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ISSUE THREE
Sample
Edition
Issue Three - Sample Edition
The following is a free sample of Issue
One of The Blizzard, including excerpts
from some of its articles, the notes from
the editor and a full list of its contents.
Our full issues run to 190+ pages, so
while this only offers you a snapshot, it’s
hopefully enough to pique your interest
for more.
What is The Blizzard?
As our editor, Jonathan Wilson, put it at
the launch of our pilot issue:
“I can’t have been the only one who
felt journalism as a whole was missing
something, that there should be more
space for more in-depth pieces, for
detailed reportage, history and analysis.
Was there a way to accommodate articles
of several thousand words? Could we do
something that was neither magazine nor
book, but somewhere in between?
“The Blizzard is not the organ of any one
individual. Rather it aims to provide a
platform for writers, British and foreign,
to write about football-related subjects
important to them, be that at the
highest level or the lowest, at home or
abroad. Eclecticism is the key. There is
no attempt to impose an editorial line;
all opinions expressed are those of the
individual author.
“The priority is the product rather than
profit; the aim is to remain true to our
ethos and to provide an alternative to
that which already exists.”
At The Blizzard, we like to be adaptable.
That’s why we offer up our football
quarterly not only as a digital download
for you to pore over on your phone,
tablet or e-reader, but also give you
the option to let our lovely, textual
creations adorn your coffee table,
bookshelf or bathroom in their
beautiful hard copy format.
Pay-what-you-like
And because we’re not only adaptable
but also friendly, we want you all (yes,
all of you) to read what we’ve got to
say. We’re so friendly, in fact, that we
operate on a pay-what-you-like basis,
and have done since day one. Our
digital download editions start from
as little as 1p each, which means you
could download the whole of our back
catalogue for less than the price of
the skinniest of skinny lattes, while our
hard copy editions can be yours from
£6 (+ P&P).
If you like what you see over the following
pages, visit www.theblizzard.co.uk to find
out more.
Contents
Contents
The Blizzard, Issue Three
Introduction
03.
67.
Editor’s Note
Gary Naylor, The Football of My
Youth
Falling out of love with the modern game
Spartak
09.
Theory
Igor Rabiner, Fallen Idol
The decline of Spartak Moscow is
inextricably bound up with the fortunes of
their former coach, Oleg Romantsev
71.
Egil Olsen talks about his conception of
the game, Wimbledon and geographical
trivia
Interview
26.
Zagallo & Tostão
81.
Mario Zagallo and Tostão talk to Tim
Vickery about 1970, Pelé and the
Brazilian style
New Beginnings
48.
53.
Shaul Adar, For Richer, for
Poorer
How nationalism has shaped the rise
and fall of Beitar Jerusalem
In Appreciation of...
63.
Michael Cox, Angelo Di Livio
How the midfielder’s loyalty inspired
Fiorentina’s return from bankruptcy
6
Philippe Auclair, The Harmony
of the Sphere
An exploration of the links between
football and music
87.
Brian Oliver, A Crisis of
Legitimacy
Kenyan clubs are leading the fight
against corruption in their football
association
Lars Sivertsen, The Mind has
Mountains
Alexander Jackson, Smash and
Thunder
How a change of approach helped
Newcastle cast off their chokers tag in
the 1910 FA Cup final
95.
John Sinnott, The Head
Case
Standard Liège’s Michel
Bruyninckx leads the way in
developing footballers’ mental capacity
Foreign Soil
102. Barney
Ronay, The Bomb
and the Bowler Hat
How modern football was shaped
in an internment camp in
Berlin
Contents
110. Davidde
Corran, Tour of Duty
149. Steve
Menary, What’s a vote
worth?
With the Vietnam War at its height,
Australia sent a team to play in a
tournament in Saigon
Doyle, The Kennedy
Conundrum
How Fifa’s attempts to devolve power
could be a bribers’ charter
116. Paul
Football Manager
154. Iain Macintosh, The
Ireland’s 1986 tour of Iceland brought
their first trophy, but ended an
international career
120. David
Ballad of Bobby Manager:
My Autobiography
When somebody takes their game
of Football Manager just a little too
seriously...
