Alana or square football had its own unique and insurmountable rules.
Wednesday noon. Shortly after school and shortly before the English tutorial. The place of the appointment is the park or in the empty school yard. Some 10 people are getting ready to τα spread their football talent on the cement.
There are still some free alleys on which no large building has been erected but… such time, such words. We do not have time to go there. A stadium is baptized whatever has the required space to set up a double in the "bam".
The football of that time is now dusty from the years that passed over it. All the innocence, the torn shorts, the bloody knees were lost too, like so many other things from that time.
Now football means a TV with pizzas and beers or (at best and when the obligations allow) a stadium with a scarf around the neck. This was not always the case, however… Once upon a time there were beams made from school bags. The horizontal that reached as far as the goalkeeper's hands. When the three corners meant a penalty and the scores did not count. When the neighbor was cursing and cursing because we cut him off from his nap and we threw oranges at him in the windows for revenge that the match cut us off at the critical point.
Let's face it: No matter how many 5x5 pitches are made, the football of the square or the alley will always have a place in our hearts. Why how to do it? Like the cannons, it does not have…
The field and the ball
Let's start with the basics for those unlucky who did not live at that time. The point was to play ball. It does not matter where. It does not matter how. It is important to schedule an appointment and gather ten people (at least) to start the bunch.
If other people came it was not a problem. All the good ones fit. The one who did not come out was the one who brought the ball. It was not supposed to be the most smelly. He had the ball, he commanded. The team started with him and ended with him. Lucky everyone else if his mother did not call him and he had to leave earlier.
If he left then the ingenious Odysseus would wake up inside us. The "air balls" that the younger brothers had were recruited. The plastics that hit the shot in the direction of the right side of the goal and was located east on the neighbor's balcony, because the wind was blowing towards them. If she did not exist either, then we would go for something smaller. Even a tennis ball could be useful in those hours.
If it weren't for that either, there would definitely be a tin can of soft drink. Turning it into a ball required mastery. You put it upright on the road and stepped on it with force and in such a way that it gathers without bending. The end result was reminiscent of the… pack used by hockey players in its largest and sharpest but what to do?
When the black and white ball was missing, with the thick seams (which when destroyed, the sambrela was left over and created a carousel) and that indelible smell that still lingers in our minds, you had to find something.
As it was said earlier, a stadium was "baptized" whatever had space. The alley, the alley where cars did not pass all the time, the square, the park or the school yard.
The goal and the division of the players
In all the above places it was not just the grass that was missing (it sounded like a science fiction script at the time) but something much more basic. The beams! Of course, this was not a particular problem in the face of the need to play ball.
Beams were the… school bags. The distance between them was defined in advance and was determined by the "steps". For the uninitiated, the "steps" were about ten (depending on the space available, it could have been more or less) and were counted by the same player for both hotspots so that there was no difference.
The one who was measuring would stick the heel of his foot in the bag and start counting by placing the heel on the toe of the shoe each time. So he walked and counted to ten. There he put the second bag and… voila! The finish is ready.
The same process for the second goal and the field was ready. The only problem is the definition of where the horizontal beam would be. There were no solutions there so horizontal was the imaginary point that the goalkeeper's hands reached when he made a field jump! When someone made a high shot and the ball passed over the goalkeeper then the first fight took place. He could reach her, no he could not. He passed by him, not half a meter above him. The tip did not come out (there was no replay, nor ρού Varouchas) so a little bit could fall. But everything in the game was…
Before we got there, however, there was the stage of training the roster of each team. If the teams were not ready in advance, the "steps" were recruited again with the only difference that two players were directed at each other. Whoever first kicked the toe of the other's shoe, started by choosing the first player, then it was the turn of the loser of the process and so on.
The rules and the strange dictionary
Just because we played in the arena does not mean that there were no rules. It was not the "get dogs grind" phase. Okay, there was no offside (it could not be, after all, since there was the player that everyone shouted "cafe" or "bag", given that he was camping in the opponent's defense and waiting for the pass) but there were others.
One of them was that the three (won) corners were penalties. Somehow this must have turned out to be one of the three pizzas as a gift! The scales did not count. In other words, you could not throw her on the wall, score a goal and celebrate like Ronaldo. The "natural barrier" was not included in the above category. The wheel of a car, that is, or the trunk of a tree that protruded a little beyond the (also) imaginary line of the out or some part of the body of an unlucky passer-by (slowly the match did not stop because a person was passing).
Also, if the match was… indefinitely and not 90 minutes, the basic rule is that when the critical time arrived, someone shouted "the phase" and everyone agreed that in the end, whether a goal was scored or not, it all ended there.
Individual rules could be the prohibition of carols (extremely powerful shots, Roberto Carlos level breaking adjacent windows) and the pogot where the goalkeeper saw a Sargani-Saravakou mix and could carry out a raid from the opponent area and score goals.
Finally, there was the rule of thumb. The one who was above all. For all of the above to apply, they must have been explicitly and unequivocally agreed in advance. If this had not been done then there was "well, we did not say that from the beginning". In simple Greek it meant that yes it was valid for the sequel but without having… retroactive value. This was the reason for the biggest conflicts to break out inside the stadium.
In any case, however, as the Zig-Zags used to say, "fortunately I forgot to grow up and if you look for me I am still in the arena. Fortunately, I forgot to grow up, don't pick me up from the street yet, mother "!
Article: Nikos Demisiotis / Newsbeast