The Away Leg: XI Football Stories on the Road

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Introduction

by David Goldblatt

The Away Leg begins with Harry Pearson opening ‘a grey box file with a red-and-white sticker advertising the Argentinean newspaper El Grafico’. Inside are the relics of his trip to the 1998 World Cup in France, and it carries the odour of ‘aged paper’ and ‘the scent of garlic and black tobacco’. I have a few boxes like that, objects and papers which evoke the sounds and smells of my own away games: the smell of burning bucket seats in Belgrade as the Partizan fans burnt their own stand while their team lost to rivals Red Star; the insistent pulse of a honed 12-piece Ghanaian horn section accompanying their team Asante Kotoko; a tear gas-impregnated face mask from a day in Belo Horizonte, when I attended a protest march, Brazil v Uruguay and a post-match riot all in one day.

Sharply as these moments are etched in my memory, I can barely remember the scores of those games, let alone a passage of play. I’m not alone. As many of the contributors reveal, our memories of football are not straightforward, not least because so little of what we remember is the football being played. In ‘The Democratic People’s Republic of FIFAland’, Harry Pearson’s account of the politically charged Iran v USA game at the 1998 World Cup, he finds that most of the near 20 games he went to have been reduced to no more than a handful of split-second sporting moments. More acutely, he reveals how our televisual memories of a match have already been edited before we see them; his match report features a game-long battle between Iranian protestors and the French police that was invisible on the world’s screens.

Sometimes we remember even less than those singular moments. In Catherine Etoe’s ‘One Nil to the Arsenal’, her account of the club’s historic victory in the 2007 UEFA Women’s Cup, she admits that in the second leg, ‘I honestly cannot remember the finer details of the 90 minutes that followed, I just know that I held my breath for longer than was probably healthy.’ Yet, her memory for a detail, seen before the first leg in Umeå in northern Sweden, is precise and poignant, ‘A red bike stood propped against the main stand, a baby buggy hugged the front of a blue coffee kiosk.’

Andrew Downie, reporting from São Paulo, Brazil in ‘Heavy Metal Futebol’, recalls a joyful afternoon at a Portuguesa game in which his only memory is the heap of peanuts he and an old friend shelled on the terraces: a stark contrast to his time at Corinthians’ Copa Libertadores fixture with River Plate which descended into furious, theatrical, maniacal violence. Not every match is as brutal and chaotic as that, but there is plenty of maniacal energy and behaviour to distract from the game in hand.

In ‘Soldiers Without Weapons’, James Corbett went to Ramallah to see Palestine’s first competitive home fixture, a moment of huge political and emotional significance. Caught in a crush as ticketless fans stormed the stadium, the mayhem that the game can generate is palpable. In ‘The Final Final’ Martino Simcik Arese recalls and relishes three mad weeks in Buenos Aires in which the mania envelops the whole city before, during and after games, cancelled matches and postponed dates in the ill-fated 2018 Copa Libertadores Final between River Plate and Boca Juniors.

Sometimes it is not the play, the feints and dribbles, but just the brutal energies and antagonisms of football players that stay with us. No one can remember a damn thing about the football in Chile v Italy at the 1962 World Cup, but we do recall the left hook thrown by Leonel Sánchez at Italian right-back Mario David. It may not have been quite the brawl that was the Battle of Santiago, but Molly Hudson’s account of ‘The Battle of Valenciennes’ takes us back to Cameroon v England at the Women’s World Cup 2019, and its explosive emotional atmosphere and sometimes crude rough-housery.

Sometimes we vicariously surf these extraordinary waves of collective energy; sometimes we taste their toxic qualities and it makes us stop and think: what the hell are we doing here? In ‘Saturday Night Lights’, Arik Rosenstein reports on a game between Beitar Jerusalem and Bnei Sakhnin, the Israeli footballing tribunes of right-wing Zionism and the country’s Arab minority. Born and raised in the United States, but long attached through family to Beitar, he finally makes it into Teddy Stadium in Jerusalem and finds himself appalled by the hatred expressed by Beitar’s fans.

