Playground football

Playground

What a laugh playground football was with all your school mates. The only thing that made school worthwhile and one of the few reasons kids would get up in the morning.

These days’ health & safety have stopped most playground football, but the local drug dealer outside the school gates is giving a new high to the kids that doesn’t involve kicking a bald tennis ball around.

I attended a small grammar school of some 350 boys. Other than summer months the only place to go at break times was the school play ground. It was small with a five foot wall surrounding on all four sides.

There was always a game of footie going on, so unless the likes of Appleby and Barrington-Babb wanted to be steam rolled by thirty footballers all massed together in a big scrum you had to scale the wall pretty sharpish.

Remember the school had 350 children, so with 30 playing football that left some 320 dangling precariously from the walls.
The boffins at the school who were not street football wise would often turn their back on the raging inferno below, working out some chess moves or showing off their collection of Peruvian first day covers.

You would have thought that with their incredible knowledge of physics and a deep understanding of the Pythagoras theory they would have prepared themselves for the inevitable.

Once Cliff Parker, the hardest shot in the fourth year, wiped out the entire school quiz team of Ackford, Eden, Jennings and Clements with a right foot volley. The situation was further exacerbated in that the quiz team were due to appear in the TV final of Top of the Form against the girls from Stella Maris Convent that very evening.