For Eastlando kids, football was more than just a game

It is the season for the World Cup, the championship that comes once every four years. I first watched World Cup in 1978 and the ball that was used was Adidas Tango.

The television was the one they refer to "Ya Mgongo" and it was a National Japan. Though it was black and white, it was the best thing that kept us football fans happy. I was raised in Buru "Eastlando", though we were considered outsiders. In Eastlands, the biggest sport was football.

I would say 99 per cent of the boys played football just the same way I will say 99 per cent of the girls played "Kati". It was more of a natural sport and I think it became common because of the fields that were available and also most of the players in the national team came from Eastlands.

The first toy one wished for was a ball when young but only 10 per cent of us got the toy. So we had to be innovative and started making balls with mattresses and plastic paper bags woven with sisal or manila ropes.

I guess most Eastlands chaps are good at ball handling because controlling that ball was a nightmare.

Luckily, we had a natural engineer and innovator among us. The person was so precise with his innovations and work.

His name was Ben Ogutu, my good neighbour. He came up with the idea of putting a bicycle tube that had been pressurised inside the mattress and paper bag ball.

This made it bounce and was easier to control and more enjoyable to play. Since we used to play on tarmac bare feet, we got a lot of injuries, especially on the big toe, which we used to refer to "kupiga ball na ondole".

We decided to go play in fields and that time the only field available was the one next to "shoppy" that was new next to Mausoleum Bar, now called Taurus. This didn't go down well with one of the parents. As I have written before, in Kapsiliet Court, every parent was like yours and could punish you any time they found you misbehaving. That was Mr Okumu, a very good man who mentored most of the boys in the court and made some of us love Peugeot, as that was his car of choice.

Tango Adidas

So to make us move away from playing next to the bars, he bought us Tango Adidas and that was the first real ball we ever played with. Good thing is the city council made for us fields with goal posts and we had "uwanja ndogo" where the library and shops stand and "uwanja soo" where there is a college next to Buru Flats.

We used to have inter-estate football tournaments on the grounds and the grudge match was always against Jericho who used to think we were softies. Football made a very big impact on most of us so much that we knew the international and local stars by name and face.

It was common for someone to buy a 40-page exercise book and plaster pictures of footballers we had cut from the newspapers.

The most interesting pages in a newspaper were the spots pages and the best puzzle was one known as Sport the Ball, which was basically a picture from a football match but they used to remove the ball so one was to guess where the ball was.

Most of us from Eastlando still admire and watch football. We have advanced from watching football from black and white TV sets when VOK (Voice of Kenya) was the only channel showing the games, to now being able to stream live from our phones.

We have seen the game advance from three to five officials, from the ref making all the decisions to being helped by VAR. We must say it is one of the best and most beautiful game we have.