What keeps us coming back? Just occasionally one is there to taste the ecstasy of winning, of achieving the unbelievable, of just being together when it happens; the celebrations that stay with you longer than the goal that brought them about. In ‘I’ve Come Home’, Nick Ames captures one of those moments, when Iceland beat Kosovo in Reykjavík in 2017, and for the first time, miraculously this island of just 330,000 people qualified for the World Cup. Most of them were there to celebrate.

Ecstasy is all very well, but there is a lot more defeat, ennui and even despair in football. In ‘The Georgian Crossroads’, Steve Menary travelled to the Caucasus to see Dinamo Tbilisi play Lokomotiv Tbilisi, and finds something closer to a wake than a celebration: a ritual suffused with the memory of the great days of Georgian football, when, as part of the Soviet Union, Dinamo Tbilisi could win a European title, but today are both impoverished and unloved.

Football matches as sites of remembrance, or as ludic markers of social change and political conflict, are the themes of our two other contributors. In ‘Statuesque’, Samindra Kunti sets Feyenoord’s victory in the 2002 UEFA Cup Final in the context of the assassination of Pim Fortuyn – Rotterdam’s flamboyant right-wing populist politician – and the club and the city’s post-industrial decline. In ‘Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain’, James Montague’s report on the Asian Cup qualifying matches between the DPRK, aka North Korea, and Lebanon has so much political context at both ends of the tie, it’s a wonder he could see any football let alone remember it.

Of course, all our correspondents saw and reported on great goals, ugly tackles, and sharp shifts of form and fortune. Yet they are all constantly drawn to the stories and memories of the people making it happen, to the game’s place in the wider world, the game’s place in their own world, and the strange connection it makes between them.

In the midst of Palestine v Thailand, James Corbett is suddenly connected to his late Everton-supporting grandfather who first took him to a match, and who, as a British soldier serving in the Mandate, was the last member of his family to go to Palestine. In the throwaway line of all time, Harry Pearson tells us that Iran’s coach at the World Cup had, prior to his appointment, been running a vegan restaurant in Silicon Valley.

The profound and the trivial, the sublime and ridiculous, the macrocosm and the micros, the personal and the political are all on show at the football, and much of the time that’s what we take away and put in our memory boxes; the authors of The Away Leg have been generous enough to open theirs and share them with us.

David Goldblatt, Bristol, December 2020

The Democratic People’s Republic of FIFAland

by Harry Pearson

USA v Iran

World Cup finals

Lyon, France

21 June 1998

Every so often, when searching for something in the attic, I come across a grey box file with a red-and-white sticker advertising the Argentinean newspaper El Grafico stuck on the lid. Occasionally I open it and glance inside. Last weekend for the first time in many years I brought it down the ladder. It’s sitting on my desk as I type this: dusty, giving off a musty smell of aged paper tinged – though perhaps I’m imagining this – with the scent of garlic and black tobacco.

Inside are the relics of my trip to the 1998 World Cup – my laminated press pass, a raft of team sheets and tickets, a typed itinerary with hotel phone numbers, the articles I wrote for The Guardian, which my mother proudly cut out and kept, and the little booklet I did for When Saturday Comes. There is my notebook too, a hardback Black n’ Red A5 with a sticker for Urawa Red Diamonds of the J League on the cover. Whenever I see it I smile at the memory of the people who gave it to me – three giggling Japanese women, dressed as Geishas, I’d helped get a taxi to the Stadium Municipal in Toulouse on the day their nation played their first-ever game in a World Cup finals (they were gubbed 6-0).

France 98 was the first time I went to football as a journalist rather than a fan. I spent most of the first week sitting in media centres and on the tribune de presse convinced that at some point police would arrest me as an imposter. Later, when I mentioned this to a football writer from the Daily Express, he said, ‘I feel exactly the same way and I’ve been doing this for ten years.’

I had a heavy schedule of matches – 17 in 19 days. I criss-crossed the country by train using my Eurorail pass so often I had to get a supplementary booklet to write the journeys in. I stayed in cheap hotels I’d found in the Le Routard guide. Some of them were charming, others were so like old people’s homes you half expected to find a mug with false teeth in it next to the bed. One night I was in Nantes, the next in Montpelier, the following one in Bordeaux. I travelled over 5,000 miles by rail in three weeks. Not that it was a chore. After all, I was in France, I was watching football and I was getting paid for it.

