WE OF A CERTAIN age have spent a lot of time lamenting the demise of street football – probably more time than we spent actually playing street football back in the day if we’re honest.
Yet there is a legitimacy to the concern. Every great talent we watched on TV growing up honed their game on concrete or dirt. The same applies in many cases today.
The demise of street football has been exaggerated – kids still play on estate greens and in football cages. The cage is where this country has a problem.
A court, a cage, a shared concrete space for basketball and football – whatever you want to call them, we in Ireland are lacking.
Some of you might disagree. There are parts of the country where they are evident, if not plentiful. Dublin 8, where The 42 has its office, is infamously without a full size football pitch despite the efforts of committed campaigners in the area.
What the postcode does have is some football courts, including at the Oliver Bond flats, one at Michael Malin Park next to Vicar Street and one near St James’ Hospital, at Oisín Kelly Park, which is fenced off and has fallen into ruin. A sad sight.
Of course the area needs more, and the urgently required grass pitch, but at the very least the young and old have places kick a ball without the fear of being upended by somebody with a phone in one hand and the steering wheel of a Nissan Qashqai in the other.
It wasn’t so much lazy kids that led to the decline of street football, more worried parents – and even children themselves who are capable of their own risk assessment.
But give them a court away from cars and the ones interested in football will spend hours there – far more than they would ever rack up training at their local grassroots club or even academy. Also, most parents will actively encourage their kids towards such facilities.
It’s not only inner Dublin where there are football courts, you’d see quite a few of them in the western suburbs for example. And they are around the country too – your chances of living near one is often down to your local authority and their view of how money is best spent.
In Carrigaline for example, a few miles from Cork city, there is a fine football and basketball court, below, while there are astroturf football pitches in the GAA club which seem accessible to the public a lot of the time, which is as it should be.
Then you have a town such as Naas in Co Kildare. It’s similar to Carrigaline in demographics – lots of young families, lots of kids who love their sports – but there is no free, open-to-the-public football court there or, to the best of my knowledge, in the smaller towns nearby like Kill and Sallins.
There is considerable loss to anybody passionate about football in any such town around Ireland. Kids will miss out on hundreds of hours of play, thousands in the cases of those who have the interest and aptitude to play at the higher levels.
And people of all ages and abilities lack a local facility where they can turn up and play without having to join a club and do everything that comes with that.
More municipal spaces for sport are a no-brainer for public health, especially if they are on a hard surface and have lights, rendering them useful all year round.
The contribution football cages make towards the production of young talent in countries like England and France is well documented in print and on screen.
A documentary worth watching from a few years ago called Ballon sur Bitume (Concrete Football) explains the importance of these pitches in the Parisian banlieues.
Riyad Mahrez and Ousmane Dembélé, among other elite footballers, explain what they gained in the cages, how the nature of competition there makes for highly skilled and imaginative footballers who are also tough.
The cages of South London, in particular, have for many years been famous for developing this kind of player.
“Even though I was in the academy system, I was still going to the cages to play football,” Eberechi Eze, the Crystal Palace winger from Greenwich, told the BBC. “I think it shaped me to become the type of player I am and focus on enjoying football as I did when I was a kid.
“You play with older boys as well. You have to be strong and you have to be better. That was the mentality. If you were small and you were young, you had to try to be the best on the ball. For sure, it shaped us to be who we are as young footballers.”
The point Eze makes about playing in the cages and the academy is key. Often the debate is framed in a street footballer v academy way, when the best approach is typically a mixture of all means necessary to develop a player.
Yet during those early years, it is hard to overstate the value of playing for hours in unsupervised games. As someone who has been involved in grassroots coaching for the past few years, it is striking how a lot of what is viewed as best practice mirrors street football: don’t shout instructions; let the kids play; play small-sided games; play 2v2 or 1v1.
The best coaches you see are the ones who are best at getting out of the kids’ way. Taken to its logical conclusion, the smart course of action is just to build the cages and let the youngsters take it from there. Away from schedules and session plans they are free to be creative and learn from mistakes.
Minister for Public Expenditure Pascal Donohoe has just said the Government will make “some really big and positive announcements about sport capital funding in September” in the wake of Olympics success.
Money to help more towns get relatively cheap public courts would be paid back countless times over by way of promoting active lifestyles and simply letting kids play. The cage can set them free.
