The Ball 2002

We advertise for a game

Our stay in Xiahe has – surprisingly – produced more games of football than anywhere else we have visited during this trip. The Tibetans are crazy about football, and play at every opportunity. With the help of Gonpo, who runs tours of the area and who speaks great English, we advertised our presence in Xiahe by posting a notice in Tibetan at the entrance to the monastery. Even though we managed to get the wrong date on the poster, many people started to contact us, and we played three games on three consecutive days.

The team captains shake hands

The first game took place on a school playing ‘field’ in the Chinese part of town…

…after we met a monk in our favourite restaurant just inside the grounds of the monastery. He had seen me updating the website in the internet cafe mentioned previously, and had spotted us eating lunch. After a bit of sign language, it became clear that he was a football enthusiast, and he started signalling ‘bed’ and ‘come along’ to me. Wary of these kinds of messages after Rob’s experience of buddhist monks in Korea, I followed him back to his quarters in the monastery, and was pleasantly surprised when he pulled out… a Juventus shirt and a pair of football boots.

The setting for the first game in Xiahe

As we wandered through town towards the school, we gathered the usual crowd of bemused spectators and boisterous youngsters, and, by the time we arrived at the pitch, we seemed to have enough players for a game on the full size pitch. Little did I realise how 9-a-side on a full size pitch in the rarified atmosphere of Xiahe (which lies at 3000m altitude) would affect me… I had at times been gasping for air just walking along the street, but five minutes into the game, I felt as though my legs had a will of their own. Mainly a will to sit down.

Brazil and Inter Milan vie for the ball

The locals, however, with none of the disadvantages of a single day’s acclimatisation, were fiercely competitive, and the match between the monks (and me) and the, er, non-monks (and Phil) was played at a furious pace, with so many breakaways, owing to the relative lack of players for the size of the pitch, that I had a hard time keeping up with the play. Phil, however, seemed to revel in the atmosphere… rather too much for my liking, as the following picture illustrates:

Phil tries to kill Chris

Early on in the game, Phil and I had challenged for the ball in midfield, and I had come off considerably worse, with a knee to the groin (as it were) which put me out of the game for a good five minutes while I tried to regain my breathing. Not an inconsiderable feat, given the lack of oxygen in the air. After the incident, I had said to Phil that that was the second time he had put me out of action in the trip (the first being at Battersea Park, when we also collided, and I bruised my foot) and he said to me, “perhaps the next time will be the last…”

So when we collided again in the second half, and, as a result of the challenge, I felt that I had come within an inch of hospitalisation, I thought that his words might have had a prophetic ring to them. Fortunately, Phil has better coordination than I gave him credit for, and, equally fortunately, he is no more prophet than he is pied piper… and when it comes to injuries, I seem to be far better at inflicting them upon myself. Which I promptly did in the game the following day…

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