This is The Guardian.

In the beginning, I remember Saturday training sessions on the rec, sprawling green fields, and the rolling hill we climbed like a mountain.

I remember golers moulded around size 4 feet, metal studs screwed into umbero souls, mesh bibs and miter footholds, part-time coaches and passing drills.

More than two decades have passed, but I still remember how things were back then, how we gathered on crisp Saturday mornings, 70-year-olds, cut loose on luresh and playing greens.

We were young kids pulled into a sport handed down through the local family network, the luresh and traditions slowly becoming our own, the cross-fade of football and Saturday mornings shifting into ritual.

I still remember those weekends, still see the grass, the pitches where we were baptized, I still remember hillie fields, I still remember south London.

Hillie Filders FC was my childhood football club, Hillie Fields was where I played my first game. 30 acres of open grass, victory lining and tennis courts, a sprawling grass junction in the blue borough, with broccoli and lady-well and luresh and central quietly lapping at its sea green shores.

It is wide parkland carved into residential sprawl, besieged by rows of Victorian and terraced housing, it is the jewel of a concrete town, raised 175 feet above sea level.

From our Everest, you can stare down towards the skyscrapers of the city skyline and see still mountains rising from the earth, glistening along a glass paneled shorefront.

Some time in the late 1990s, Ron Bell, a local coach and the uncle of a boy from ira state, began running training sessions, gathering flocks of south-landed infants in the park.

Young boys dragged into ritual by fathers who dreamed of one day seeing the family name printed on Premier League jerseys.

We found our feet on that turf, swung skinny legs at side three footballs, scampered across the shore grass, broken our new arena.

But we were not the first, there were other black boys and other decades who came before us, kids who stumbled to their feet on the same turf.

A hilly fields FC played these grounds through the 60s and 70s, the few solitary black faces speckled among the traditional dream photos on club archive websites.

A boy named Don Fields and another named Delroy Richards, Evik Banton and an Albert St. Clair, black kids with tight afros, south-landed and footballers frozen in time.

Ian Wright played these fields in the late 62, before Palace, before Arsenal and England, before he became Arsenal's top goal scorer, pulling his shirt over his face at Hybury and revealing 179 just done it underneath.

I never lost a game playing in hilly fields he once said, never lost a game.

Footballers are symbols, an illustration of changing social and economic dynamics, of immigration and new communities that have taken root.

I was born in 1992, during the time of Lewisham and South London had been imposing their will on British football.

The early 90s, the time when Arsenal's David Rockassel had come out of the honor of the state in Broccoli and Wright had come with him. The Wallace Brothers, Danny, Rod and Ray out of Deppard in the North of the Borough, who went on to play for Southampton together,

Rod winning the old first division with leads in the year before it became the Premier League.

Chris Powell, Kevin Campbell, Michael Thomas, Paul Davis, their collective presence was an indicator of how things were in South London, how things are, how they will be.

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