baanpolball

Soccer Soccer

To score that goal they missed playing as children in the backyards of their homes and on street corners with friends. To undo the target that they pinpointed as goalie if they let down their team.

Other grown ups have come to earn the team they knew they should’ve left, had a child-hating adult or coach comprehended their talents and the concealed work in their hearts.

Every Saturday at 7 each day, middleaged and elderly baanpolball men saunter individually as well as in pairs across a tarred parking lot and also through a glass entry way, which makes their way into the indoor soccer construction.

Their eyes gleam with a demand for revenge because their memories flashback over time, and also their voices betray recognition of the urgency of a life slipping away minus the necessary correction in their history. Age, they state, holds no hurdles. Soccer skills reside in one’s heart, not in fragile legs and aching knees.

Each player stops by the darkbrown front desk to pay for the ten dollars admittance commission to a cynical, goatee-mustached attendant old enough to compete.

‘Don’t allow the youths to break your legMatt,’ the attendant often reacts with all the grit of cynicism in his voice, after receiving the obligations and putting the money in a drawer.

The warning often prompts Matt to have a fast inner conversation with himself. By no means did he see or feel an aging Matt. Can his mind become lying ? Does our brain deceive us concerning the condition of our body? What exactly did the attendant find in him that he did not see from himself?

Poorer by ten dollars, Matt turned left as always, swaggered forward, and followed with a brief corridor. A shifting brown wooden doorway let him in to the dazzling blue-white light of the soccer field.

Even a cathedral-high ceiling capped the indoor arena. Metal frames embedded together with fluorescent bulbs criss crossed its matrix, while slowly rotating buffs wrapped with sticks that the vault jumper would jealousy supplied aeration.

Foam padded the side walls of the field. A sheet of pliers descended from the side metals at the roofing into the artificial Astroturf floor beneath. Between the net and the padded walls was a distance using three silver metal chairs. Movable goalposts inhabited both ends of this area along with emergency exit signs hungover two doors on opposite sides.

The players were heating when Matt entered. He was wearing an ordinary black tshirt and crimson short pants, a bit loose around the waist, which he teased while walking to join the warm up: quad stretches, short runs and short moves, and so forth.

A number of the men came regularly and Matt knew them by name at least by their own nick names. Kris laid supine, flexing and extending one knee after the other. Ejikeme throttled up and down a brief distance.

A man whom Matt had seen often times without ever hearing anybody shout his name during a game was tugging on his soccer shoe laces. ‘What a leg,’ Matt marveled in silence. Never had seen legs just like it, so bowed so large, resembling a horse’s throat.