Thursday 24 March 2011

The spirit of street football...

... is alive and kicking in Bamako.

Just around the corner from my guesthouse in the Malian capital is the most amazing football pitch that I've seen so far. It consists of a triangular parking space (really bumpy in some parts) and an adjoining road.

The surface alone would make playing there too risky for my taste - it's a 10 cm step up from the parking onto the road - but what makes playing here look really dangerous is the fact that there's quite a lot of traffic on the road where the players run. Not all of the vehicles go slow either. The pitch is delimited on one side by a metre-deep drain next to a really busy road and on the other side by houses and another drain. However, the guys didn't to pay attention to the difficult conditions and played really well. To my big surprise only one leg broke - the leg of a chair - when two players fighting for the ball fell on an elderly onlooker who was sitting there. The man just brushed off the dust and walked away without a word.

1 comment:

Safari-Birgit said...

Football in Africa - so amazing!!! :-) I like!!