Football was an ornament of my childhood.
From the age of five to twelve, he possessed my imagination not only in Vadim Sinyavsky’s radio reports. Every summer, football blossomed on the sloping lawn of our neighbors in the “Ilyich’s Precepts” along the Yaroslavl Railway. In the “Testaments” my nanny Filippovna and I lived in my great-aunt’s cottage on Dekabristov Street, near the streets named after figures of the world revolutionary movement. This set us up in a serious way, which is probably why Ilyich did not leave us such a testament: “Play football!” He himself, as you know, preferred chess and small towns from all sports. During his lifetime, football had not yet become widespread. Well, no, not really. The babysitter and grandma didn’t even play. This covenant was invented by us, the children, and we were faithful to it. Football might not have burst onto the surface of the planet at that time, but it was already bubbling in its depths, like magma seeking an outlet and sometimes finding it.
A natural field (lawn) on the plot of our neighbors, the Vakhitovs, descended from a birch tree to elder bushes that grew along the fence shared with the neighbors. The angle of the pitch was small, but still the ball rolled down faster and it was more pleasant to run after it. We played not by time, but by score: up to ten goals in one of the gates. After five, they changed gates, making it fun for their opponents to run downhill. The modest size of the field and our youth determined the number of players – four by four according to the scheme 1 x 1 x 2:
The goalkeeper
The midfielder
Two attackers
It can be seen from here that we did not sit at our own goal, but preferred an attacking style of play; a sharp, combinational style. In our understanding, the midfielder was more of a half-forward, and his favorite habitat was not even the center of the field, but the opponent’s penalty area. However, he was responsible for all the goals conceded along with the goalkeeper. Individual feints were welcome, but only to a certain extent. It was possible to get involved, it was impossible to get involved, to flaunt, as they say, to fix things, especially to lose the ball. A reminder immediately followed:
– Borka, don’t play tricks! You’ll be fine.
– Orik, stop fixing it. Give up.
The correctness of the game was subject to another requirement:
– Don’t forge!
In our vocabulary, forging meant hitting not the ball, but the opponent’s legs.:
– Guys, why is Klim forging?..
It was as if one player’s foot was a hammer and the other’s foot was a hoof, and he had to be shod. However, we didn’t do it on purpose, but from problems with possession of the ball. Footwork was controlled not by reason, but by chance. Our rudeness remained unintentional. From time to time, it wasn’t about hitting the goal, but about hitting the ball, and then someone’s foot would turn up. The expression “the youngest, the most technical” was not about us. Both youth and technology loomed far ahead, they still had to live up to them.
A separate word about the ball. The ball was a volleyball, leather. It was inflated by a gray rubber bulb placed inside and sprinkled with talcum powder, but for this it was necessary to inflate the “aunt Pear” itself, and already it was bursting the tire. She had a long rubber nipple. In the absence of a pump through the nipple and blew. No one had enough air to inflate the pear alone, so they took turns blowing: the squeamish ones wiped the drooling end of the nipple with a dirty hand, the rest did so. After pumping the ball to an elastic roundness, they intercepted the nipple with a strong cord and shoved it under the tire, and the gap behind which it was hiding was tightened with lacing – a harsh leather cord, hoping that in the game, when it hit, it would not hit anyone in the face, especially in the nose. Blood could have splattered. This immediately stopped the game.
We didn’t knock on the gate, we knocked.
Our goalkeepers didn’t fall, but struggled. A rebuke to the goalkeeper: “Why aren’t you poking around, catching mice?” – could have led to his replacement, if there was anyone.
The attackers rolled back during the enemy’s counterattacks, and the midfielder (half-attacking), as said, repelled the attack on his own goal and immediately rushed to the other’s.
We did not use the “goalkeeper – drove” rule, considering that it only brings chaos into the game, which was enough. In addition, an empty gate turned into a tasty and too accessible trophy. No, our goalkeeper was standing in the gate like a sentry.
The goal scored by the goalkeeper on a shot from goal to goal was not taken into account – it was painfully light. The formula worked here:
from gate to gate does not count.
There were so many corners, but they were of so little use that we grouped them into three, and each three equated to a penalty. This formula sounded like
three corners = penalty.
The eleven-meter ones have long been the subject of controversy. Seven steps from the gate is close. Eleven is far away. We agreed to strike at nine paces. But then another question arose: to whom and how to measure the steps? If the penalty taker measured out, he noticeably shortened the step to a normal seven. And if the kicker was the goalkeeper, then the steps spread out a lot, especially the last two or three, indeed, almost to the usual eleven. Of course, the protest remark “They only go to ubortrest like that” somewhat reasoned with the goalkeeper, and the last giant step could have been shamefully shortened, but nothing more. Then they decided to increase the accuracy of the unit of measurement, taking for it not just anyone’s step, but specifically the length of the goalkeeper’s foot. She was named laptem. The step could be narrowed or stretched, but you couldn’t particularly stretch or shorten the bast. Measuring out the agreed number of lapties, the goalkeeper walked from the goal ribbon into the field, putting the heel of one foot to the toe of the other. It was called
pendal on the goalkeeper’s bast shoes.
Cheating with bast shoes was much more difficult than with steps. Of course, you could go out not in your own shoes, but in your father’s old ones, which were several sizes too big, and put the heel of one foot against the toe of the other, not close, as it should be, but with a gap, but you couldn’t gain much from this clowning, here the struggle was already for some centimeters. The bast shoes were constantly changing. Each goalkeeper wore shoes in his own way, but we couldn’t compare them with the control bast shoes stored as a reference in the basement of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Paris. Far away. Deep. And it’s not a fact that it’s stored there at all. We didn’t send him there.
You must agree how inventive and rigorous our approach has been. Even if the football formulas we adopted (FOFU) adapted to our circumstances and capabilities and did not meet the rules of the Big Game approved by FIFA, even if FIFA did not recognize FOFU, this did not bother us at all.
We didn’t play for FIFA, but for our own high.