“ALL BALLS” By Des Kelly

Craig Andrew Foster beware,

An East Indian Commentator, there,

Does not miss, as he recalls

The matches that involve “all balls”.

This is Soccer we are talking about here. However, all balls are different. Aussie footballs are brown and oval. Soccer balls are round, in black and white. Leather Cricket balls are smaller, rounder, harder, even multi-coloured.

I am not even going to mention the “pink ones”,used in the last Test between Sri Lanka & Australia. We are not USED to pink balls, in Sri Lanka. This is the only reason that I can see, for the Inning’s defeat suffered by the Lankan team, recently. Had they used red balls, like the ones suffered by the Soccer player shown in my video clip, the story might have been different. These were not slightly “scratched” ones either. They were smashed ones. The poor Soccer player in my story has a very good reason,then,to “haggle”.

The game has had a severe impact on his”wedding-tackle”.

Now, “Ping-Pong” is different again.They use “soft balls” made of a special plastic, while golf-balls are hard, and a pain in the neck, especially for bad golfers. Billiard and Snooker balls are different again. They are slightly bigger than golf & ping-pong balls, hard, and multicoloured.

Why do I go on like this ?!, the answer is simple. These are “all balls”, we are talking about. It would be remiss of me, not to make mention of “Tennis-balls”. They are different, and larger than ping-pong balls, although “Ping pong” used to be called”Table-tennis”,before the name was changed, for reasons unknown. These balls are about the same size of all cricket balls, except that they do not have any similar consistency of hardness, and will not kill you, if you have the bad luck of being hit on the head by one. Mind you, “all balls” can hurt you if they hit you hard enough, EXCEPT the balls that are utilized in “Pocket-Billiards”, played quietly by non–Sportsmen everywhere, when they have nothing else to do. I just played some Snooker because the “tables” were smaller. For me, Sports in general, were impossible, the reason being, I was too engrossed in writing articles about them, for eLanka. (Apologies to my good friend Trevine Rodrigo).

Enough said. This is a very serious topic indeed. I would not be writing “all balls”, if it was not important. Also, I dedicate this story to my dear departed dad, Carlo, who never ever “swore”. If anyone attempted to speak some rubbish to him, he was very polite, listened carefully, and his standard answer was, (you guessed it, you clever lot).

“ALL BALLS”!! (and he mean’t it too).

Desmond Kelly