Читать книгу Goals to Gold - Lee Sandford - Страница 14

MY FIRST MEMORY of playing football is a somewhat painful one. I was five and my brother Paul was nine. Paul and his friends met up every Saturday to play football on a big concrete area near where we lived. It was probably a series of disused tennis courts that had doubled as netball courts – the kind of nasty, hard surface that could really mess up a kid’s face. I would go along with my dad, who acted as their referee and coach, and watch from the sidelines.

One Saturday I begged dad to let me play and he said I could. I was so excited; I knew I had a lot to prove to these big lads and if I played well, they’d let me play again. Everything was riding on my first appearance. I had been playing one-touch football with Paul and our cousin Chris in our six-foot long front yard and I was confident I could control the ball.

I got put on just before half time and hovered around in centre midfield, waiting for my big moment. Finally it came. Craig Andrews passed me the ball. I caught it easily with my left foot, turned and started dribbling down the left wing. Two seconds later I felt intense pain and heard a big crack. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground with dad looking down at me.

I’d knocked myself out. I’d been so busy watching the ball and trying to keep control of it, I hadn’t seen some small goal posts down the wings (presumably erected for a 5-a-side game that would be played on the width of the main pitch). I’d run straight into one of these hard, metal posts and given myself an almighty crack on the head. That was my excuse for not doing well at academic subjects at school sorted; I lost half my brain cells when I was five!

At the time, we were living over a pub in Elephant and Castle where dad was working as a publican. For a place named after a pub, Elephant and Castle lived up to its name as a boozy, petty crime-ridden London borough on the south side of the river, just east of Waterloo. In the early 1970s, the area was still recovering from the extensive bombing it suffered during the Second World War, which had left many people having to double and triple up with their extended families in large Victorian town houses and prefabs.

The general overcrowding and lack of space in London had led the government to spearhead several relocation projects. Keen to get us out of the rundown place we were living in, and give us a bigger and better home, my parents applied for one in Basingstoke.