Ashton, The Midfield
A veteran remembers the no-man’s-land
football of the First World War
126. Jonathan
Wilson, The Youth of
Greatest Games
166. Janus Køster-Rasmussen,
Today
Denmark 4 USSR 2
Clouds, clubs and the collective:
reflections on the Under-20 World Cup
World Cup qualifier, Idrætsparken,
Copenhagen, 5 June 1985
Polemics
Eight Bells
138. Simon
Kuper & David Winner,
Comparing Apple with Oranje
181. Ben Mabley, Great finishes in
Japan
Were Johan Cruyff and Ajax the John
Lennon and Beatles of Amsterdam?
141. Gabriele Marcotti, The Race Card
Racist chanting is deplorable, but does the
rush to condemn it obscure deeper issues?
A selection of the most gripping
climaxes to the J.League and JSL season
Information
192. Contributors
Subcription
195. About The Blizzard
196. Clothing
194.
146. Musa
Okwonga, The Dawson’s
Creek Principle
Could it be that a US teen drama helps
explain anomalies of football history?
7
Editor’s Note
Jonathan Wilson, Editor
Last year, after my dad had died, I stayed
holding his hand for about a quarter of an
hour and then left the nurses to it. In the
hospital waiting room I made three calls.
The first was to Sunderland Civic Centre
to register the death. The second was to
the undertakers. And the third was to the
Independent to tell them that I was, after
all, free to cover Sunderland v Burnley the
next day.
I know a lot of people found that odd.
To be honest, looking back, it seems odd
to me. At the time, though, it seemed
perfectly natural. Part of it, of course, was
that I needed something else to do; that I
couldn’t bear just to sit at home with my
mam, wallowing in that blend of grief and
relief that comes after the death of a loved
one who has been tormented by illness. Part
of it was about honouring my dad’s militant
unemotionalism, his insistence on getting
on with things no matter what. And part of
it was because football and my dad were so
closely related.
That evening, discussing funeral
arrangements with the undertaker, I
mentioned that the first game Sunderland
had played after the death of the great
inside-forward Raich Carter had also been
against Burnley. I realised that my mam and
the undertaker were looking at me strangely,
at which it dawned on me what an absurd
thing it was to know. I have no idea how I
knew it — I certainly don’t have a checklist
of first games played after famous player’s
deaths — but I’ve looked it up and I was
right. It was the kind of detail in which my
dad would have delighted.
He was not, in any sense, a talkative man,
but on long drives he would regularly, after
minutes of silence, ask, “Do you know
what happened on this weekend 20 years
ago?” and, when my mam and I admitted
we didn’t, he’d reveal that it was the
anniversary of a Brian Clough goal against
Walsall, or of Kevin Arnott’s debut, or of Jim
Montgomery’s save at Huddersfield which,
he always maintained, was better than the
more famous one in the 1973 FA Cup final.
After Carter’s death, Sunderland and Burnley
had played out a scruffy 1-1 draw. They
had the decency, at least, to mark my dad’s
passing with a comfortable 2-1 win that
mathematically confirmed they would not
be relegated: nothing flash or extravagant,
but proficient and economical, just as my
dad would have liked it.
My dad grew up about 200 yards from
Roker Park, Sunderland’s old ground, and his
mother lived in the same house on Appley
Terrace until a few weeks before her death
in December 1995. When I was a kid, we
often used to go there for tea on a Saturday.
When I was six, my dad started to take me
to the ground for the last 15-20 minutes of
games, sneaking in when they opened the
gates to let people out. The first thing I saw
was Steve Williams sidefooting an equaliser
for Southampton. I’d been to about a dozen
games before, a year later, I saw Sunderland
score for the first time, Gary Rowell heading
in at the back post against Leicester.
Looking back, it occurs to me that we
talked about football remarkably little, but
then we didn’t really need to. We saw the
game the same way, knew what each other
was thinking. We both disdained the flashy,
both admired calmness and precision and
respected deep-lying central midfielders who
distributed the ball without fuss. It was only at
his funeral that I found out he’d played rightback at school: needless to say, that was the
position I played for my college side.
