Ex-pat Football
By Ian Mitchell Photos by author
Nick Rees kindly hosted another lavish evening for participants in the Expat football league at the Holiday Inn, Sokolniki two weeks ago. This well-organised, smoothly-run Charity Ball raised more than $27,000 for Diema’s Dream, a charity for disabled Russian orphans, and for Guide Dogs for the Blind.
Apart form all the very generous donors of prizes for the raffles, which helped raise a lot of the money, the evening had three major sponsors, Lufthansa, Ernst & Young and Power 8, the energy drink.
Player of the year was Pierre Libessart, and the team champions for the 2006-7 season was the Four Squares Moscow Flaggons.
The dinner was wonderful and the bar-staff ever-obliging. Then the music started and the whole event really took off, Cuban dancers, a full dance floor and a steady procession between the tables and the bar. I don’t know when it ended but it was a great evening.
It must have been exhausting organising The event as Nick Rees had to take four days off the following week just to recover from the stress. But he remembers the event with great pleasure. “It was a great night,” he told Passport subsequently. “You had better write that down, because if anybody can remember it in any sort of detail, then they did not drink enough.”
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