St Pauli — not PLC
St Pauli’s in Hamburg, by the way
Some pictures for those of you who might be having trouble seeing the videos — perhaps your connection isn’t fast enough or perhaps you haven’t installed Quicktime yet. Either way, here you go:
One of our tickets to the game
We are warriors! The St Pauli crowd gets into the music
The St Pauli Sound supporters’ turntable mat
Radical through and through
But there’s a common cause — having fun
Courtesy of the St Pauli Sound Supporters
Find out more about the St Pauli Sound Supporters at their website…
Blinded by the light
Beto keeps it up
Outside the Opening Ceremony is the usual media circus — more camera crews and presenters than you can shake a football at. In the midst of this electronic feeding frenzy was one Adalberto Sanchez, world record holder for bouncing a football on his head. His record is two hours, if you’re thinking of emulating his feat.
One of the features of South and Central American supporters is that they often buy the shirt of the host country as a show of goodwill. Watch Beto as he puts his Deutschland shirt on whilst bouncing The Ball on his head!
We arrive at the Opening Ceremony
The gathering has started.
The end of The Ball’s journey
For us, the journey has finished — at a particularly attractive wasteland outside the stadium in Munich — but for all the teams that take part, the journey has only just begun.
Let’s play football!
UPDATE: We’ve got promises to keep, so I’m adding to this post — sorry that it took so long for us to get this picture of you up on the site, Philipp. Here it is now:
Philipp — a little star
The things that divide us
We cross to the east at Point Alpha…
Christian at work
…and realise that east and west are just in our heads.
Peace
It’s the Opening Ceremony today. A time to make friends. Bring it on.
Verld Kupp!
Philip Schlösser
We should have read the signs!
Gymnasium Martino Katharineum
We go in search of the first game of football in Germany — reputed to have taken place in this grammar school in Braunschweig.
I found a PDF (Acrobat Reader required) on the web which has the following to say about the game:
Die offizielle Geburtsstunde des Fußballspiels in Deutschland schlug in Braunschweig. Das genaue Datum ist unbekannt, festgehalten ist lediglich “Michaelis 1874” – der 29. September 1874.
Der Initiator, Gymnasialprofessor und Turnlehrer Konrad Koch, sprach mehrfach davon, das Spiel im Oktober 1874 während eines Spielnachmittags am Gymnasium Martino-Katharineum mit seinen Schülern erstmals gespielt zu haben. Kochs Kollege, August Hermann, hatte sich aus England einen Ball besorgt und diesen einfach in die Schar der spielenden Jungen geworfen mit einem für Konrad Koch Überraschenden Ergebnis: “Der große Eifer, der alle zunächst Herangezogenen beseelte, machte es gleich im ersten Winter möglich, ja nötig, zweimal in der Woche, am Mittwochund dem Sonnabend-Nachmittag zu spielen; dabei war die Beteiligung der Einzelnen am Spiel durchweg rege und unablässig”
Roughly translated, this says:
The official birth of the game of football in Germany took place in Braunschweig. The exact date is not known, but it is commonly believed to have happened on the 29th September 1874.
The Initiator, gym and sport tutor Konrad Koch, spoke often about it, saying that the game was first played by his students in October of 1874 during an afternoon break at the Martino-Katharineum grammar school. Koch’s colleague, August Hermann, had procured a ball in England and had simply thrown the ball into the melee of playing students, with (for Konrad Koch) the unexpected result that “the great eagerness for the game which followed made it possible – nay necessary – to organise regular games on both Wednesdays and Saturdays throughout that first winter, and the enthusiasm of those taking part never waned”.
As the World Cup approaches, bakers whip up football fever.
While Chris scoffs his ball…
I eat my goal
Check out England’s victory at the 2006 World Cup…
A quick behind-the-scenes look at how we get this site together while we’re on the road. Believe me, it’s not easy.
Our office
The trouble with this blogging thing is that doing and publishing both require time, and we just don’t have enough to give to both. So we muddle our way through, aware that one of them will suffer.
I usually work in my sleep
So we grab what time we can to edit and write — in this case after dinner in a cafe, as you can see. Ah, this gonzo journalism lark… how much easier it would be if we’d decided to simply write about what we’re doing — video seems to take so much more effort to produce that text.
Right, I’ll stop complaining now.
The Crack
Well, we did eventually manage to have a bit of a knock-about in Ieper, but not the full-scale game that we had hoped for. Instead, we found Glyn, Peter and Matthieu playing keepie-uppie in the field next to our campsite. As so often happens when it’s underway, The Ball quickly became a source of fascination and a little puzzlement. Once we’d explained what it was all about, Phil and I donned our KVK Ieper shirts and joined in the kickabout.
The Team
