It is the WhatsApp message that gets sent around an hour or two before kick-off asking if anyone can bring a mate because we’re one short; it’s the debate over who wears bibs or, worse, who goes skins when there’s a colour clash; it’s visualising ourselves as Gazza when we’re more like his five bellied mate.
Five-a-side, the sport of the people, for the people, by the people. “There’s nothing else like it,” says James Brown, the founder of Loaded magazine. “This is football as most of us know it and how most of us play it.”
That is one of the reasons why Brown decided to write a book about it.
“There are loads of football books and some unbelievably good writing about the sport in general but five-a-side has somehow been largely overlooked and that doesn’t make sense considering how many people play it every single day. So I decided to do it myself; not to tell only my own story but to bring together those of many different people who play five-a-side and who love it in the same way that I and millions of others do.”
The end result is the recently released “Above Head Height: A Five-a-side Life” which was also inspired by the death of Brown’s longstanding friend and fellow player James Kyllo. It was while he was coming to terms with his loss that Brown worked out that he’d played five-a-side with Kyllo for around 17 years and he wrote an article about the bonds are built just through playing football at its most basic level. The response was remarkable. Not only did the article go viral, it prompted thousands of Twitter users to contact Brown to tell him that the game as he had portrayed it and the relationships he had described fitted in with their own experiences.
“The connection was phenomenal,” says Brown.
“I hadn’t been expecting anything like that. It was the most interaction that I’d ever had on social media. That was obviously nice because it meant that people were reading about the special bond that I had with James and were identifying with it because they’d had similar experiences. This was about amateur football bringing people from all kinds of different backgrounds together and there’s something incredibly powerful about that.
“What brought us together on pitches up and down the country on days and nights when we could have been doing anything else was that shared desire to do something in our own game that our heroes would do on a Saturday or whatever day the big clubs play on nowadays. It could be a tackle that earns you a round of applause, a goal that wins you the appreciation of your team mates or a selfless run off the ball that creates the space for a team mate which only you recognise the importance of. It’s that almost indescribable thrill of playing football and you don’t have to be a top player to experience it.
“But what takes it to another level is that this is something that we share. We turn up in whatever kit we can get hold of and divide ourselves into teams made up of people we know and people we don’t know. You can be good, bad or indifferent. You can be fit or unfit. As long as you turn up and you’re ready to play, you can play and you come across so many different types of people and players. The more you go, the more you get to know one another and I’ve even worked out that some of my five-a-side relationships have lasted longer than many of my conventional friendships and any of the jobs I’ve had. It really is unique.
“That was what I wanted to get across when I wrote the original piece about James. He was the one in our group who booked the pitches and collected the money. He was the organiser. He wasn’t a natural footballer but he gave it everything he had and he absolutely loved playing. It was that, more than anything else, that people responded to. Some told me that the piece I had written about him had actually made them cry and nothing I have ever done has ever done that but I think the reason why people were so moved was that they could see themselves and their team mates in James.”
Having connected in such a powerful way, Brown embarked on a project which proved both cathartic and introspective initially before becoming more of a shared experience. “I have always played football since the age of eight,” he says. “But there was a time in my life when I was drinking too much and that meant I wasn’t able to say where I’d be at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning for example because I’d more than likely be drunk so I couldn’t commit to playing football. So, the moment I stopped drinking, which was 19 years ago, I committed myself to playing five-a-side again because I knew that would help bring a bit of order to a chaotic life.
“That was my story. That was my reason for playing and why it was so important to me. But when I started on the book I didn’t want it to be just about me because that would have been a bit self-indulgent so I asked people to tell me their stories.”
What followed captured the game as Brown and countless others know it. There was a tale about a player who worked for the water board who couldn’t get enough players to participate in a tournament and so flooded the pitch, another about a team who took Viagra before a game just to see what it was like. “Some were really unique in their detail,” Brown says “But they are all connected by a sense of fun and the idea that daft things can and do happen when you’re playing five-aside.
“One of my favourites was about a lad called Chris Collier who scored a hat-trick in the final of a works tournament and his team was presented with the trophy by Alan Kennedy. As he shook Kennedy’s hand, Chris said to him ‘Do you know what it feels like to score the winning goal in a cup final?’ This was Alan Kennedy, a player who had scored the winning goal against Real Madrid in one European Cup Final and the winning penalty against AS Roma in another!
“Kevin Sampson, the brilliant author and former manager of The Farm, told me about playing five-a-side against John Barnes and being absolutely humiliated by him. I had my own experience of playing in a tournament with Craig Johnston, the former Liverpool winger, at a music festival. He turned up with a pair of Adidas Predators and no other gear, not even a bag. He was booked into a hotel with Stan Bowles who also played but he never went back to it; he stayed out all night drinking and chatting.
“Then there was the bloke whose work team was playing against one of their suppliers and they turned up with half of the Boston United team, complete with Mel Sterland who was their manager at the time. That’s what the book is about. It has got my name on it but the stories belong to all of us and anyone who has played five-a-side will recognise them.”
Above Head Height: A Five-A-Side Life, by James Brown is out now, published by Quercus, priced £16.99.
