1982 Brazil: The Glorious Failure by Stuart Horsfield (Pitch Publishing 2020))

 

So, imagine you are looking down on a large patch of grass, roughly equivalent to the size of eight football pitches. Along the top of the square is a boundary made up of a variety of garden fences, of which number 158 sat approximately two-thirds along to the right. Top-right corner was the St George’s main building and a small, fenced-off playground. The bottom-left corner was occupied by Overdale County Primary School with three additional prefabricated classrooms. The playground sat in the centre of a two-storey U-shaped building and extended out from the school straight up towards the houses. The entire left-hand side of the square was a similar collection of back garden fences which belonged to Hawthorn Avenue (part of that epic sprint home). The rest was pure grass; an emerald canvas upon which I spent more time growing up than I ever did inside the four walls of number 158. To us it was just the back field.

I have two more final landmarks to note before we leave this overhead scene. There were three football pitches marked out on the remaining grass. Two of them were adjacent to each other and ran from top to bottom of the square. One belonged to St George’s and one belonged to Overdale. The final pitch was at the bottom of the square, running from left to right, into the bottom-right corner. The pitch that belonged to St George’s was about 20 yards from our back garden fence. If you stepped out of the back door, you put your foot on the drive. Turn left and walk straight into the back garden, past the shed, over the fence, which was the original wood and wire structure that was put up with the house. Climb over it and there you were in what seemed like acres of grass and between the white wooden goalposts.

The goalposts were essentially three long planks, nailed together and cemented into the ground. No nets, but those three white pieces of wood afforded me more joy, exhilaration, fun, memories and friendships than any other place on Earth. It is worth noting here that in my mind I would have put a football through those white sticks tens of thousands of times over the years, playing under the assumed identity of whichever player had crossed my conscous at the time. Kevin Keegan scored a few, Kenny Dalglish was prolific for a short period of time, as was Glenn Hoddle. I would even go so far as to say Paul Mariner got a couple. I can say for certain that Zico scored an awful lot of goals in the early-to-mid-1980s on the back field.