My dream when I see those big empty green football grounds in America......
After coming to US, every place I lived, I have seen big big play grounds covered by beautiful green grasses, even they have bar posts ready, only thing I never seen anybody to play there. Then the thought usually crosses my mind, if I can go back to my child hood, and come here with all my friends and have a football match with them here, then how nice it would be.
In my early childhood, we used to play football in Pagli buri’s math. Its about 20’ X 125’ piece of land. At one side of it there are about 5 tall palm trees and they have about 21/2’ wide trunks. Other side there were 2-3 coconut trees but not planted nicely in a row as the palm trees are. All those trees are inside our football ground and we used to utilize them for dribbling and most of my friends lost their nails at least once banging on them. Luckily my position was the goalkeeper so it never happened to me. Half of the ground had some trace of grass and remaining half was not at all. Even clubs grown up members also play some time in that field. If they want to play a serious match they used to go to Bhagad math. That was basically land beside town’s garbage dumping ground. In those days people even dispose their dead cattle , domestic dogs cats at that place, observing vultures were very common over there, normally they feast on those dead animals. But the area to play was nice green. Eventually the town municipality had built a stadium over there.
When I was in my mid teen that time our senior club members took initiative to capture a comparatively bigger piece of land about 150’ X 200’ lying close to our place as an abandon land full of small trees bushes etc. I heard, in 60s it was habitat of small foxes, there were holes where they used to live. But I have seen any fox there but seen little scorpions, sneak, mongoose, jungle rats, moles etc. in that field. The senior members clean the land put bar posts over there and started using as our club’s play ground. During my upper school days, we used to play almost regularly over there. But it was also not fully covered by grass and during rainy season it goes under water so very difficult to play over there that time. But it’s a big part of my athletic life . Recently I heard that this playground also no more available for the club. The original owner family , Rakshit family, put a court case and won it. Most likely in couple of years we’ll see some building constructions over there.
With all those memories when I used to look at those abandon playgrounds of America, I usually get very tempted to play a football match over there with my childhood friends.