Born With The Ball

He was born with the ball at his feet.

The first time he stood up, it was to kick the ball, he only started running to chase after it.

It didn’t seem out of the ordinary then, he was merely a child with an avid interest. It wasn’t until he enrolled in school until anyone realised that he was special.

Under 5s football isn’t football. If you could watch it from a birdseye view, it would much closer resemble ‘hungry-hungry hippos’. The ball bounces off shins with no rhyme or reason, most of the children yet to learn to kick the ball and not each other.

So when the ball rolls to the feet of one of those children, and he dribbles past every other child as if they were cardboard cutouts, it is unsurprising that the parents who bothered to attend took notice.

Wow, that boy is special often reframed in their minds as why can’t my son do that?

Quickly, he was moved to older age groups and even against boys twice his height he stood out. He stopped going around his opponents and simply walked through them, flicking the ball through his defender’s legs whenever the opportunity arose. It didn’t give him any advantage, in fact, it was harder than the alternative. But that did not matter to him, it was more fun like this, he was playing the game as he wanted it played.

Like anything in life, football only becomes more competitive as you grow older. Of course, at under 7s level, everyone wants to win, but by the time you’ve turned 12 winning is a requirement.

This was no different for him. In his team’s first game on a full-sized pitch, he was played on the left wing. This was his favoured position, he could drift in off the left-hand side and towards the goal to either pass or shoot as he saw fit. During the second half, a long ball was played out to him which he controlled expertly. Looking up, he saw his teammate free in the box, screaming for a cross.

He was born with the ball at his feet but he grew up with it only at one. So good had he become with his dominant right that he never had to use his left. With only one defender to bit, rolled the ball past him with his right foot, and stepped over it with his left before wrapping his right foot around his standing leg to cross the ball. This ‘rabona’ was played to perfection but his striker headed over when it seemed easier to score. Nonetheless, the few dozen people who had come to watch him play ‘ooh’d’ and ‘ahh’d’ in recognition of the skill they’d just seen. His team went on to lose the game.

After the game, his coach came to him with an ultimatum. He was to stop with the fancy stuff, no tricks, no flicks and certainly no rabona.

“I want you to play the game normally. Use your left foot, it’s more effective.”

When he refused he was told that no one was above the team. If he wanted to play, he was to ‘play normally’.

So he stopped. He started using his left foot, he started passing instead of dribbling, he stopped trying the flick the ball around players in favour of passing it back to where it came from. All of these things made the team more efficient, they scored fewer goals but they won more games. They won titles back to back to back.

He was dissatisfied though. The game wasn’t meant to be played like this. Every time the ball touched his boots, he had to fight his body in order to make the ‘right decision’. He couldn’t suppress it forever. In one match, towards the end of another title-winning season, he received the ball during a 3-on-1 counter-attack. With unmarked teammates left and right he did what seemed most natural to him; he pretended to kick the ball to his left to shift the defender's legs and then poked in through them. There was no ‘ooh-ing’ or ‘ahh-ing’ this time, however. Everyone had stopped coming to watch him play long ago. After rounding his man he dinked the ball over the keeper, missing narrowly.

Seconds later he was off the pitch. His coach was furious.

“I told you no one was bigger than the team.”

That day was the last time he ever laced up his boots. He told his coach he would not promise to never do something like that again and his coach said he would not play him until he would make such a promise.

He never did.

And his old team just kept winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning and winning.

They kept winning in total silence.