Well it was his Dad's fault for keeping hold of some properly old brown leather footballs and letting us use them when they weighed more than we did!!!
The lace in the ball was a nightmare if you managed to catch the lace when heading it, and a few drops of rain and you ended up kicking a medicine ball, good times it was first on the list every xmas as a kid
The same thing used to happen in Sevenoaks park in Grangetown.......and at Ely racecourse at about 14 we'd get over the racecourse at about 10:00am in the summer holidays and start a game, there would always be about 18 - 20 players minimum, people would drift off at dinnertime (lunch was what posh kids had ) and others join in, the same at tea time, and the game would go on until it got too dark to see or the parkie kicked us out, the game would last in one form or another for 10 or 11 hours, and would always end up with a row about who won, we could never agree because you could end up changing sides two or three times in the course of the day, and no one ever kept an accurate score, and if one side looked like it was getting to far ahead, well we would call an American style "time out" and swap some players over..............the "transfer negotiations" that took place in these time outs..........well they made the transfer window shenanigans we see in the football league and premiership look like friendly little chats. Happy Days
