Time Frame: Keeping the ball rolling

This week saw the launch of the UAE Schools and Streets Cup, a new festival of school and street football that will get underway in Abu Dhabi on October 17.

This photograph from the early 1970s is old-school football, quite literally. It appeared in an edition of Al Ittihad, the Arabic-language sister newspaper of The National, and according to the caption, shows boys from Zayed School and Zayed the Second School – meaning Sheikh Zayed, the first President of the UAE – competing in what must have been a fiercely contested local derby

The location is given as Abu Obeida Military School on a pitch that looks more suited to beach, rather than association, football.

* James Langton