was just about to take in a life giving breath of air when another twenty five stone slab of meat landed on top of me.
Just as life was ebbing away the message that my brain had been looking for finally came through,
Message read, ' Footballs aren't that shape!'
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Short Story Series - Abridged from the book - The Tatty Nickers | |||
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