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Jill Stephenson and Andrew Hook
Govan. Photograph by Islay McLeod
There were no teachers or coaches around when my 10-year-old pals and I kicked a ball about, no all-weather fields when we used to drop a couple of jackets on the ground for goalposts. You only needed two people to play three-and-in; not a whole team. You didn’t need to have boots or even a football.
Most of the kids I knew had an old tennis ball in their pockets; always. When you waited for the bus you’d bring the ball out and kick it back and forth to each other. If you were on your own you’d knock it against the wall, control it as it came off the stonework at odd angles; trap it and tap it back with either foot.
That would be the sort of thing those kids did that Douglas Marr saw in Tunisia – it was how we learned some fairly decent football skills. The cobblestone streets added extra requirements as well. You never knew where the bounce would take the ball. But you learned how to deal with it. When the time came to pick teams you didn’t want to be the last one. That was part of the motivation too.
Ironically Scottish football has been in decline since the Gorbals were demolished, since kids could no longer play in the streets of Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen or Paisley because cars took over our cities; since the culture of ‘play’ changed to a more sedentary form. You could argue that too many kids who play football in Britain now have had to play – have been taught to play – within organised or semi-organised structures. And organisation can kill off those transcendent skills that used to take some of Scotland’s footballers into another realm altogether; to levels of talent gifted only to rare practitioners like Pelé, Baxter, Law, and Best.
Through at least the first two thirds of the 20th-century, a conveyor belt carried Scottish kids from the back streets of our cities to the big English clubs. Players like Alex James, Hughie Gallacher, Billy Steel, Dennis Law, Bobby Collins, Charlie Cooke and many, many others went off to become the mainstays of illustrious clubs like Arsenal, Newcastle United, Chelsea, Manchester City and Manchester United. Their names are etched into the history and fabric of those clubs – still.
Nowadays wonderful players stream out of the continent of Africa and the back streets of Rio to the English Premiership, to La Liga, and Serie A. Dare we suggest that the lack of Scots in the primary roles we once enjoyed in world football is because Dundee, Aberdeen and even Glasgow have been gentrified? Can it be that our potential Ronaldos and Messis have been handed over to the tender guidance of teachers and coaches, to play organised sport and ‘systems’ football on all-weather pitches – and that the result has been the loss of something that was essential to the surpassing excellence that those earlier players showed us? Imagination.
Douglas Marr’s case for extending the school day by an hour might be one solution to the problem of Scotland’s dismal showing these days on the international football field. However, unless it involves real opportunities for the kinds of raw creativity and inspiration that the children of the streets can give to it, then it will only reinforce the kinds of rigidity that too much organisation can bring with it.
Michael Elcock was born in Forres and grew up in Edinburgh and West Africa. He emigrated to Canada when he was 21. He was athletic director at the University of Victoria for 10 years, and then CEO of Tourism Victoria for five
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