The Joy of Six: great footballs (original) (raw)

1) Adidas Tango

For those of a certain age, the Adidas Tango - like the ZX Spectrum, Panini stickers, roast beef Monster Munch (they’re back!), having your head flushed down the toilet and crying 23/7 - is a vivid reminder of childhood. Yet few of us ever actually got our pudgy fingers on one. They cost a packet, and you’d have needed to save your pocket money for about four lifetimes to buy one. So it took two to Tango: you to nag nag nag away at your parents, and convince them to blow about half their weekly wage on one. Some chance. Most people would only see them once every four years, at the World Cup, and so they became as brilliantly mysterious as puberty and the idea of a proper conversation with a member of the opposite sex. Instead, most of us settled for buying the Subbuteo version, and then weeping furiously when some flat-topped bully stood on it in a fit of rare pique after losing 2-1 in the last-day-of-term competition.

The Tango’s predecessor, the oldest of the old skool Telstar, is certainly cooler - as one member of the theguardian.com/sport parish put it, “imagine Gerd Müller roofing that past some poor [expletive deleted] from two yards, or Franz Beckenbauer sauntering down the middle of the pitch like a bloke coming back from the shop with the Sunday paper and a pint of milk” - but the Tango had greater cachet. It was the OK Computer to the Telstar’s Bends. Which puts both of them above everything else ever, you’ll surely agree.

2) The Mitre Delta 1000

On the long list of Doodles Done In Class In The Late 80s, the Mitre Delta comes behind only assorted genitalia and that formless thing with the tail and a sort of face. The pre-Premiership ball of choice might now be associated with a dark period of Elton Welsby and Saint & Greavsie, but at the time it was seriously cool: who wouldn’t want the ball that was caressed by the likes of Brian Kilcline, Ian Ormondroyd and Mal Donaghy? Short of swaggering into school with Bronwyn from Neighbours on your arm, there was no surer way to win friends and influence people than by whipping out a Delta at lunchtime. But woe betide the kid who had to go home and tell his parents it had been punted out of the school, never to be found.

3) Mitre Mouldmaster

It’s a fact that, by the time you have finished reading this entry, your hands will have instinctively drifted down to cover your nether regions. The Mouldmaster does that to a person; it was the Candyman of footballs. Parents and schools loved it because it was relatively cheap, and it was certainly nasty. Up and down the country there are millions of Mouldmaster Vets, bearing the tattoo of its rough, basketball-coating on their inner thigh, whose eyes glaze over as they recall the time they went to war. Unless you have felt the stinging kiss of the Mouldmaster during a PE lesson on a witheringly cold day, while wearing shorts that amounted to little more than a piece of elastic and in an environment that was a torture camp in all but name, you cannot truly say that your time on this earth has been justified.

It’s a serious oversight that it isn’t used as a tool in police interrogations: any fool would sing like a canary rather than have that beast boinging off their skull at high speed. This said, the Mouldmaster had some hidden benefits. Sweet-spotting a half-volley into the business area of a bête noire was a teenage experience only exceeded by the discovery of a swearword in a foreign language. And, as one internet forumista recalled, “on impact, as the ball rebounded off my bollocks, the surge of pain allowed me to unleash a 20-yard screamer into the top corner, before I collapsed in agony on to the red blaise.” Hands up who can relate to that.

4) The old ones

A link has yet to be formally established, but surely 99.94% cases of dementia involve those who spent a lifetime heading the old footballs, which were medicine balls in all but name. The bladder was taken from the pig at 2.58pm, inflated a bit and then put in the referee’s hands. On a wet day, it was like a brick. If the word metatarsal had been part of the lexicon in the 1950s and 60s, there would not have been a single person who hadn’t broken one, or have had their ankle ligaments dangling by a thread after putting the boot through one of these mothers. No wonder old football was rubbish: if you’ve ever kicked a wall in drunken frustration at being you, imagine doing that for 90 minutes solid.

5) Adidas Fevernova

Pretty much everything about this ball stunk, from its name (Fevernova? Yeah, well done) to its design (not bad in itself, but the first deviation from the Tango/Telstar for a World Cup and as such an act of the most vulgar cultural vandalism) to the fact that, when it was premiered at Japan/South Korea 2002, it basically ignored row Z and went straight for orbit: there were barely any direct free-kicks scored in the tournament, and few long-range shots as well. It was less champagne fevernova, more Lambrini fevernova.

Yet it has a place in history as the first football to really cause something resembling a moral panic. These days no tournament is complete without a load of semi-talentless nuggets complaining that the ball is the reason they have shanked 94 shots over the bar in the first two games. Yep, Fwank, it’s not you, it’s it.

6) The Adidas Wawa Aba

Most contemporary balls are, well, just that. And contemporary too. But there is one exception. If you only buy one modern football, buy this one. If you only buy two, buy two of these in case the dog eats one. The Wawa Aba, brought in for the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations with a bespoke design prioritising the red, yellow and green of the hosts Ghana, is the sort of ball that, like a fine wine, you buy but never open. Its shrill design might assault the senses and make football with a hangover an even more gut-churning business than usual, but it still looks impossibly cool. And if you sit it the right way up, you’ll notice that it has eyes, a nose and a mouth. Look at its face! Just look at its face!