England & Italy: are you "going to football"?! My generation LIVED football

photo: me kid in Sun Valley (Alps, highest mountains in Europe, you can see them from Milan), my family's origins, as Ireland for the Gallaghers.


"...lost behind a silver screen are all the things you could've been to us..."
(Oasis, who put the weight of the world on my shoulders? - see on the right column, video with Italy World Champion)
I hope you can understand what I mean here.

As Liam said some days ago, "Everything's different now. They've got it all haven't they? You don't see many out in the park playing, or in the streets, they're just all indoors staring at screens. I'd hate to be a kid growing up today. It's fucking soulless."
And Ian Wright too, the other day he said there are only a few home-grown talents.
Today they're all in front of a computer, and sometimes I hear people saying they're "going to football", as one of many activities. When I was a child, a kid, in Milan, we were thinking about football the whole day. We even used to play inside the classroom, with teachers VERY angry. In our eyes every little space was created to play football.
I even played alone making tournaments (really) as a mad one, playing for both "teams", in my VERY small room, even making little balls with paper. It was so small that one day I hit a wall with my face and broke my teeth. Another example: we used to play everyday in a small yard (cement, not grass), with people passing and we hitting them so our house porter was always VERY angry with us, trying to steal our ball all the time. And we could play for hours, not just 1 or so.

I was also lucky 'cause we had a countryhouse and my father built a goal for us, with white posts, lines made of sawdust (is it any wonder why princes and kings are clowns that caper in their sawdust rings? :) -> on the cover of that single, Go let it out, there were kids playing football on the cement roof of a skyscraper) and all, but we also played on the cement of another pitch (I broke my finger).

And of course we also used to "go to football", we had our team, red shirt & white shorts as England and Milano colorus (our church, the main one in Milan, had cement on our football pitch), but it was just "one of many football activities" :). Our goalkeeper was great because, as all of us, used to play on the cement, so when we played on the grass it was easier.
Result of all this: my generation, some years ago, in 2007, Milan became the best team in football history, and still is, and some years ago, in 2006, Italy became the 1st European country, and still is (2nd in the world after Brazil, where they live football, the poor ones, they have only football on the streets, that's where great players come from).
Today I have a bigger room and a long corridor ("life endless corridor" :) - The Masterplan) and even today I still play football at home, now with my cat :) My double Paul Weller (new album "Wake up the nation"): "get your face off the Facebook and turn off your phone".

So today I say: wake up nations... darling, and you want to be World Champion? Do us a favour: step outside, leave computers to "old" ones who can't play anymore.

Paul Weller playing football :)