Sporting Memories: The Bliss of inter compound Match
Growing up was quite an interesting time for me although we never keep plenty friends due to parental restrictions. We began playing with ourselves but later on we needed to break the circle and start associating with other.
I really want to appreciate cyrptoandcoffee for letting us share our sporting experiences.
Many times we’ve been canned for going to people’s house to play but that didn’t deter us just because fun that we derived from play. You know they say that all work and no play make Jack a doll boy. I personally have been denied food a couple of times because of going to my friend’s house to play football. Generally football was my favourite sport while growing maybe because I was limited to that as I wasn’t earlier enlightened on the kinds of sport that one could engage in.
When we started recognizing our excellence performance and we knew that when every passerby always stood rooted to the ground watching our excellence display of skills, we thought of a way to appreciate ourselves and our talents and that was how we started an inter compound football competition.
Still we had a challenge and the challenge was how to fund the competition cause in every competition, there must always be a winner. So we started making supports cards to raise money for the competition and also inviting our supporters to come watch us as we perform. Well! Every competition gets interesting when there are many competitors so we started inviting youngsters like ourselves from neighbouring compounds join us.
I remember one time we went to a compound and we were chased out of the compound as we were often referred to “bad children” who came to spoil others children. Off course people could go ahead and say whatever they wanted say as that wasn’t our business. Ours was to satisfy ourselves through football. So out of the compounds we went to about five (5) of them, only one compound could join us.
Having raised our rewards from a few people that loved sport like my dad, Uncle Ub(The short dark guy that loved football so much) and Uncle Morgan, we were good to go. Then my compound was quite a big compound with a big play ground that always served as our pitch. Just like we saw in television, we made sure we mark the place very well with white sand noting all the four corners of the field. It was always a three aside match and we often used the 1 – 2 formation that’s 1 defender and two attackers and this two attackers will always have to come fall back to defend when the pressure is much at the back.
The rules of the game was one is permitted to use joggers for the match and since we could not get rent kits we used mufti and one side need to go skin while the other side wear mufti. The first time, we had a high fan base as everybody from my compound and the opponent compound came to support us.
You can imagine playing football under the full view of your parents and loved once… those that have the experience know the fun and excitement that always comes with that and you can’t afford to loose the match. So we added so much effort to it just so we could win the match and good enough the god of soccer was with us and we won the competition.
The scream and shout of victory from both ends made the competition epic. The greatest fun in every competition is when you’ve won a competition that came with a trophy.