The ball’s the thing

Fifa has tossed back the sponsored ball which was expensively designed for June’s World Cup: it was too inclined to wobble in flight. Also last week, the on-going fuss over the size and aerodynamics of the golf ball came to an interim conclusion when both the Royal & Ancient and the US Golf Association admitted secret research into the manufacture of a larger, lighter ball which can be propelled less far. Modern clubs and a stronger generation have been pinging the thing such distances that many of the game’s fabled courses are becoming obsolete.

The ball is kernel, core and be-all of so many games that such news items make you realise how sparse is the homage that history has paid to it. The unsung, innocent ball, simply, makes sport’s whole world go round. No prolix poet pronounces lofty paeans to The Ball; soccer’s penny-a-liner hacks sniffily pass it off as the leather, the sphere, the orange, the orb, the globe, the pill, the pigskin, the bladder, or just the (see above) ‘thing’. In cricket, the noble ball has to answer to the cherry, the jaffa, the turnip, even the crimson rambler; in tennis, it’s the fuzz or the furr; in golf, the pea, the pellet, the puck, the bead, the aspirin, the dimpled onion. Yet no ball equals no game. QED. In 1887, with the 22 Casuals and Old Westminsters stripped for action at 2.15, the throng at the London Cup Final at Crystal Palace had to wait till 3.10 as an exhaustive search round Sydenham sought a proper blown-up leather football. Sixty years ago this spring was the second-longest delay in a Cup final — when the ball burst at Wembley in 1946 and a new inner tube had to be inserted and inflated.