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Friends Reunited

Chris Rich and Phil
Rich, Chris and Phil meet in Samarkhand.

So, we’ve met up with our friend Richard Hamilton, who took a taxi from north-eastern Afghanistan to Samarkhand. He’s been running an aid campaign for Concern Worldwide, trucking in relief supplies from Tajikistan in the wake of the “Operation Enduring Freedom.” Richard was going to make this trip with us (the three of us had travelled to France for the 1998 World Cup together) but, unfortunately for us, Afghanistan called to him louder than Seoul. Phil and I are glad that he’s managed to get away for long enough to meet us here.

We meet Rich in Samarkhand, who wastes no time in organising a game in the historic Registan.

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To celebrate our reunion, we played keep-up in the Registan, followed, as darkness began to fall, by a fast and furious game with a group of children in a park nearby.

After the game, I entertained the kids with a couple of his magic tricks, which seemed to do down well. Judge for yourselves by downloading the MPEG movie clip.

Written by on Thursday, April 18th, 2002

4 comments on this post

  1. Hi Chris, Phil and Rich,

    It was nice to meet you in Bukhara.

    Wish you to get to your climax :)

    Next time you play soccer take care of your gates properly. :)

    Wish you luck in North Korea. Let border guards be benevolent to what you do for football sake.

    Dinar

  2. Are you Genesis now? Who’s Phil Collins then?

  3. Did you pack your gates?

  4. We failed completely to pack our gates… hence the comment.

    What Dinar’s referring to is a game we played in Bukhara at the foot of the city’s famous minaret. Five a side, Uzbeks v. Englishmen… we met Tim, another overlander to the World Cup in an internet cafe, and he, Rich, Phil, myself, and a Tajik friend of Rich’s lost convincingly to the local lads.

    Full story to come… sometime…

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