When we watched football on television
together, we communicated in a series of
tuts and grunts. After Sunderland had lost on
penalties to Charlton in the 1998 play-off final,
following a 4-4 draw, we looked at each other
and turned for the exit simultaneously, ignoring
Sunderland’s lap of honour. We collected the
father of a friend to whom we’d given a lift, and
drove back to Oxford. Only when we met my
mam did we realise neither of us had spoken
for over two hours. (If, by any chance, Mr
Wilkinson, you’re reading this, I apologise for
our grumpiness.)
My gran was cremated on January 6, the
day Sunderland played away at Manchester
United in the third round of the FA Cup. In
the afternoon following the funeral, my dad
drove me back to university. As we passed the
end of Appley Terrace, Nicky Butt gave United
the lead. There was, I think, almost a sense of
relief. Neither of us would have said it, but I
suspect we had both dreamed of some kind of
send-off; this at least punctured those hopes
early, and let them gently deflate. But then,
in quick succession, Steve Agnew and Craig
Russell scored. There may have been a snort
at the ridiculousness of it all, but otherwise
we were silent, recognising what this could
mean. But there are, of course, no fates; there
is no guiding force. Football does not hand out
sentimental favours. Eric Cantona equalised
with a late header and United won the replay.
A few weeks before my dad died, I signed
a deal to write a biography of Brian Clough
(it’s called Nobody Ever Says Thank You and
came out in November). His memory was
gone, ravaged by Alzheimer’s, but when I
told him, I saw a flicker in his eyes. “Do you
remember Clough?” I asked, talking, to be
honest, for the sake of talking; he couldn’t
have told me, by then, what day it was or
what he’d had for lunch. “Of course I do,”
he snapped, and went to describe a hattrick Clough had scored against Grimsby.
Although I continued to visit every day, that
was probably the last “proper” conversation
we had.
Why do I bring this up? Well, it comes from
trying to explain what being a fan means —
to me. I realise this is personal, and I don’t
want to suggest there’s a “right” way to be a
fan, but supporting Sunderland was never a
choice. It just was. I’ve spent a lot of time in
Argentina and people, naturally, have asked
if I have an Argentinian team. My thengirlfriend and her family are Boca Juniors
fans, and so I tried to support them, but the
truth was that I didn’t care. I didn’t feel sick
with nerves when they took the lead, and I
certainly didn’t feel tears pricking at my eyes
when I recalled their greatest triumphs.
I don’t really like being so emotional about
Sunderland, but I am. And of course it
has nothing to do with whichever bunch
of players happens to be wearing the
candystripes this season. Nothing to do
with the manager, the style of play or
success. It’s to do with home, and family,
and a sense of the club as representative
of a strand of belonging stretching back
generations. My dad’s last game was the
4-0 defeat to Manchester United on Boxing
Day 2007, but in a sense he has been with
me at every game I’ve been at since. What I
hadn’t realised till last year is that his father,
who died before I was born, had been
coming with us for years as well.
As those of you who follow us on
Twitter will know, The Blizzard is now
an award-winning magazine, having
lifted the Portfolio-Sunderland Echo
Creative Industries title in October. That,
of course, is tribute to everybody who’s
contributed to the magazine, but it was
particularly pleasing to win a business
award rather than an award specifically for
the writing. Those of us who write for the
magazine have our names in it and most
of us, I suspect, have had at least the odd
comment on our articles. This, though,
was tribute to the hard work and initiative
of those behind the scenes in the office —
Garreth, Nina, Michael and Dave — without
whom The Blizzard simply wouldn’t exist.
In the alcoholic fug of victory, somebody
asked, having won it, what we’d do next.
Flippantly, echoing Clough’s line, I said we’d
“come back next year and win it better.”
