COMMON PEOPLE

Of all the great football stadiums of the world, from Manchester's Old Trafford and Milan's San Siro, to Barcelona's Camp Nou and Brazil's Caracena Stadium, I believe not one of them rivals Stroud's Rodborough Common, the venue for our Wednesday night football for a decade or more, come rain or come shine, but mostly as I remember it, shine.

And by 'our' I mean a cornucopia of humanity that could have just as easily been the same bedraggled hoards referred to in 'The New Colossus' by Emma Lazarus (1849-1897) inscribed on the bronze plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

"Give me your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free." 

We didn't have a statue as our beacon, however, just the 'lonely tree' (sadly no longer after being struck down by lightning in 2023), a misshapen, wind-swept beech with a cavity in its trunk which the ball would occasionally fall into like a lucky ring toss at a fairground.

The assembly of players each week on the common was a lottery in itself, a rogue's gallery of varying ability from local league players to club-footed high hopers who fancied themselves as the next Roberto Carlos. What was it about this raggle-taggle common game of ours that somehow prompted such egalitarianism in its relative disorganisation? Here was an open workshop where no miskick would be admonished and no shot wildly off target would be sneered at. The superiorly gifted amongst the players would lift the less able to do better by the mere fact of their presence amongst us. It was in many ways as if the cast of 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' had met with the 'Harlem Globetrotters' on this field of dreams where the sublime met the ridiculous in a heady brew of something (sort of ) resembling the beautiful game we call football.

Teams were organised in much the same way as they were at school with two captains chosen to call out their selections from the eclectic 'pick n'mix' of players available to them. Of course, those of us who remembered being the last picks at school for being too fat or gangly experienced a mild sensation of PTSD finding history repeating itself once again. Nevertheless, every Wednesday evening we had a chance to prove our doubters (including ourselves) wrong and become over-achieving underdogs. Speaking of dogs, we even had some playing amongst us at times if certain players had brought their canine friends for a run around. We were progressive in so many ways in regards to identity politics back then: gender, race, species, old, young, fat, thin, talented, inept - all were welcome. There was even a self anointed druid princess ('Lisa') amongst us and a wizard, namely a certain Peter Waller who had brought this generations-old tradition of the common game from South London to Stroud along with Keith Morgan, his lifelong friend and business partner.

The family friendly tribal warfare between the Wallers and the Morgans was undoubtedly the lynchpin for the game up at Rodborough Common which may well have been in centuries past a land dispute now settled over a leather ball.

Perhaps another reason for our broad church of players was the broad, wide open space in which we played that had no actual parameters to contain our game as such, no white lines to keep the keep ball in play, just the capacity and limitation of our own lungs. And no referee except our collective anarchy that found its own common agreement.

One of the most freeing delights of our common-held Wednesday night football was when two players would run off towards the horizon, silhouettes against the dipping sun, until the ultimate victor would eventually return like Omar Sharif in that famous, hazy desert shot in David Lean's 'Lawrence Of Arabia', ball at feet like a magnet while his opposite number would remain, doubled over, panting from their exertions in the cool, tall grass.

And because we had such varying talents involved in the game, it meant the measure of greatness in any single moment in the match could be measured relative to the player involved, whether it was a spasmodic, unthinking booting of the ball that prevented an oncoming attack, or a lucky reach of a hand that diverted the ball inches from going into the goal. Of course, there were the star players (Toby, Josh, Andy and Colin to name but a few), some more mid-table 'water carriers' as well as the bottom of the table, delusions of grandeur types like myself. In my self-delusion I often thought of myself as a part time David Beckham/Ryan Giggs with the occasional Zidane turn that probably looked more like a circus elephant balancing its soft, large feet on a balloon. I had my moments of glory - fleeting, mazy runs and expert crossing of the ball, to say nothing of the destiny-touched thirty yard rockets that would defeat whatever rando was in goal. Sadly, my achilles heel was not managing to sustain my flashes of brilliance beyond the thirty second mark. However, in those miniature moments of greatness, I glimpsed what it was to be a footballing god and heaven's light shone down upon me and indeed all of us. We all had a chance to be immortal on those nights, large or small, lithe or cumbersome.

Actually, it was my heel that cut my Rodborough nights prematurely short after attempting an audacious dummy past a deceptive clump of grass that had my number. How much more heroic would it have been if I'd been taken out by a Roy Keane-like tackle from Keith, with his bony shins like a full set of kitchen knives. But no, my nemesis was the ground itself which, of course, is the risk of playing on such wild, unruly surfaces.

Sometimes now when I go for a walk back on the common, I can still hear the whoops and cheers of our past games playing like old replays, happy ghostly memories where I can even see the figures no longer with us still alive with competition, their images fading like the silver reflected light of the Severn estuary.

Looking back, our Rodborough nights were an opportunity to play on nature's transcendent stage and test our own desire to be great without being judged. It was in its way the purest expression of the game I can remember and only those who participated will remember the common bond we all shared as we played, not for points, leagues or trophies but for that special feeling of both being alive as individuals and as a group.

What you might call, totality football.