The blast of the referee's whistle.........

In a throwback to Robert DeNiro’s baseball speech in The Untouchables, I will say that as a man becomes older, he finds out that the essence of his life is in his enthusiasms. Enthusiasms – what bring him joy, what draw his admiration, what make him look forward to another day on this earth. What are mine? One: football.

I have been a football fan since I have known me. I was fortunate to be born in a football crazy country like Ghana. In Ghana, you become a football follower unconsciously. It is part of your upbringing. It surrounds you from the moment you are born. In your cradle, in your parents’ bedroom, in the small porch of your house, on the unpaved streets, on every school field, from gutter to gutter. You play football by default and you become a football coach by default. You learn every aspect to the game unwittingly. Football is a national obsession.

What then makes football special to me? It is just two teams of eleven men each, kicking a ball weighing ~450g around, right? Wrong. To me, football is an education. I have learned perhaps the most important principles in psychology, sociology, mathematics and strategy from watching and playing football. It has also taught me the most important practical lessons in life: preparation, hard work, focus, sacrifice and team work.

Football is a unifier. What else will bring eleven strong men each from the US and Iran together on the same turf? How about North and South Korea? Football defies tribe, ethnicity or race. When the goal is scored, it doesn’t matter if it was an Israeli who scored or a Lebanese who gave the pass. Unless of course, you are Amr Zaki. Football is also a leveler. It is a classless sport. In the game, the dreams of egalitarians come true. On the same field, it is common to find someone from a poor childhood arm in arm with another who had a privileged upbringing. In the pub, it is not uncommon to find a bank analyst sharing a few bottles of Guinness with his director over a Champions League match.

Most importantly, football is the strongest bond between me and my best friends. Be they in Accra, London or Boston, it is the adhesive that holds us together. It is what we call each other about. My friends visit my Facebook page, expecting an interesting line they can comment on. They look forward to me making a ridiculous statement so they can heap abuse on me. I send them text messages to gloat when their teams lose, like this. Not a day passes without us touching base about the latest happenings in the sport we adore.

This is thus my motivation for this blog – that my friends and I will have a platform to share everything we love about our game. This blog is about the jokes, the gossips and the laughter we indulge in. It is about the frank interchange of ideas. It is about the tactics, the formations, the famous stadiums, the big matches and the biggest personalities we discuss. It may have taken a long time in coming, but finally the pre-match hype is over and Right Said Fred have sung their inspirational song. Let’s get on with the game.

To my American and Canadian friends: by Football here I mean Soccer (eww!!)