The Ball 2006, known for the first time as The Spirit of Football, embodied the motto of the 2006 World Cup: A Time to make Friends. Its short journey to Munich brought people together in the spirit of the beautiful game.
We’ve settled in Erfurt in Thüringia to recover from the stresses of travel and video-blogging, and to meet up with Andrew, whom I met when I came over to Germany just before Christmas. He’s been organising a project here that’s also called Spirit of Football and contacted us when he found that we had the domain name. We immediately recognised our common attitude to the beautiful game — and so here we are to hang out and enjoy the football.
Stefan Beutel, Rot-Weiss Erfurt manager
Andrew invited Phil and me to his club, Rot-Weiss Erfurt, to have a kickabout, to meet the manager and have a chat about all things football. What we didn’t expect was that Stefan would also be a sharpshooter from the penalty spot.
I stand no chance
And, of course, if you kick The Ball, you have to sign it…
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
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!
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:
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”.