UV maping a sphere to have stripes runing between both poles? I tried to map a country flag on a UV sphere, but I could not get it laid out the way how I wanted to see it. I used the Poland flag. 
I wanted to map it exactly as you can see in picture 1.



But what I got was a result as you can see in these pictures.
 



The flag was looped at least 8 times on each half side of the sphere.
I could double that, but I could not go half of that, or less.
I wanted the flag to show up just 1 time at each half side of the sphere.
or maybe twice at each side, but not 8 times. 
as you can see on the third picture, I tried to resize the UV map, but also then it would never go under 8 repeats.
How can I change this?

Here is the Poland flag texture.
If you do it backwards, so instead of unwrapping an icosphere you create a plane and turn it into a sphere, you have a lot more control on the results.
To turn a plane into a sphere see this answer

Unwrapping a plane will give you perfect UVs to do what you want:



.blend file

related:

What is the best way to unwrap a sphere?
https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/13927/1853