The £100 Nike ‘Incyte’ ball
While MOMS still longs for the day when a retro Adidas Tango will be the official football of the Premiership, here is the ball that will grace Villa Park and lesser grounds in the 2013/14 premiership season.
Nike’s ‘Incyte’ ball sees a price hike of £10 from last year’s ‘Maxim’ ball to £100. The orange and purple design isn’t a classic my any stretches of the imagination, but as well as being the official ball of the English Premiership League, the ball will be also used in Serie A and La Liga.
As usual, the ball comes with the obligatory Nike jive talk in terms of it’s design. Last year, the ‘Maxim’ was all about ‘360 degree sweet spots’ (it’s a ball, what do you expect?), ‘aerodynamic textured casing’ (whatever) and a ‘Six wing carbon-latex air chamber’ (a what?). This year, the ‘Incyte’ boasts Nike’s RaDaR (Rapid Decision and Response) technology (wtf?), a ‘high-elasticity layer’ (does that make it bounce?) and it’s ”micro-textured’ (oh, sexy).
Of course, it’s the kind of advertising wording nonsense (that actually means nothing), they use on other products like shampoo. There’s no surprise Nike boasts, ‘the ball is most technologically advanced ball in the world’; it has to justify its £100 price-tag some how.
Hopefully Paul Lambert’s young Aston Villa team will utilise the new ball to better effort, than the team did last season’s model.
And now comes the bit where we show you a picture of an Adidas Tango ball and pause for a second to mourn the loss of classic design.
Follow MOMS on twitter at @oldmansaid
The ball does make a shit load of difference, if u played at any level, Sunday league Esp, having a Mitre Cosmic, pumped up to within an inch of its life, becoz the Manager dont know what PSI is, is not pleasent and then they wonder why there so shite trying to ping around a cannonball. I’ve always brought more expensive balls becoz they make the game so much better and compensate for our non professional shitness ! I loved the Pro Max (£50) and the Spalding ball used in the conference, that ball was awesome despite the Shearer and Co bitching about it when they played some non league team in an FA cup match once 😀
BlobbsMorris hahaha. I remember a junior school team match i played in, where it was an away game played in a gale force wind. The opposition was warming up with one of those 99p plastic balls you’d get from Woolworths. We knew we won the game, before it even started, just by seeing them with that ball. Even the Mitre match ball behaved like a beachball in that wind. With the wind, we were 6-0 up at half-time. Against the wind, we couldn’t do jack about it, and the game ended 6-0.