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My dad's football
On a business trip to Germany back in the summer of 2006, the same year the FIFA World Cup was held over there, I asked my dad to bring me a present. So, as I was hoping for, he brought me a replica (I had all intention of playing with it so an original one wouldn’t be such a good idea) of the ball that was to be used for that World Cup. It had a very simple yet appealing design, with those squiggly, black lines making something of an 8-like shape with golden edges. It felt very smooth and with not much cushion in the first layer, you could tell it would be a hard hitter. At that time, I played football with my dad every Saturday and Sunday, we would go out to my garden and stretch our feet for a couple of hours. He always bugged me about using both feet (I’m right footed), but I never really wanted to. I could barely hit the ball with my left foot let alone give an accurate pass or shot with it. A couple of days after he returned from Germany, whilst we were getting ready to play with that same ball, he came up with an exercise to make me get better with my left foot. In our garden, there’s a big wall on one side covered in bindweeds which has something of a vertical line or column of bricks that stick out of it (with a width of about 30 cm, no idea why it’s there to be honest). It’s fairly noticeable. He told me I had to hit, from about 8 meters away, a spot on the column that was about three meters high, with my left foot! At that age (around 8 years old), you’re not guaranteed to lift a football upwards of three meters every single time, even with your natural foot let alone hit a 30 cm column from almost ten meters away. Giving it a try with my left foot, I struggled to make it reach the wall in the first place. So this became our ritual. Every day, before playing, I had to have at least 30 go’s at hitting that same spot on our wall with the same football. There would be some times where I would lose my balance and fall, others where the ball would simply not reach the wall, and every now and then I would be able to lift the ball only to see it hit far away from the intended spot and brush some bindweeds. It was excruciating, but I wanted to play so I would just get on with it. I really can’t remember the first time I was able to hit that spot with my left foot, but I guarantee it was at least several months later with that same World Cup ball my father brought me, which was probably full of scratches and green grass marks by then.
