“Is there anything, I wondered,” Tim Parks writes in A Season With Verona, “is there really anything more important than football?” As a million vuvuzelas across the world agree with him, Nilanjana S Roy picks four unusual books about the beautiful game, the fans, the players, the thugs and the pure lunatic addictiveness of it all.
STRIKER, STOPPER
By Moti Nandy (Trans: Arunava Sinha, 2010)
No fan of the football matches on the Maidan in Calcutta — indeed, no self-respecting fan of any club matches played anywhere there’s a green field and a black-and-white ball — could resist the pulp fiction pull of Moti Nandy’s two novellas. This is the Calcutta of the 1970s, and Nandy’s protagonists are cast in a romantic glow, even while they struggle with the skulduggery of the clubs and the bitterness of poverty. (Nandy’s writing style is contagious.)
Young Prasoon Bhattacharya must rise from the smalltime club Shobabajar to the ranks of the powerful Juger Jatri — and erase the tragic legacy of his father, once a formidable footballer himself, now a broken wreck of a man. In the second novella, Kamal Guha lives with the memories of a once-brilliant career as he battles age and his own personal tragedies to try and bring back at least a flash of the glories of the past. It’s a hardscrabble, corrupt world, but Nandy brings it to life — and manages to get you to suspend disbelief long enough to cheer for his two unlikely heroes.
THE SOCCER WAR (1992)
By Ryszard Kapuscinski
The two countries [Honduras and El Salvador] were playing for the right to take part in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. The first match was held on Sunday 8 June 1969, in the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa.
Nobody in the world paid any attention.”
In 1969, Kapuscinski was the foreign correspondent for a Polish news agency. El Salvador won the match, three-nil, to the accompaniment of violence before and after. Kapuscinski flew in as the “Soccer War” began. It would last for a hundred hours and leave 6,000 dead, 12,000 wounded. But The Soccer War would serve notice that one of the greatest, most acutely observant and most controversial journalists of his time had found his voice.
He goes into the history of the conflict between Honduras and El Salvador, so much more complex than the surface story of inflamed passions at a football match would suggest. With a reporter’s accuracy and a historian’s cynicism, Kapuscinski captured not just La Guerra del futbol, but the histories of other Third World revolts. “The only chance small countries from the Third World have of evoking a lively international interest is when they decide to shed blood,” he comments.
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And he doesn’t forget the football. After the war, Honduras and El Salvador played a best-of-three series in neutral Mexico. (El Salvador won, 3-2.) This is how Kapuscinski describes the match: “The Honduran fans were placed on one side of the stadium, the Salvadoran fans on the other side, and down the middle sat 5,000 Mexican police armed with thick clubs.”
FEVER PITCH (1998)
By Nick Hornby
It may not be as famous as “Call me Ishmael”, but “I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it”, is perhaps the better loved first line.
Hornby became famous for About a Boy and High Fidelity, but Fever Pitch remains his truest book, an unexpected bestseller at a time when publishers declared that a book about football would never sell. His discovery of his lifelong loyalty to Arsenal, and his explanation of the tangled, passionate rivalries between the UK’s football clubs is now classic. But along with the matches, the fans and the thrumming roar of the crowds, Hornby also understood how deeply the game shaped his life. His years as a fan are divided into three sections: childhood, adolescence, manhood, each section shaped by Arsenal’s games. Few football books get to the heart of what it means to love a game the way this one does — read it alongside Parks’ A Season With Verona, another classic account of obsession, love and the inside take on a football team.
AMONG THE THUGS (1990)
By Bill Buford;
Buford is best-known as one of Granta’s legendary editors, the author of the truly classic food memoir Heat. Among The Thugs was both rougher and more direct, as Buford stumbled via football hooliganism into an exploration of his own fascination with violence. His testing ground for his theories about the madness of crowds and the behaviour of the mob thinly veils his ability to sense, like an addicted-to-war veteran hack, where the next riot will be — and to find himself in the thick of it. “I had not expected the violence to be so pleasurable,” he confesses, as he crosses the line from objective reporter to something, and someone, more primal. He meets the soccer “firms” of the UK, witnesses beatings so savage that they mimic the aggressions of war, attempts to understand the tribal loyalties that underlie the game; and like a junkie, goes from one soccer riot to another, looking for his next fix of something far darker than adrenaline.
| STRIKER, STOPPER Author: Moti Nandy Publisher: Hachette India Pages: 208 Price: 250 | THE SOCCER WAR Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski Publisher: Vintage Pages: 240 Price: $7.95 | FEVER PITCH Author: Nick Hornby Publisher: Riverhead Pages: 256 Price: $6.65 | AMONG THE THUGS Author: Bill Buford Publisher: Vintage Pages: 320 Price: $9.38 |