By the time I’d watched my tenth game, Spain v Paraguay in St Étienne, the matches had started to blur into one. Shaking my memory now I recall Roberto Baggio’s equalising penalty in the rain at Stade Lescure, Bordeaux; Cuauhtémoc Blanco’s bunny hop in Lyon; a mad refereeing display in Toulouse (South Africa v Denmark) by a Colombian named Rendon; Hristo Stoichkov stomping about like Alexei Sayle imitating Mussolini. The football was often dull, but meeting fans from all nations on trains and buses, hanging around in brasseries with journalists, queuing up at the press-centre cafe for croque monsieur between Bernd Schuster (who was dressed like he was auditioning for the Don Johnson role in Miami Vice) and Rinus Michels (who wasn’t), it was fabulous. In fact, it was one of the happiest times of my life.

Game number 11 was a Group F fixture at the elegant Stade de Gerland in Lyon. I’d put my name down for a press ticket with limited expectation of getting one. Press passes for matches were allocated by a complex system (nowadays it would be an algorithm, back then it was likely some FIFA official in a blazer with a flow chart, or maybe a blindfold, a list of names and a pin) and since this had been described by one of the competing nation’s officials as ‘the mother of all games’ it seemed likely to me it would be oversubscribed.

Group F was the draw FIFA didn’t want and the one most supporters had a feeling was inevitable. At the ceremony in Paris, Germany and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (as the agglomeration of Serbia and Montenegro was briefly called) had already been drawn, and they were then joined by the team from Pot C, Iran. Pot D was drawn next. An excited buzz went up when the name was read out: the USA.

Relations between the USA and Iran had been hostile since the revolution of 1979. There had been the hostage crisis of Jimmy Carter’s final year as president, and US support for Saddam Hussein when he invaded Iran in 1980. There had been the kidnapping of US citizens in Lebanon by Iranian-sponsored terrorists followed by a bomb attack on the American embassy in Beirut as well as a US barracks. Almost 400 people were killed. In 1988, the US had attacked Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf and shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 men, women and children. In 1993 Bill Clinton placed an embargo on all US trade with Iran.

Sport had inevitably become mixed up in the dispute. When Iranian wrestler Rasoul Khadem won an Olympic medal in Atlanta in 1996, Iran’s president Akbar Rafsanjani said the grappler had raised Iran’s flag ‘in the house of Satan’.

After the draw, US State Department spokesman James Foley took a different tack, suggesting the game might help thaw relations between the two countries: ‘If this soccer match is a sign of our ability to deal with each other at least in this one area in a civilised and positive way, that’s something we could applaud.’

Iranian officials seemed to be playing down the match as some kind of war minus the bullets, too. ‘Governments are one thing,’ one said. ‘We are friends of the American people.’

US Soccer Federation president Alan Rothenberg, meanwhile, tried to lighten things up with a wisecrack. ‘All we need now is an Iraqi referee,’ he said. As it was, when an official was allocated for the fixture in Lyon they got the Swiss Urs Meier, who six years later would have to go into hiding after being hounded by irate England fans.

On the face of it the Americans seemed to have the better side, or at least the better known. Their regular starting XI featured several players with experience in the Bundesliga, including captain Thomas Dooley (probably the only player to produce a joke about the 1950s US folk band The Kingston Trio on BBC TV commentary; their most famous single was called ‘Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley’ – Chris Waddle the culprit), as well as Premier League goalkeeper Kasey Keller and the ageing but skilful Roy Wegerle, the South African-born striker who had hit 29 goals in 65 starts for QPR a few years earlier. Wegerle was partnered up front by Brian McBride, a big, robust old-school centre-forward who looked like the ranch foreman in a Saturday night western. McBride was said to be on the radar of many English clubs (he would later play 140 games for Fulham and was so popular with the fans they named a bar at Craven Cottage after him) as was midfielder Joe-Max Moore who would end up at Goodison Park.

By comparison the Iran players were largely unknown. The exception was the powerful forward Ali Daei, who’d had such a successful season at Arminia Bielefeld that Bayern Munich had signed him. Those who’d followed the qualification tournament would likely also have recognised the name of his strike partner Khodadad Azizi. Iran had made it through to France via a play-off with Australia. The Aussies,