At once, the image came to me of Clough
sitting at home the night Nottingham Forest
won their second League Cup, watching
television with the trophy perched on top of
the set. In that, as in so much else, he was
a contradictory figure, eschewing the usual
celebrations while insisting it was important
to savour the moments of recognition or
success life affords. I made a point, then,
of standing a little apart for a few minutes,
looking across the dining room at the
Stadium of Light where the award was
presented, trying to soak in the detail.
What struck me then was how far from
inevitable the sequence of events that
had led The Blizzard to that point was:
how rooted it was in a series of footballrelated coincidences. If my dad hadn’t
taken me to Sunderland games as a kid,
I probably wouldn’t have become a fan.
If I hadn’t been a fan, I probably wouldn’t
have become mates with Peter, the co-
founder of the magazine. We lost touch to
an extent after university, and if we hadn’t
bumped into each other at an away defeat
at Brighton in 2005, I probably wouldn’t
have started going to games with him when
I was back in the North-East. And I wouldn’t
even have been in Fitzy’s for the prematch pints during which The Blizzard was
conceived if I hadn’t been at home because
my dad was seriously ill.
In Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film
Shadowlands, the academic CS Lewis
(Anthony Hopkins), the creator of the
Narnia books, is troubled by the question
of why literature matters. In the end, after
the death of his wife, the US academic Joy
Gresham (Debra Winger), he concludes
that “we read to know we are not alone”.
Literature is the currency by and in which
his relationships are conducted. All
culture, it seems to me, whether overtly or
obliquely, fulfils a similar role, and nothing
more than football (whose function as a
cultural mode The Blizzard was at least
partly established to celebrate). Fandom is
about belonging. The introduction to this
editor’s note was initially written for a Polish
website. It couldn’t be less mainstream and
yet I’ve had more feedback for that than for
any other single piece I’ve written, which
seemed to prove my point.
Football provides us with a sense of
belonging, whether that is related
specifically to one club or, as in the case
of The Blizzard, to a much more disparate
community. The real answer to the
question of what we do next is to try to
keep growing that community, to draw in
as many people with a shared interest in
football as possible. An award won’t make
us sustainable; people will.
December 2011
08
Spartak
“’And because of the absolute nature of his
power and the absence of control, both
the club and the man began to decay.”
Fallen Idol
Fallen Idol
The decline of Spartak Moscow is inextricably bound up
with the fortunes of their former coach, Oleg Romantsev
By Igor Rabiner
I pronounced the word “Spartak” for
the first time after I said “Mummy” and
“Daddy”, that’s for sure. But I can swear
it was not much later.
It couldn’t have been otherwise in my
family. Bright and naughty Odessa, where
my parents were born, had never really
followed the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. The
capital of humour in the Soviet Union, it
always called itself a “free city”. That most
people there supported Spartak Moscow
as opposed to their main rivals, Dynamo
Kyiv, was one of the indications of this
inner freedom.
Of course, odessits supported the local
team, Chernomorets, too. But they didn’t
have much success. So, in the Russian or
Ukrainian mentality, you have to choose
as your second team one of the big
guns. There was a reason that the best
Odessa footballers, if they had freedom
of choice, left mostly for Spartak and not
to Kyiv.
My family also left, before I was born. Not
to Spartak, of course, but to Moscow.
But, actually, it was more or less the
same thing.
More than 40 years earlier, my uncle,
a popular Soviet lyricist, left a Moscow
maternity home where his daughter just
had been born. Garik, as he was called
in the family, was, deep down, a little bit
sad. He had wanted a son who could
have prolonged the family tradition of
supporting Spartak. Because of some
important meeting my uncle couldn’t stay
too long, but his parents, my grandfather
and grandmother, saw through the
window how he stopped abruptly in
the garden outside the maternity home
and started to discuss something with a
stranger, gesticulating passionately.
Growing anxious, they decided to go
to check everything was all right. As
soon as they heard the first sounds of a
conversation, everything became clear.
A devoted spartakovets, Garik had met a
fan of Dinamo Moscow. Words followed
upon words — and in a few minutes
the debaters were surrounded by a
crowd. The birth of his daughter and an
important meeting were shifted to the
back burner...
