With my Villans, Italian amateur emanation of the English club, in 2022 we will be 40 years old, we could only play 12 games, about half of those we usually play, 8-a-side football. I started playing football as a child in the oratory , then in middle school I got a company from my neighborhood, I was a light fin that with the years and the kg has become a median, let's say a Brazilian 5. In those days it is not like now where if you want to go to a "football school" your family has to pay good money and take care of taking you and picking you up for training and matches. In those days it was all free, not only that, they gave us bags, training clothes and a voucher to buy shoes, those with aluminum studs that unscrewed. For the 2/3 weekly training sessions we were in a certain point of the neighborhood, a minibus passed to pick us up while, since I went to school until 13.30 on Saturdays, it came to pick me up directly from school for the championship game. I remember that on Saturday I went to school with a bag of books, a football bag and a sandwich with mortazza to eat while we went to play, wherever we touched. Then there was a lot of football outside the official one, in Turin, in the suburbs where I lived there were green spaces, 2 sweaters were enough to make the doors and the game was done. Or we would play in the street, on concrete so there were few cars, we are talking about the first half of the 70s. Football has always accompanied me, when I worked in tourist resorts in the tropics I remember a big game in the Seychelles on a grassy space next to the sea, while in the Maldives there was a kind of field in the center of the atoll with a palm tree in the middle where we did epics you leave with the Maldivians. I also played in Cuba, there are many guys who are at the small pelota stadium in Las Tunas, or in the 11-a-side field inside the city athletics track. You start as a boy you knew when they started but not when they ended. A passion that, despite the years, never dies.
