Jumpers are stripped off, furry wooly jumpers that itch a bit as the cuffs cling to bare skin. Dumped on the ground like a carcass they become goal posts. It’s a game where you all compete to see who becomes the goalie. Footer as we called it in my day. The grass is a bit patchy and because it’s Friday afternoon the big mowers’s been past and left a silt of grass clippings, most of them get caught up the big rectangular hopper, but some escape to capture their last fragments of sunlight before withering to brown and dissolving into the earth, before they’re trodden over by those plugs on the bottom of the soccer boots of the Crowthorne Football Club. Studs that pierce and terrorise soil for 90 minutes.

We are here in our basics, plimsols and runners made of canvas, it ’s me and Simon Foreshaw, Mark Colvin and Peter Heath. I’m in goal first, the oversized ball zig zags around tiny feet. I’m set up on the freshly laid lime chalk boundary- funny stuff it smells of nothing, powdery but sticky – has to be – too last through a weekend of trampling boots. Mark sails in a quick one and I stretch to save it . It whacks my hand- saved- but my palm is smarting- a momentary red hot burning sensation as If I have put my hand on the bonnet of a car on a super hot day- ‘yowser’.

The tangle conntinues unitl a low ball skids past my left foot. At the last moment I realise and stick it out but the ball rolls right through to the bushes that guard the far edge of the soccer pitch. On the field there’s a lot more running and huffing and puffing and tangling with the other boys, looking on it might seems chaotic and brutal, but inside we’re chuckling. There’s mountain streams of chuckles and fun bubbling away inside- there’s a hunit of seriousness too. The desire for ownership of the ball for only a few seconds motivates a definite tackle a sliding tackle that leaves a thick grassy streak on my pants- I wear this as a badge- my pride is measured by the number of stripes I can return home with and that mum can scold me over.