1986. Ahm Maradona. King of the two-a-side village derbies. Ah hear the crowd in my head. You should see the way ah dance through the defence, past daft Gassy, so wiry you could tie a string from his lugs to his toes and fire arrows at the seagulls (hair trigger mental too – hit his brother with a golf club and gave him a stammer), round the Colossus of Mackay, shorts like Speedos and a bodywarmer, always a maroon bodywarmer, summer or winter, tracking my every move but always a step behind my twinkle toes that feint left but go right, up the pitch, less Easter Road and more an actual slope, one tackle and the ball was halfway down the brae to the bottom end of the village, greyhound chased by the unfortunate who was last to touch it, effing and blinding and never mind the cars, there were less cars then weren’t there, no need to worry about blindly running into the road, more fearful of the horse shit left behind by the jodhpured swanky wanks trip-trapping on their sleek nags from god knows where and back again, one slip on the sharn and broken collar bone it is, but its only dog owners who have to pick up their shit, not the equine entitled with their immense arses and ah don’t mean the horses, but the ball staying on the pitch this time, Mackay’s last ditch tackle succeeding only in a grass burn to the knee and a flee from an angry bee and ahm past him, closing in on Denzil, ah fuckin hate Denzil, guarding the goal between lamp-post and jumper, he of the aspirational parents, a fox-faced father who once followed me when ah chapped at his door and ran away, creeping down and round the houses to collar me but ah saw the bugger’s fat silhouette and crept round our parked car as he crept round the other side, no kidding it was like Donald Duck hiding from Elmer Fudd and there’s Denzil crouching now, a quick spit on his flash new goalie gloves, the fanny, five quid from Intersport, just in, ahd seen them the other day, just like he had a Millennium Falcon hanging from fishing gut in his bedroom, a weird family, ate eggs every day in a strict rota of scrambled, boiled, fried and likely poached too, ah told you they were aspirational and now ah want to belt it right at his bowl-cut heid but what better, what better to wait, to wait until he commits, takes that step forward, legs apart and now, now is the time, ah slip it through his legs and into the goal, turning to windmill celebrations as the ball cuts a celebratory swathe through Mrs Fraser’s geraniums, looking back to see Denzil wiping mud from his arse and he’ll have to explain to his maw, who’ll send him bedroom-wards, humiliated, to watch his Millennium Falcon twist in a sweet breeze from the window that looks down across the scheme to my house, the flicker of my midnight TV and Maradona beamed straight from Mexico, dancing through that Belgian defence and dancing on, dancing on like me, just like me…