The Beautiful Game

Top photo - Blackrock College Sports Day 15 May 2011
Bottom photo - Sunday Times Magazine 15 May 2011

I couldn't help but see the similarity in pose of the player striking the ball. That's where the similarity ends. There are no flares created by an Italian oil company extracting billions of dollars from the ground and destroying the local environment in Blackrock, whereas there is in Oshie, Nigeria. Still maybe our Government will soon by going down that road in an effort to restore the country's finances.

The Beautiful Game

I see a little silhouette of a ball, Scaramouche can you play the fandango.....

The Beautiful Game

Chelsea, London 1970.

The Beautiful Game

UAE v Iran Dubai September 1985.

The town Gerry loved so well

A young boy and his little sister play ball under the Bloody Sunday murals.



While meantime in another part of town............

Football - the Opium of the Masses

"It turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half, for not only had you escaped the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, from wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your mates and your neighbours, with half the town, cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swapping judgments like Lords of the Earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid life."

J. B. Priestley

A view of the pitch

Nairobi, Kenya - from the corporate boxes.

Tottenham, London - from the corporate boxes.

Beautiful game

Malawi's chances in the next World Cup?

Beautiful game

Repeat - "Came across this fabulous photograph in the Telegraph today (sincere apologies - I only buy it for the football) and it sums up the indefatigable attraction of the beautiful game."

The photograph is from the streets of Havana (giveaway - the car), and as the boys play their parents are meeting in a sidestreet bar or cafe to plot a political coup and to oust the incompetent and corrupt dictatorship that has run their country into the ground. Either that or else they're rolling cigars on the thighs of well proportioned, sallow-skinned red-lipped beauties who need to while away time before the next fandango begins.

Either way these people have got it right.

There's no gas, no barbed wire, there's no guns firing now.....

11am on the 11 November 1918.

I searched for pictures or artwork showing the opposing sides playing football on Christmas Day 1914 but nothing jumped out at me. I also searched in vain for a report on the match which the Germans won on penalties, despite having gone a goal down to a hotly disputed goal (in off the butt of a rifle), awarded by a Russian Kaiser who was miles off the play in downtown Volvograd.

Football - the global game. Choose football. Choose life.

The Beautiful Game

Came across this fabulous photograph in the Telegraph today (sincere apologies - I only buy it for the football) and it sums up the indefatigable attraction of the beautiful game. The scene overlooks Kabul and in the midst of the horror and turmoil prevailing in their country, soccer provides a welcome respite. It'll be a while before they're fighting over who plays out-half.