Čihák: Still Playing Football at 75 | Resilience & Content Writing

No symbolic or episodic start. Josef Čihák was a stable member of the Krásná Hora B team in the fall. It was with its renewal after almost six years that he started playing for competition points again. “I wanted to prove to myself that I would survive, that’s why I went for it. Football is my whole life,” he said about his motivation to run onto the pitch with generations younger in the current episode of the Příbram district association’s Football in the Cubes podcast.

With the use of hockey substitution, Josef Čihák collected match minutes by the dozens in the lowest league. For example, against B team Kamýk (3:0), for which club president Pavel Žebrakovský, who is only five years younger than him, played the entire match, he estimates his stay on the field for about half an hour. He started, how else, than on the left wing. “I can’t do anything else my entire football life,” he recalled. How does he feel on the field? “It used to be better when I was younger, it’s not like that anymore. You try as hard as you can. It’s harder. You have to maintain yourself so that you can run out onto the field and not be embarrassed.”

He is clear about how long he wants to play. “I think they’ll get the competition going and then I’ll be done,” said the vital man, whose career path is connected with the construction industry. As a trained bricklayer, he improved his qualifications by distance learning in Prague. After the military service, he joined the then-famous JZD Krásná Hora, where he worked as a construction technician for more than twenty years. After the revolution, he founded his own construction company. He is also still thinking about retiring, to which he has been entitled for a long time. “I’ve already said that I’m going to quit, and I also have to go into some sort of retirement,” he smiled.

He did not start his football career in preparatory school, as is the case today, but at the age of twelve in the pupils. It is said that some of them went straight to men after the so-called “aging”. Since then, he has experienced a lot in football and can offer comparisons like few others.

For example, in rubber-textile football boots, a phenomenon of his time, he started even at an advanced age. “Even when I had Láďa Vízek in my fifties, he told me, you’re such an entrepreneur and you don’t have shoes. I replied that that’s not the case and that he won’t win here. It ended 3:3,” he said, reminiscing about the previously most popular football boots, which today’s generation of young people would probably turn up their noses at. “But there was a sense of shooting in them, I felt good in them,” he added.

According to him, football used to be played more simply. “When he was a handy midfielder, he sent me a belt from behind through the full-back, I was just watching for offside. We got five balls like that at half-time and there must have been two goals from that,” he recalled.

What he clearly lacks on the pitch today is more respect for old age. “You didn’t allow yourself that much for us, but that’s the time,” he said. As an example, he also gave an unsparing tackle on himself in one game, which he still remembers years later. “The hitchhiker came as if on a sled, a slide in the rain, turned me upside down, upside down. I fell like a fool. I didn’t break anything, but I didn’t sleep for about a week, just kept awake in the chair,” he recalled.

Fortunately, he was not otherwise injured. Surprisingly. As an attacking player, he caught quite a lot. “When I ran away from someone, they painted me. There were no yellow cards then. But when I was fouled near the goal, I often took revenge from the penalty box,” he described. To his credit, he added that he had never received a yellow card, let alone a red one, in his entire career. “How many times has it been the art of keeping calm and balance that I don’t want to believe it.”

He talks about Jiří Zelenka as the best player he played with. “He just had it in his leg. I haven’t met a midfielder like that since. He gave the ball fifty meters with feeling, it flew over the full-back and you just ran up to it and had to make it. I haven’t seen many like that on the pitch.”

He also remembers a lot of matches with the old guard Příbram. “To play with guys who were representatives, like Skuhravý, Knoflíček, or Příbramáci – Ivan Pihávek, Jarda Mašek, Pavel Nováček, Petr Soucha, it was a real experience, football looked completely different with them, they had their heads up, the ball went to their feet and everyone played.”

While his beginnings are associated with modest conditions for football, he considers the current ones in Krásná Hora to be perfect. “The field after the reconstruction is nice, we have artificial watering, it’s a fur coat. In addition, we have a training grass field. Cabins. Such an area deserves a higher class than the one that kicks. We have to hope that the young people will pull it off like we used to,” he found perhaps the only thing to improve.

In addition, he looks up to her with hope. He likes how they work with young players in Krásná Hora. “The boys who lead the students are dedicated to it and it’s at a level that it might be possible to bring someone up. What we’re kicking now seems to me quite unworthy of the background we have. Hopefully it will get better. Ačko kicks decently after promotion. There are a lot of young people there, which is good, mostly foster children. There’s a lot to build on. They go as a group and train. There’s some order to it. I hope we’ll kick a level higher in the competition,” he commented. the present of the club.

At the end, he revealed his recipe for football longevity. “Every day I work out at home so that I can go into the day’s work on the move, in motion, ready. During the off-season, we go to the gym, about ten of us meet regularly every Wednesday. We can’t stop and we have to do it all the time. I also strengthen myself on the construction site, where I can use the concrete wheel to the full. That’s for my legs, then I feel good and still have some strength.”

And a message to the younger football generation? To be more considerate of herself on the field. “No one does it for money, but for fun and for a lifelong love of football. Even if it is a contact game, everyone should be aware that we all go to work the next day, and approach it that way. You need to respect the opponent and recognize when he is better,” Josef Čihák concluded with his insight into football, which, according to him, gave him a lot and above all the opportunity to be in a team…