The one thing missing from the festive football? Seeing an orange ball in snow

Football grounds can cope will all sorts of weather these days, which is a shame. Few things beat the giddy excitement of seeing an orange ball in snow

By Neil Andrews for When Saturday Comes, of the Guardian Sport Network

“Why have you got a set of orange footballs?” asked my son as we went through my Subbuteo collection. “Just in case it snows,” I replied, safe in the knowledge that a game of table football has never been called off due to the weather. The joke was lost on him – he had no idea what I was talking about. In an era when you can seemingly buy any colour of ball you want, the significance of an orange ball appears to have bypassed a whole generation of fans. For them, the sight of an orange ball on a snow-covered pitch would probably be met with apathy. What’s so special about a coloured ball?

Yet there was a time when a mere dusting of snow would send schoolboys up and down the country giddy with excitement at the thought of being able to use a ball that otherwise lay dormant at the bottom of their cupboards for the rest of the year. I remember forcing a relative out into a blizzard on a cold Saturday night in the late 1970s just so I could use my orange – albeit plastic – ball in the conditions for which it was intended. This excitement was equalled, if not bettered, when such a ball made an appearance at an actual match, generating a buzz around the ground the moment it was produced by the referee.

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