"I knew I was better at football than the others in the playground, although the teachers just looked at my size and that was against me from the start..."
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Trouble in the playground
“The right to play is a child’s first claim on the community. Play is natures training for life.
No community can infringe that right without doing harm to the minds and bodies of its citizens."
Lloyd George – British Prime Minister (1916-1922)
The lunatics have definitely taken over the asylum and built a £46 million super school in Peterborough for 2,000 pupils without a playground.
The head master defends the decision by stating, “I want the teachers teaching and the children learning at the school. If children are enjoying lessons, then there will be no need to go and run off steam outside.”
When asked how the kids would eat and drink he said, “The children can hydrate during the learning experience.”
I don’t know about you but I never called triple maths ‘a learning experience’.
Luckily some 80 miles up the A1, take a turning left and you are on a different planet.
The Bolsover & District Sports Partnership fight furiously for the children’s right to play and have fun. Part of that is organising fun games in the playground facilitated by the school dinner ladies.
Give Us Back Our Game recently spent two brilliant days with 80 Derbyshire dinner ladies, giving them ideas about introducing fun football games to the playground.
Ideas on how to use the space get all those involved that want to play and how to deal with the different age groups and abilities.
Generation of footballers have played in the school playground, playing on their own terms and having fun.
Here is a little look back to playground football in the 1960s.
What a laugh playground football was with all your school mates. The only thing that made school worthwhile and one of the few reasons why kids would get up in the mornings.
These days’ health & safety have stopped most football in the playgrounds, but the local drug dealer is filling in by giving the kids a different high at the school gates.
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.
Black School Shoes
Worn in the playground as changing into your daps would mean less footie time but a huge barney with your mum.
The standard lace up variety were only worn by boring kids with glasses who looked like bank managers, even at the tender age of ten.
Then there was the slip on, which was quite trendy but one of the most dangerous weapons known to man, ranking somewhere between the Scud missile and the Atom bomb. Many a keeper has been dragged from his goal, bleeding, to the school nurse after being hit by an Exorcet Clark's slip on.
The scenario has been played out on many a playground. A player through on goal strikes the ball with ferocious venom. He miss times the shot and his slip on travels faster than the speed of sound, striking the hapless goalie on the forehead, knocking him backwards and unconscious into his goal while the miss hit shot trickles innocuously over the line.
Some players got their mums to buy a size too large pair of slip ons so they could fire them off their feet at will. This gave them a certain street cred in the playground as to how many keepers they had permanently disfigured.
Paul Cooper
http://www.giveusbackourgame.co.uk 07875 283093