The family history pales, however, beside his personal story. As a child of four, Elisha was told he had a unique talent. Leonard Bernstein embraced him, Isaac Stern invited him to New York, Arthur Rubinstein predicted a glittering future. Elisha's father, Shlomo, gave up his job in Jerusalem to move the family to Hod Hasharon, close to the exacting teacher Pnina Salzman. For ten years, Shlomo took Elisha to lessons, while developing a second life of his own as Israel's best-selling children's writer. 

After lessons, Shlomo would take Elisha into the garden to kick a ball. One day, Elisha said he didn't want to be a pianist any more. He was going to be a professional footballer. "I hated the atmosphere around concerts," he tells me, "the snobbery, the expectation. My teacher used to say, there are two kinds of happiness. When you get asked to play a concert. And when it's cancelled. She was right."

Through his late teens and twenties, Elisha Abas played football in the Israeli Premier League. He was signed for Hapoel Petah Tikvah by Avram Grant, future manager of Chelsea. "Avram never gave me a game," he shrugs. After a season in the reserves, he moved to Hapoel Kfar Saba. "I was a striker, but I never scored." They tried him in midfield. Then he moved as a right-back to Hapoel Nazareth, a team composed of Galilean Arabs, Christian and Muslim. "My brothers," Elisha calls them. 

Nobody in Nazareth knew he had been a classical pianist. And, if they knew, who cared? Football society is as consuming and self-enclosed as the concert world, a blinkered routine of daily practice and weekly high performance in the public eye. Two failures can finish you off. In either pressure cooker, there is no place to hide.