All summer, cheeking Parkie with language we wouldn’t use at home becomes routine, but he never responds in kind, preferring to keep our ball when he can catch it. Kickabouts arise with many a-side: we brothers against the Shackletons and anyone else who fancies a game. Some unleashed mongrel invariably tears about to sink its […]

The hailstorm forecast to drop any time at last breaks over the city at the full-time whistles on this final Saturday of the football season (excluding domestic and European finals), spotting cracked pavements until all the dots are joined and stag-weekenders in dresses pelt along the road with bits of papers in polythene covering their […]

After just one replay of what himself will call ‘the Hand of God’, Colin Boyce from Walsall has already seen enough and blusters out from his cousin’s house to the hot and humid streets of the fervidly Loyalist Ballybeen Estate, where a short chiming burst of ‘O Sole Mio’ brings children out from cut-throughs to […]

From the way Simon Stainrod does his keepy-uppy tricks on the bouncetastic Omniturf pitch — the centrepiece an over-the-head juggle nonchalantly caught by his nape— you would never suppose that not fifteen minutes before, in Huckleberry’s on the Uxbridge Road, Sheffield-sharp in a three-piece chocolate suit, he ordered a cheeseburger deal to go and, from […]

was heartily sick of not being pigeon-holed, of people calling him Mr Versatile, which his team-mates always took the Michael about, like he swung both ways as some kind of deviant; with no one position he could claim as his own except the number twelve’s bench from where he’d be pulled to become a makeshift […]