It's nearly summer time!
Ice cream vendors are preparing themselves for the intense two-week season that puts their kids through college, and parents everywhere are scrambling to find spaces in summer camps so someone else can take the kids off their hands for a few hours and hopefully tire them out.
As a kid, summer was the greatest time imaginable. No school, no responsibilities, and three months felt like an eternity. It was glorious. Of course, it was even better if your Mum had signed you up for Samba Soccer...
We got togged out in our cheaply made faux-Brazilian kit, became suffocated by the overpowering smell of sun cream, and off we went to learn how to play the Brazilian way!
Here are 7 things anyone who went to a Samba Soccer summer camp will instantly remember:
You're authentic Brazilian coach who only ever had one name.
Every camp had a resident Brazilian who only had one name. The most common was "Alex", but I must have been lucky as my coach was called "Everton" which lead to people bringing in swaps of their Everton Premier League stickers thinking he would find it funny. He had no clue what we were saying, of course, because he was just a Brazilian student here to learn English, but that didn't matter, as he spoke the language of football. You thought he was on the verge of going pro because he could do the Maradona 7, but the reality was he was nowhere near good enough for the local amateur side.
The cheap but iconic kit.
One of the major selling point of the Samba Soccer camps was that every kid got their own Brazil kit when they signed up. The first few years involved a cheap thin yellow jersey with a logo on it, but then someone had the brilliant idea to make a reversable blue/yellow jersey that always fit terrible and ended up looking like a dress.
These VHS tapes.
If you really loved your Samba Soccer you could get a VHS to show you just how amazing you were going to be after the completion of this 5 day kickabout in the sun.
The free football.
Brazil legend Jarzinho was in town to launch the first Samba camps, and here he is with the yellow ball that everybody ended up losing or kicking into their neighbors' garden. This was later replaced by a ball with flags of the World on it.
This bloke..
No, not Bertie Ahern. The other guy in this picture was the head of Samba Soccer and probably gave a talk at your school. If not, he was the chap in the VHS tapes above telling you how amazing you were going to be. His tracksuit is sensational.
Being taught nothing other than unnecessary tricks.
Granted, you weren't signing up to a school of excellence, but the only instruction given to the young boys and girls who enrolled in the school of Samba was how to do that flick pictured above or the holy grail of childhood football... The Maradona 7.
Having your coaches autograph your free kit.
For some reason you absolutely insisted that the DCU students who were still hungover from the night before and Brazilian lads sign your jersey. They were going to be famous footballers one day, and you could say you knew them when. It was all very awkward when you spotted them working in Chartbusters a few years later, considering they were meant to be the next Trevor Molloy.
