Remembering Football

[tag]Jogo Bonito[/tag], The Beautiful Game.

The other day, driving home in one of those gnarly KL traffic jams, just a few days before the the World Cup started, I saw one of the many buntings flashing the words ‘Jogo Bonito’. I believe Pele used those words to describe football (‘soccer’ to you Americans), but I doubt he was the first to use that phrase.

I remembered back when I was in primary school in a small town, [tag]football[/tag] (and to a lesser extent, badminton) was the primary sport all of us knew and played. I wasn’t all that crazy about football, but we played it all the time, nonetheless. We played it during our Physical Education classes (‘Pendidikan Jasmani’), we played it before school started, we played it sometimes during recess. Some of our friends played after school (or before, if it was the afternoon session), and almost everyday during the holidays.

I remember back I was in Primary 2 (back in those days it was called ‘Standard 2’), we had 3 periods of free time in the week. Why is that so? It’s actually ‘Agama’ period – Islamic studies for the Muslim students. Which meant the 15 non-Muslim (or non-Malay) students are supposed to spend quality reading time in the library. Yeah, like hell we’re going to sit in the library – most of the time we ran havoc all over the school while everyone had classes. The teachers, well, you could say they ‘closed one eye’. (That was supposed to be a political joke. Haw haw.)

In between playing ‘galah panjang’ and ‘biawak hitam’ (hmm, probably need to write about these in some other post), we played football in the field with a small rubber ball. Goalposts were usually small mounds of hay collected from around the field, or whatever objects we could find. We weren’t good at it, we were, after all, only 8 years old.

During PE classes, the whole class played together, all 40 of us. PE time football was a little different, for starters we used a bigger, proper football, and goalposts were standard issue broomsticks stuck in a Milo tin filled with concrete so that it could stand on its own. Obviously 20-aside footie was a little different from FIFA sanctioned 11-aside, we played as most kids did, everyone swarming around the ball like bees, or like rugby. Anytime a slightest infringement occurred anywhere near the goalmouth, some kid would shout ‘PENALTY!’ and everyone would follow suit. I dunno, taking penalties seemed like the pinnacle of the game, every game had usually a few.

Football back then was fun, although it was very much different from what we watched on ‘Big League Soccer’ or ‘Road to Wembley’. For us, it was a beautiful game, though we didn’t appreciate it as much as we do now.

Next: The MSSD tournament in Primary Six.