Football for thinkers
A new guide to the World Cup, which gives a rundown of every country competing, is good for the lapsed football fan but often has nothing to do with football. By Michael McCaughan
The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup. Edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey. Abacus, 400p, €12
Between the ages of six and 12 I played football with a wild passion, preparing for my inevitable future as a professional player with Liverpool FC. Every week I devoured soccer magazine Shoot! and my bedroom walls were plastered with pictures of my favourite players. The World Cup was the crowning glory of this obsession with Beckenbauer, Cruyff and Rivelino my childhood heroes until Joe Strummer and Che Guevara taught me about a world beyond the football pitch. As a foreign correspondent in Latin America the success of the Irish soccer team added a fresh topic of conversation to a narrow field dominated by Bobby Sands and U2.
On 21 June 1994 (some dates stay with you) I was arrested by the Mexican army as a suspected subversive just as Ireland kicked off their crucial World Cup game against Mexico. The local commander visited me and chatted about his graduate thesis which he wrote on the IRA. An hour later, a TV was wheeled into the holding room and drinks were ordered for the 'Irlandes'. I was grateful Ireland lost the game as the soldiers, content with their nation's triumph, lost interest in me and handed me over to migration officials.
The World Cup has since become little more than background noise at a time of the year when sane people are out of doors in the heat and playing their own games, rather than sitting cooped up in front of a screen. This year though my legs have inexplicably been carrying me to the TV to watch most of the matches.
The Thinking Fan's guide seems tailor made for lapsed obsessives like myself whose only serious reading on the matter has been Eduardo Galeano's Football in Sun and Shadow and Ryszard Kapuscinski's superb The Soccer War on the hostilities which broke out between El Salvador and Honduras over a football match.
The idea behind the book was that a hip writer would reflect on each country that qualified for the 2006 tournament, making for 32 brief essays. Roddy Doyle was booked for the Irish contribution but got the red card when our team failed to qualify. The reader will quickly become aware that a knowledge of football was not deemed particularly important when it came to choosing contributors; William Finnegan, taking charge of Portugal, delivers an ode to surfing in Madeira and wonders aloud why anyone would bother playing soccer when majestic waves sweep tantalisingly off the Portuguese coast. Dave Eggers, founder of McSweeney's, explains the beauty of suburban soccer: "Twenty-two kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match."
The choice of contributors includes a former Mexican foreign minister, an art critic and fast-food analyst Eric Schlosser. The gamble paid off as the writers, thinking well outside the box, produce a diverse and often profound reflection on life, sport and politics around the globe.
The Latin American and African contributions highlight the significance of soccer as the great leveller in highly unequal societies where kids play barefoot with a rag wrapped around a tin can for a ball. Another theme that runs through the book is how the beautiful game is under siege from big business. Caryl Phillips, writing on Ghana, describes the yawning gap between the lifestyle of superstar Michael Essien (sold from Lyon to Chelsea for $40m) and the rest of his team-mates whose clothes are threadbare and who cannot afford a newspaper on the plane home after their match. Saudi Arabia takes this concept to its logical conclusion. This oil rich nation might eventually become the Chelsea of the World Cup, winning one tournament after another by buying up and nationalising the world's top talent.
The most instructive essays are on debutants Angola, Ghana and Togo. If football delivered fairytale endings then Angola deserves a place in the final as pride in their success brings a nation together after war and economic devastation. At the opposite end of the spectrum success for Togo, even one victory, would probably prolong a brutal dictatorship by another 10 years.
The style and substance varies throughout these pages, with world class writers like Nick Hornby towering over a reluctant Polish contribution which reads like a school essay written to deadline. Said Sayrafiezadeh turns his piece on Iran into a moving reflection on father-son relations and reminded me that the longest time I spend alone with my father is the 90 minutes shared in front of a World Cup match. Saudi Arabian commentator Sukhdev Sandhu unmasks the absurdity of Sharia law which dismisses soccer for, among other reasons, the after-goal celebrations: "What do joy, hugging and kissing have to do with sport?"
The book is divided into bitesize portions which allow a half-time dip into each country. I learned more about Switzerland and Croatia in these brief profiles than in all the foreign pages of our newspapers. In addition to the literary stuff, there is a fact file on each team and a record of each country's involvement in previous World Cups, giving the reader some bluff material for striking up conversations with strangers.
Sean Wilsey, co-editor of this anthology, reveals the perfect antidote to the anticlimax that occurs when the tournament is over; you can now go online and buy an entire collection of past World Cup games.
The football fan can thus purchase the 1970 Mexico games (25 tapes in all) and watch the tournament unfold as it did back then, round by round. As a bonus you get a rerun of the clichés in vogue at the time, including classics like, "My word he's got a kick like a mule," and "Rubinos was left like a foundering whale." p