Heading to Brazil for the 2014 World Cup? Apprehensive about the demonstrations and logistical nighmares that might lie in wait for you? May I make a suggestion: pack a copy of James Montague’s kaleidoscopic new book Thirty-One Nil.
It will remind you that, however trying your current circumstances, things could be worse, while articulating, in a succession of scrupulously observed national tableaux, why you made the effort in the first place.
Not that the author makes a meal of his discomfort, as travel-writers sometimes will. Au contraire. At moments such as when he starts to photograph the “smoke spinning crazily out” of a tear-gas canister that has landed at his feet in Cairo, he seems almost comically unflappable.
But, from a dying aluminium-smelting city in western Tajikistan to Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, the roll-call of Montague’s destinations as he follows the qualification competition for football’s greatest prize is so unremittingly bleak/harrowing that you will be thankful to be with your team in Brazil at World Cup time, even if cooped up temporarily in some unmoving queue or aircraft.
Thirty-One Nil – the reference is to American Samoa’s catastrophic 2001 shellacking by Australia – joins a growing inventory of football travel books originating with Simon Kuper’s 1994 classic Football Against the Enemy.
As the cover blurb says, Kuper hit the road to “discover the sometimes bizarre effects football can have on politics and culture”. But this most genuinely global of games has come a long way in the past two decades. Most particularly, it has got a whole lot richer. And therefore more powerful. Most of the time, in the majority of countries, football matters a great deal more than politics to million upon million of ordinary people. In a world hedged around with shades of grey that shift disconcertingly, football offers a sense of belonging and differentiation and of certainty (however illusory).
There are always exceptions, especially if you set your compass as consistently to the flashpoints of the world as Montague. Indeed, there are days in nearly every country when politics temporarily reasserts its primacy. Nonetheless, it is a sign of football’s extraordinary global reach and stature that Thirty-One Nil seems at least as much about the sometimes bizarre effects politics can have on football as vice versa. Take the occasion when Montague attends a World Cup qualifier between Switzerland and Albania in which nine of the 22 players on the pitch were either born in Kosovo or raised by Kosovars.
His account of his visit to Port au Prince sets out what a game as obscure as Haiti against US Virgin Islands signifies for the home nation’s new President, Michel Martelly.
Martelly, he writes, is “aggressively promoting the match. He loves football, of course; all Haitians do. But a match against the US Virgin Islands, a team of amateurs who have won only three games in their history, all of them against the British Virgin Islands, is a sure thing. Martelly wants to make good on his campaign slogan: ‘Viktwa pou pep la’. In Haitian Creole this means ‘Victory for the People’. In the absence of any other kind of victory for the people, victory against the US Virgin Islands will have to do.”
The relationship between football and politics sketched out in this passage struck me as the mirror image of that implied in an interview with the Cameroon World Cup star Roger Milla in Kuper’s book. When Kuper pointed at a photograph and commented that Milla was an admirer of Cameroonian President Paul Biya, the footballer responded, “Yes: he’s our President. When he goes there will be another President whom I will admire.” Milla’s pledge has yet to be put to the test; the 81-year-old Biya has not gone yet.
Montague covers an enormous amount of ground, literally and metaphorically. Sometimes his potted politico-historical summaries are a little, well, potted. There is a very occasional typo (‘CONMEBAL’). But it is his reportage that makes this book sing. The text is studded with sympathetically-drawn characters and telling details that you just don’t pick up if you haven’t been there and done that. Who else would tell you that the main shopping street in the Zaatari camp has been named the Champs-Elysées?
Another plus is his understated dry wit: Tajikistan “is a country whose sole natural resource appears to be water”; “stickers on the glass of the automatic sliding doors at the [Serbian FA’s training] complex entrance warn visitors of articles that may not be brought in: cigarettes, guns and, most importantly, ice-cream”.
He has an ear for lists too: the lobby of the Albanian team hotel is “a chaotic mix of film crews, fans, players, models, ex-models, families, lovers, bemused Taiwanese tourists and Swiss businessmen”.
I find it highly improbable that any prior World Cup qualifying competition has been recorded and contextualised with anything resembling Montague’s tenacious verve. A rare treat.
Thirty-one Nil by James Montague is published by Bloomsbury, price £12.99.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.