Could you imagine, after this story, that I
had any chance to support another team?
In our family all the men were
spartakovtsy — two grandfathers, my dad
and my uncle. Even my grandmother
wasn’t indifferent. She said that when
all the family was watching a game on
TV, and the Krasno-Belye (Red-andWhites) scored, our simultaneous shout
could have cracked the walls of nearby
9
Fallen Idol
buildings. Finally, in 1981, they decided
to take me, then eight years old, to the
stadium for the first time. My family tried
to pick the right moment. I had been a
‘TV-supporter’ already for two years, but
they didn’t want a first live experience
to be a disappointment for the kid. They
didn’t want there to be any possibility
that I would lose interest in football
and Spartak. Or, even worse, to start
supporting another team.
But the game they chose looked safe:
Spartak against SKA Rostov in the final of
the Soviet Cup. Rostov were outsiders,
a team from the bottom of the league.
Spartak had once had the reputation of
being a ‘Cup team’, but before 1981 they
hadn’t won it in 11 years — and they were
awfully hungry for the Cup. The final
took place on Victory Day (9 May, the
anniversary of the Nazis signing the Act
of Capitulation in the Second World War).
So, two grandfathers, veterans of the
War with all their orders and medals, my
dad and me walked to Luzhniki — slowly,
prolonging the pleasure...
...Spartak lost. Their central defender
Alexander Mirzoyan failed from the
penalty spot for the first time in his life
and near the end the Rostov striker Sergey
Andreev converted the only chance his
side created. In the struggle between
father-in-law and son-in-law — the
manager of Spartak, Konstantin Beskov,
and his inexperienced opponent from
Rostov, Vladimir Fedotov — the younger
man was the winner. I howled. I couldn't
imagine that a couple of decades later
I would be able to discuss that game
with all its heroes, or that Fedotov, who
wounded me in the heart, would become
Spartak manager — the manager most
loved by Spartak fans in the last decade.
10
Contrary to the fears of the grown-ups, I
didn't stop supporting Spartak after that
black afternoon. The drama I suffered,
rather, drew me even closer to the
team. The same year my father found
somewhere a home-made Spartak logo
and sewed it onto an ordinary red T-shirt.
At that time we didn't even dream about
real merchandise, so I loved that T-shirt
more than anything in my life. I played
football and went to tennis classes in it. It
there hadn't been a standard uniform for
Soviet schoolchildren, I would also have
studied in it.
At 14 I started to attend Spartak home
games regularly. At 16, when Valery
Shmarov scored from a free kick in the
last minute of a decisive league game
against Dynamo Kyiv, I lost my voice
for a week. I also remember how, a
year later, in the autumn of 1990, the
legendary Soviet TV announcer Vladimir
Maslachenko took me, a 17-year-old
rookie reporter (I had just interviewed
him), to the commentators’ booth in the
Luzhniki for a game between Spartak and
CSKA Moscow. I felt in seventh heaven,
helping the famous man with some stats.
At times it felt like I’d be blown up from
the inside I was struggling so hard not to
shout but to whisper — and this was being
broadcast to the whole Soviet Union.
But I withstood the test. And in the
second half, as I became a bit calmer, I
started to understand what it means to
watch football with the objective view of
a journalist, not a fan. At that time, the
situation forced me to do that. It was
only much later that I'd start to enjoy it.
You can love Spartak in different ways.
You can do it somewhere deep inside,
not deafening your neighbour in the
stands with heartrending yell of “Go-
Igor Rabiner
o-o-al!”, not abusing a referee, not
screaming disgusting curses about an
opposition team. You can love Spartak
while rating highly those who play
against them. And you can calmly
acknowledge that an opponent was
stronger on the night.
had played in Simonyan's position in
every game except the last one, but
there were only 11 medals and they
were given only to those who had
played in the final. Streltsov refused to
take the medal, but Simonyan’s offer
sums up the Spartak spirit.
