Football development in Russia – it is not a bomb, it is a football

Good Friday, April 13 – 1906
An amusing story has reached Sunderland from Poti, Russia, where the crew of the s.s. J.W. Taylor, of Sunderland, recently played a football match with the crew of two other ships in port. The custom officers in their search of the vessel came across the football and took it for some Nihilistic instrument of the bomb type, and took much persuasion before they could be brought to regard it as harmless. In fact, the sailors had to let the air out and squeeze it up to show its harmless nature to prevent its confiscation.
(Luton Times, 13-04-1906)