Tell me one of your football memories

February 11th, 2006 | by: Afshin Afshar | Comments Off

One of the fun things for us football fans, especially those of us who have a couple of years up on the rest, is reminiscing. I can come up with so many of them from as early as I was six. Most of my memories go back to when I was growing in Iran.

I was not an athletic kid until I started paying organized football. Even then I had to start as the goalkeeper because I was too slow! But there I excelled and had me a few fun years of diving left and right pretending to be the legendry Swedish goalkeeper Ronnie Hellstrom!

Many of us who lived in Tehran or other bigger cities have memories of playing what we called gol koochik (small goal). This was basically playing football in very tight alleys where we had to maneuver around parked cars and light poles.

Sometimes our cheap plastic balls would go over the wall and into unfriendly neighbors’ yard and that was the end of it unless we had a commando style operation to climb over to retrieve the ball.

Getting chased by an angry neighbor was a common occurrence.

We had neighbors who over the years collected and never returned many of our soccer balls. I still wonder what they did with them!

Let me hear about some of your memories. From wherever you are, share a few memories with me.