In the summer of 1990 I went on a trip
along the Volga River and met a lad
the same age as me from Kyiv. For two
weeks we argued all day long about
what's more important in football —
spectacular performance (the Spartak
way) or pure result (Dynamo), beautiful
combinations or powerful breaks on
the flank, a manager of football art like
Beskov or a strict mathematician like
Lobanovskyi. But during this argument,
putting forward our own views, we came
to feel respect not only for a counterpart
but also for his club, a club we had
previously seen as an enemy. Football for
both of us became much wider and, for
me, I think, it made the transition from
fan to journalist much faster. One of my
best friends, a successful scientist, has
lived for years in Germany. But wherever
we meet, we remember that trip on the
Volga, which made us a little bit wiser.
Because it was then that we learned to
respect other people’s beliefs, while not
giving up our own.
Spartak for me is the USSR captain Igor
Netto, who approached a referee during
the USSR v Chile game at the 1962 World
Cup to tell him that Igor Chislenko’s shot
had gone into the goal through a hole in
the side netting, and that he should give a
goal-kick, not a goal.
Spartak had never been for me just the
team I support. It was my life philosophy.
This is a Sample Edition - the full version
of this article appears in Issue Three of
The Blizzard.
Spartak for me is the USSR striker Nikita
Simonyan who, after winning the 1956
Olympic final, tried to give his medal to
the young Eduard Streltsov. Streltsov
Spartak for me are the Starostin
brothers, the founders of the club. One
of them, Andrei, once uttered a phrase
that became an idiom: “Everything is
lost except honour.” The fact that the
Starostins were sent to the gulag by the
head of the KGB and Dinamo Moscow,
Lavrentiy Beriya, also became an
important part of Spartak’s history.
Spartak for me is also a sad 1976,
when the club for the only time in its
history left the top division of the Soviet
championship. There were enough
important supporters of Spartak to lobby
for the top division to be expanded ‘as
an exception’.
The Blizzard is available on a pay-whatyou-like basis in both download and hard
copy formats from www.theblizzard.co.uk.
11
47
New Beginnings
“The national federation is arguably
the most corrupt, incompetent,
wasteful, self-serving sports body in
the world.”
For Richer, for Poorer
For Richer, for Poorer
How nationalism has shaped the rise and fall of Beitar
Jerusalem
By Shaul Adar
Witnesses are the stars in the sky
For racism that is like a dream.
The whole world will testify
There will be no Arabs in the team!
I don’t care how many and how they
are killed,
Eliminating Arabs makes me thrilled.
Boy, girl or old,
We’ll bury every Arab deep in the
ground.
Beitar Jerusalem fans’ song
The last days before a new season
should be the days of hope. For Beitar
Jerusalem fans, at least for the last 10
years, they have also been the days
of fear as they have hovered between
financial disaster and sugar-daddyinduced optimism. This summer was
no different, apart from the cartoonish
pace at which everything unfolded.
With resources limited, fans feared the
worst, but then the news broke: two
Jewish-American fans, Dan Adler and
Adam Levin, had agreed to buy the
team and provide much-needed funds
for redevelopment. But their joy soon
faded: the two turned out to be peaceloving lefties, a despicably cruel joke on
the part of fate.
The defining image of the 2009-10
season came in the final game as
Hapoel Tel Aviv beat Beitar Jerusalem
at the Teddy Stadium to win the
championship; Hapoel Tel Aviv, with
its “Give Jerusalem to Jordan, there’s
nothing good about it” song, lefty
image and Arab players. As Walid Badir,
the Arab-Israeli skipper of Hapoel, lifted
the championship trophy in front of the
jubilant Hapoel fans in Jerusalem, a city
in which symbolism is part of everyday
life, it was hard to miss the point.
By May the following year, as the rest
of the world spoke in awed tones of
Barcelona’s victory in the Champions
League final at Wembley, Beitar’s fans
and directors were hoping for a minor
miracle. After two troubled years the
team were looking for a new owner,
and the main candidate, the Brazilborn Jewish-American businessman
and current sponsor of the club, Guma
Aguiar, had just given a barnstorming
interview. “I will come to Israel in a
short time as the new owner of Beitar
Jerusalem…” he said. “Next season
I will put $20million into Beitar. I’m
not looking to win one championship
and then disappear. I saw Barcelona’s
match against [Manchester] United
and I want to be at this kind of stage
with Beitar. I want to bring Barcelona
to Jerusalem”.
