Small Players and Big Balls
The title itself is enough to put you off your dinner, I apologise for that but it had to be said. When I opened my first box set on Christmas morning 1969 I was confronted with that statement in all it’s glory . The poor guys in their pristine(??) red and blue kits with big brown balls that came up to their chest. The game was advertised as the replica of Association Football, and included the immortal phrase of “Reproducing all the thrills of real football by FINGER TIP CONTROL”, printed on the box. So when was the last time any of us saw the “Real” game played with balls this size which if to scale would have been around 1.5m in diameter, I suppose it would make goalkeeping easier, and the amount of 0-0 scorelines would become the rule rather than any kind of exception. But as we know it wasn’t the scale of things that fascinated us back then, it was the fact that we were in control, we scored the goals, we saved the shot s, and we won the trophies, no one cared the ball