| |
|
The World's Game
JUNE 2006
|
|
The World's Game
This month 32 nations will compete for the World Cup of soccer, the "beautiful game" that unites and divides countries around the globe. To celebrate that we bring you excerpts from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.
|
By Sean Wilsey
|
Photographs by Marco Anelli, Grazia Neri
|
|
"Introduction" by Sean Wilsey
"IVORY COAST—The Way to Win Juju on the Field," by Paul Laity
"ENGLAND—Faded Glory: Taming the Hooligans," by Nick Hornby
"BRAZIL—Ballet with Ball: A Love Story," by John Lanchester
"COSTA RICA—Soccer Inc: Marketing Fanaticism," by Matthew Yeomans
"SPAIN—Morality Play: Soccer as Theater," by Robert Coover
"ANGOLA—A Greater Goal: Healing a War-Torn Land," by Henning Mankell
"ARGENTINA—Ode to Maradona: Falklands' Revenge," by Thomas Jones
"CROATIA—Group Therapy: A Nation is Born," by Courtney Angela Brkic
ENGLAND
Faded Glory: Taming the Hooligans
By Nick Hornby
It was all so straightforward back in the '60s, when I started to watch soccer. England had just won the 1966 World Cup and, therefore, unarguably, were the best team in the world: fact, period, end of story. Then everything went wrong, pretty much forever. For a start, I became a grown-up and much more troubled about what it meant to belong to a country; meanwhile England's soccer team was hopeless. (I may not have been so conflicted about the subject of patriotism if they'd been any good.) The team didn't even qualify for the World Cup of 1974 and 1978; the world-class players we'd been blessed with in the '60s had gone, and by the '80s, the whole subject of patriotism and soccer had become much more complicated.
In the mind's eye now, England games during that decade were only just visible through a cloud of tear gas, used by European police to disperse our rioting hooligans. England fans were fast becoming a pretty sinister bunch. If you went to see England play at Wembley, you could observe people around you making the Nazi salute during the national anthem, and abuse of black players—even those playing for the home team—was commonplace. Sometimes it seemed as though the thousand worst scumbag fans from every single league club were gathered at Wembley so they could make monkey noises and sing anti-IRA songs. If you saw someone coming toward you in a T-shirt sporting the Union Jack, you'd have been best advised to cross the street. The T-shirt was a graphic alternative to a slogan that might say something like, "I'm a racist, but I hate you no matter what color you are."
And so some soccer fans started to feel a little conflicted about the national team. In 1990, when England played Cameroon in the quarterfinals of the World Cup, it wasn't hard to find people in England—middle-class, liberal people, admittedly, but people nonetheless—who wanted Cameroon to win. I watched that game with some of them, and when England went 2-1 down (they eventually won 3-2 in extra time), these people cheered. I understood why, but I couldn't cheer with them, much to my surprise. Those drunk, racist thugs draped in the national colors. . . . They were, it turned out, my people, not the nice liberal friends I was watching the game with, and England was my soccer team. I mean, you can't choose stuff like that, right? The 1990 World Cup turned out to be a turning point. The team wasn't embarrassing. The fans weren't embarrassing either. After a horrendous couple of decades, the national team once again basked in the warmth of the nation's affections.
The rebirth lasted about five minutes. There was a disastrous managerial appointment, which resulted in yet another failure to qualify. And by 1998 soccer was a different game. Many of the players in our top division came from outside the British Isles. The globalization of the transfer market was beginning to rob international football of much of its point. In the old days, you'd look at the best players in the club teams and think, What would they be like if they played together? And the answer was they looked like the national team. Now, Chelsea, Manchester United, Real Madrid, Juventus, AC Milan, and Barcelona have replaced the national teams as fantasy soccer teams.
In 1989 England played out a goalless draw against Sweden, helping to ensure qualification for the 1990 World Cup. The enduring image of that game is of the England captain, Terry Butcher, swathed in a bandage, his white England shirt and shorts covered in blood that had pumped steadily out of a head wound throughout the game. "Off the pitch I was always an ordinary, mild-mannered bloke," said Butcher in an interview. "But put me in a football shirt and it was tin hats and fixed bayonets. Death or glory."
That was the old England: the war imagery, the crucial nil-nil draw against modest opposition, the unavoidable replacement of style and talent with blood and graft. Those who loathe David Beckham, the current England captain, would claim that he will wear a tin hat and bandages only when tin hats and bandages become de rigueur in some ludicrously fashionable European nightclub. That's not fair, because despite his looks and his cash, he has worked hard to compensate for things he lacks as a player, notably pace. But there's no doubt he is brilliantly illustrative of a new kind of English sportsman: professional, media-aware, occasionally petulant, and very, very rich.
The England fans who went to the 2005 friendly match against Argentina (resulting in a meaningless but enthralling last-minute win) were still singing their "No surrender to the IRA" song, and there's more than a suspicion that they'd rather be watching Terry Butcher and his fixed bayonets than David Beckham, a man who, after all, has been photographed wearing a sarong. But then, that's England all over at the moment. We'd still rather be bombing the Germans; but after 60 years, there's a slowly dawning suspicion that those days aren't coming back any time soon, and in the meantime we must rely on sarong-wearing, multimillionaire pretty boys to kick the Argies for us. We're not happy about it, but what can we do?
(Click here to read Nick Hornby's entire essay. He is the author of Fever Pitch, a memoir of his lifelong support of England's Arsenal soccer club. His latest novel is A Long Way Down.)
Subscribe to National Geographic magazine.
|
|
Top
|
|
|
|
|
|
