How long must guilt last? When I was a boy, aged about 10, I had a football that I kicked around for years, with my mates, with my brother or all on my own, dribbling aimlessly about or booting it against a wall. This ball conferred upon me some status, for it was what we used to call a caser, which is not a word I’ve used for a good 40 years. A caser meant it was a proper football, with a rubber bladder on the inside and leather on the outside. This was as opposed to a very cheap plastic sphere that blew around in the wind, or one made of thicker plastic and fashioned to look like a caser. The latter was more respectable than the former, but it wasn’t, you know, a caser.
I had this ball for a long time, progressing from being able to do only five keepy-ups, to as many as perhaps 10. Yes, I was that gifted. This was the 70s, at the dawn of which decade Adidas had come up with its Telstar ball for the 1970 World Cup. It was made of 32 leather panels, consisting of 12 black pentagons and 20 white hexagons. My caser was modelled on that caser. It was probably a present from my grandad, but I don’t remember what it looked like when it was new, only how it looked when it was old, when the panels were neither black nor white, just brown, having had all the colour kicked out of them.
