Playing with Yohan’s balls

Today, immediately after I finished my mandatory office hours, I headed to the Car Workshop at the Industrial Area. Gave my car for repair and then from a nearby mallu cafeteria had my favourite glass of authentic mallu saada diagonal chaaya (kerala style tea), packed a few sandwiches, got hold of an unauthorized taxi and headed straight to the Al Sadd Football Stadium (Yes, the same one which has those butt cooling AC outlets just behind the chairs).

For those who don’t know, today was match day. It was an India versus Qatar tie, with both countries full fledged football teams playing a friendly match.

No so long ago I was at the same stadium with my family to watch the under 23 lads from both the countries battling it out for the Olympics qualifiers. We lost that match badly, hitting just one goal against their three. Today’s one was wonderful though; India won with two goals to one. And I must say, the men in blue played wonderfully. Actually, even the lone goal which was awarded to the 2022 World Cup hosts was a no-goal. Anyways, we won and I am happy for my country. I enjoyed the match thoroughly and I missed my boys terribly. It would have been wonderful if they were here, especially Yohan, who is a great fan of Kik (Football) and Bakitiball (Basket Ball).

Yohan, unlike his elder brother Kevin, who is a bit slow with sports related matters, has been kicking a football since he was crawling. He is an ardent lover of sports related activities and ‘balls’ in particular. You ask him what toy he wants and unarguably his answer (till the movie Cars 2 released) would be “Vava wan ball”, indicating that he wants us to buy him a ball (now, his liking is slowly shifting to cars).

Since I got back home after the match, I’ve been thinking about my lads and playing with their balls at home, bucketing and dribbling them around the house shouting “We did it, yeyyyy!” with every basket and reminiscing how they’d jump over me to wake me up on those lazy Friday mornings and how little Yohan would pester me later to play football and basketball with him.

I miss them so much, and unlike the past two days, my belly isn’t really content enough to shut my shop off and so here I am writing a blog on Yohan’s balls, bringing them to the world.

Here they are; not all, but most of them.

The Cars Hopping Ball. The scribbling on it is not an artwork,
it is his signature stating that this one belongs to him.

The Lady Bug.

The Spidey Pool Ball

Bakitiball (Yo's Basket Ball)

Yo's Hand Ball

Yo's Foot Ball

The talking Alphabet Ball.

The soft foot ball

The 'glow in the night' Fluorescent ball

The hard Crazy ball.
A handy weapon to attack his elder brother

And those plastic balls, which are part of his weaponry.
Used mostly to ambush a sleeping elder brother
in revenge of the day's bullying.

Cricket bat and ball

Little rubber football

Golf Ball

The Cricket 'Tennis' Ball.
Always reminds dad of that fateful day when he was
playing cricket with little Yo and learnt this lesson the
hard way 'Always wear a groin guard when a charged up
mallu kid is bowling to you'

The micro mini ball

That rubberized crazy ball

And finally, his Dad's 14 balls; all tennis.

Talking about balls, I am reminded of this wonderful late 70’s AC/DC song. Enjoy!

That was a lot of balling around; it is already half past two. Let me go and hit the bed now. 

Bye folks. And again, enjoy.