The Ball 2002 set off across Europe & Asia to uncover the spirit of football and established the legend of The Ball as a powerful symbol for the football community. It is not just any ball, it is The Ball, the star of the beautiful game.
The Ball falls from the Minaret (it’s in the image, honest!)
The day before Richard left for Tajikistan, we arranged to film the Ball falling from Bukhara’s landmark minaret. The minaret is justifiable famous for its role in satisfying the considerable blood-lust of the local khan, who used to dispose of people by having them thrown off the top.
Rich, Chris and Phil reach Bukhara and play a game in the shadow of the ancient minaret.
The only person to survive the fall was a woman, who when asked for her final wish, elected to wear her entire wardrobe, consisting of forty dresses. This gave her sufficient padding to withstand the impact, and indeed, to this day, Uzbek brides are given forty dresses on their wedding day. For good luck, I assume…
After filming, we were surprised to find that the medrassah which the minaret is attached to was also used by the locals as a boundary for their regular evening five-a-side games… so of course we asked to join in…
I’m writing this entry as a personal aside. It’s not football related, but tells the story of how I found my grandfather’s grave – something I have dreamt of doing since I first heard the almost impossibly traumatic tale of my family’s exodus from Poland.
The Registan in Samarkhand is where Al Ghorasmi wrote his famous text “Al Jabr”. I feel particularly privileged to have sat where he most probably sat – we now recognise his name as ‘algorithm’ and his book gave us ‘algebra’ – I use these every day of my programming life.
A Buckyball
The Ball itself is another mathematical object, named much more recently after R. Buckminster Fuller, another scientific visionary – its basic form is called a Fullerine or a Buckyball. In nature this shape occurs as Carbon 60, a molecular-sized football which can bounce even when travelling at half the speed of light. You can read more about it in this article on soccerballworld.com
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.
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.
Lifelong Chelsea fan Phil will be pleased to hear that the Blues made it to the FA Cup final where they’ll face Arsenal on May 4th. His home town team, Brighton and Hove Albion made history by clinching the Second Division Championship and a second successive promotion after winning the Third Division last year. Fellow musician and Seagulls shirt sponsor Fatboy Slim was reportedly “lost for words”.
Phil sings and plays harmonica in The Blues Cafe in Samarkhand.
So then, more bureaucracy. Oh joy of joys. Still, on better note, we’ve just heard that Ananova published an article about us yesterday. Big shout to Ginny for the coverage. They’ve titled it “Football fans create World Cup’s version of Olympic torch” which we like – some nice touches too, such as the first line:
“A group of men (!!! – ed) are taking a football from London to Japan to create the World Cup’s version of the Olympic torch.”
The Ball hits the bar in Tashkent
Our stay in Tashkent has been brief – just long enough to organise how to get out of the place, in fact. We’re heading for the ancient and historic city of Samarkhand, built by Tamerlane to be the capital of his vast empire stretching far and wide across Asia.
In which we leave Tashkent and anticipate meeting Rich.
The long ball from the centre of defence to midfield went straight to feet. We landed safely in Tashkent, though it was touch and go to say the least – the ball could easily have been intercepted, and we would have been left wide open at the back. Let me explain…
Despite the hassles encountered here, we have fond memories of Moscow.
We love this sentiment, which we found at the training ground just outside Luzhniki Stadium… given the current troubles in the Middle East, does anyone fancy organising a game between Israel and Palestine, like the one at Christmas in 1914?
Could sport ever really bring peace, or is it just naivety?
Phil and Chris head for the Kazakh embassy for yet another round of intensive visa training.
We got up at 6.30 this morning for a photo-shoot in Red Square for the Moscow Times (read the story here) – which went very well, apart from me having to pay a “fine” to a militia guy with 500 Roubles (kindly negotiated on our behalf by Martin, the photographer) to persuade him to give Phil his passport back -all for using a tripod to do a panorama of the square!
If you’re reading this, my Russian friend, I hope you like this photo of you with Phil.
A dodgy encounter with a dodgy official – we come very close to our first yellow card.
