SPECTATOR SPORT
Poor man's game
Simon Barnes
TO DO the job properly, you need 30 or 40 plastic bags, about ten yards of string, a fair amount of skill and not a little love. You have to pack the bags together quite tight, and then bind around the outside again and again.
It bounces a lot better than you would think. The string is normally a coarse twine, which is hard on bare feet. But then so is the ground, and they are used to that. That is how you make an African football. I remember watching them play on a patch of open ground in Lusaka, as I drank a Mosi beer.
I was waiting, along with my old friend, the ornithologist Baron Robert Stjernstedt, for the Land-Rover from Livingstone Museum, who were backing our expedition to the North-west Province in pursuit of a small, brown bird that had not been seen in the wild since 1939 (and still hasn't, alas). In Africa, you wait for things. It is part of life, what old Africa hands call a TAB Situ- ation: That's Africa Baby.
We marvelled, as we waited, at football, the game of the poor, as I believe I have said before, which makes it the game of the world, of course. The poor you always have with you. Therefore, you always have foot- ball. It is worth remembering, as football gets richer and more fashionable, that foot- ball's heartland is in places such as this.
Zip-pan to Borneo. This time, I was up a river in a boat, looking for proboscis mon- keys. Stopping at a small village, behind the longhouse, I saw a football pitch, what else? The posts were stout pieces of bam- boo. There were kids playing with a real football. They kicked it to me, I kicked it back, and damn near broke my foot. It was an ancient leather football, soaked from the latest downpour and as heavy as a can- nonball.
Back to Africa, to the Arabuko-Sokoke forest in Kenya, a hotspot of biodiversity, home of several birds and mammals found nowhere else, including the gorgeous black and yellow Clarke's weaver. There is a foot- ball team called the Clarke's Weavers. They play in yellow and black. The strip, the football, the pitch were provided by the Worldwide Fund for Nature. The WWF man on the spot has a citation from the team thanking him for his unfailing sup- port: 'Your presence invariably enhances the morality of the team.'
And back again to Asia, to a concrete wasteland, a flat area reclaimed from the sea on an outlying island off Hong Kong. It was the only place where the poor souls that lived there could play football, so they played on concrete. I know. I was one the poor souls, the poor bloody goalkeeper as it happened.
To see outfielders playing slide-tackles on the concrete was to learn something about commitment. Metal posts, no nets, and white concrete that threw the heat back at you in suffocating blasts. Me padded up like the Michelin man to do all the Lev Yashin stuff.
Football is the world's game all right. I wait and wait, in traditional African style, for the first African nation to become a major power in world football. Surely it cannot be much longer delayed. Nigeria, for this World Cup? I drink a bottle of Mosi to their success.
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