Sundays rolled around and people will be out shopping or visiting family but in Nishinari it was a football day.
Scrimmages held and adults coming to watch, our own little good thing at the Rec.
The Sunday scrimmages weren’t organized by anyone in particular, which was exactly why they worked.
Word just went around, Haru telling two kids at the marke and those two kids telling their cousins, which led to somebody’s older brother showing up because he had nothing better to do with an afternoon until Nishinari Rec had a group of kids split across three teams, shirts-versus-skins sides, ages ranging from twelve to maybe sixteen, rules enforced by consensus and argument in roughly equal measure.
Nobody kept a table.
Nobody cared who’d won last week.
It was just a way to spend the hours between chores and dark, the way other kids in other parts of the city spent their Sundays on game consoles or cram school, except here the console was three cracked concrete slabs and the cram school was what you picked up from getting nutmegged by someone older or younger than you, skill is everything.
Rui played every position across a single afternoon most weeks, whatever the numbers needed, striker when a side was short up top, sweeper when the kids needed someone to link the defence and midfield, once even keeper for a full half when a player claimed a phantom wrist injury to get out of being backup keeper.
He didn’t think about it as anything other than what it was.
Sunday and the joy brought by the ball.
The particular tiredness that came from running full-out for three hours on concrete that punished you for every mistimed step.
Nobody there was thinking about scouts or academies or futures.
In Nishinari football was everything.
It was just the thing you loved to do rather instead of sitting still.
Sora came most Sundays too, though less as a coach now.
He sat on the low wall at the edge of the second slab with the same unread newspaper, occasionally called out a foul nobody else had the nerve to call, once rarely so got dragged in himself when a side was down a man, and when that happened the entire game changed revolving around him without anyone deciding to let it.
He didn’t run much.
Didn’t need to.
He read the whole pitch two passes ahead of everyone else on it, the ball finding his feet like it owed him something, and the kids who’d never seen him play before always end up with a ‘wow’ on their face, the way you go ‘wow’ watching nature do something you didn’t know it could do, a wonder he is to watch.
“Play with us more,” Haru said to him once, sweating, hands on his knees.
“You’re wasted just sitting there.”
“I’m exactly where I want to be,” Sora said, already walking back to the wall and unfolding the newspaper he wasn’t going to read.
Today, a lot of players showed up, I mean eight teams worth of players and that’s on Tatsuya popping up at the Rec.
Rui has heard of the name since he started playing, he heard about him the way you hear about a relative you’ve never met, secondhand and slightly unbelievable.
The old men at the market would swear Tatsuya born in the next ward, learned to trap a ball on these same cracked slabs as a kid, that he used to sleep out here some summer nights rather than go home, that he was molded by nishinari and by virtue it’s his home given the years he spent playing here.
Tatsuya stopped coming when he got recruited by a J2 club at 16 and never looked back and at just 25 has made 60 appearances for Japan.
Rui had always thought it was all a lie, the kind of story a neighborhood tells itself to feel important.
Players like that don’t come from places like this, they come from academies with real grass, not a field with rocks that splits your knees open if you slide wrong.
But this morning a banner was being zip-tied to the fence, hand-painted, WELCOME HOME misspelled once and fixed with tape over the mistake, and a van parked by the entrance with a club crest on the side that makes even the older brothers go quiet.
Kashima Antlers.
Tatsuya plays center-back for Kashima Antlers, on loan from Chelsea for a season, and today he’s standing at a folding table at the edge of the Rec handing out boxes of boots, shin guards, brand-new balls still smelling of rubber, to any kid who wants them, no forms, no questions, just his hand out and a box in it.
Apparently it’s been ten years since he left.
This is the first time he’s set foot back in Nishinari since he left for the academy.
Rui hangs near the back of the line, watching the man work through the crowd, easy and unhurried, crouching down to size boots against some kid’s feet like it’s nothing, like he isn’t the reason half the neighborhood has knocked off work early to stand around a chain-link fence.
He doesn’t look like what Rui expected.
No academy shine to him, no distance in his eyes.
He looks like he one of us
Someone’s already chalking a bracket onto the wall, it is Sunday to be fair.
Eight teams.
Winner plays Tatsuya’s best eleven side, whoever he throws together from the defeated teams.
Word is he wants to watch, maybe get a touch of the ball in if his allowed, I doubt he’ll play.
The Rec hasn’t held this many people in years and for Rui, this was his first experience of a packed ground, the feeling he felt looking around him changed something and in himself.
(Author)
Thank you for reading.
Constructive feedback to improve appreciated.