53
For Richer, for Poorer
“What is your motivation?” asked the
interviewer.
“The love of the city of Jerusalem and
the will to bless its name all over the
world… I want to bring Avram Grant to
work with me in some capacity. We met
in the USA a month ago and we had a
great talk. I believe that he is free now.”
A day later Aguiar was committed to a
mental health institute in Florida by his
family.
There are obvious jokes to be made linking
that and his belief that Grant could found
a Barcelona in Jerusalem, but the mental
state of Aguiar, a young charismatic and
loveable person is no laughing matter. Nor
is the state of Beitar Jerusalem.
15 years ago it looked like Beitar was
becoming a club for all Israel. It had
cross-sector appeal and played attractive
football, and politicians queued up to be
seen at games. By summer 2011, they
were on the verge of catastrophe. The
team was in debt, the squad was down
to the bare bones and the owner, Arcady
Gaydamak, was disillusioned. The club
was desperate to find a new owner, but
with attendances falling and the club’s
image one of racism, there was no
rush of buyers. In a place prone to false
messiahs, Aguiar was just one in a long
line. They tend to flourish during crises.
This city has seen a lot of them. Over the
years pilgrims have been overwhelmed
by the thought that in ancient times,
upon these streets and these clouded
hills, walked Jesus Christ and King
David. Every year about 10 tourists
are referred to the local mental health
institute with religious-themed obsessive
54
ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like
experiences, a phenomenon known as
Jerusalem Syndrome.
“Over the years we believed that people
came to Jerusalem and got mad here,”
said the psychiatrist Dr Moshe Kalian in an
interview with the Israeli paper Haaretz.
“We believed that there was something
about the city that made them go
mad here, but our research shows that
they come here with history of mental
problems and Jerusalem is the stage on
which they perform their big play.”
It’s February 2011 and I’m back in
Jerusalem for the first time in years.
Two decades ago, I lived here. The
entrance to the city is now dominated
by the huge Chords Bridge, a beautiful
structure that looks out of place in the
cramped surroundings. Nearby, a Hasidic
Jew draped in a tallit rocks back and
forth while praying. It’s a city of great
aspiration but its present is troubled.
At Morduch, a Kurdish restaurant in the
souk, they’ve served the same marak
kube for 30 years. At a table nearby
a middle-aged man tells the young
waitress how his life went wrong after he
suffered shellshock during an operation
in Lebanon. He asks her if she knows a
good woman for him to meet.
At Bayit VaGan, Beitar’s mishmash
of portacabins and training pitches,
overlooked by a wooden stand, it’s eerily
quiet. Hooded crows circle above the
valley. In one of the offices I meet Itzik
Kornfein, a former goalkeeper and captain
of the team and now the general manager.
“The club is under a cloud,” he says. Beitar
Shaul Adar
is fighting for their survival and their identity
against debts, their own fans and time.
Founded in 1936 by members of the
Revisionist movement in Jerusalem,
Beitar had to fight for their niche in the
city against Hapoel and Maccabi, and
against the British Police team and later
the British mandate in Palestine itself.
The fan base and source of players
was the Irgun, a hard-line paramilitary
Zionist organisation. In the early forties,
the British cracked down on the Irgun
and many of the team’s players were
deported to east Africa, where they
formed Beitar Eritrea. In 1947 the British
governor of Palestine declared Beitar an
illegal organisation and the club had to
change its name to Nordia until the state
of Israel was formed in May 1948.
Beitar got its name back but for more
than 25 years it was an irrelevance in
Israeli football. Hapoel teams enjoyed the
support of the ruling Labour party and
the Histadruth, a trade union representing
most Jewish workers in the territory,
while Maccabi Tel Aviv had always been
a powerhouse of Israeli sport. Beitar was
backed by right-wing Herut party (later
the Likud) and directed endless bile and
rage against the ruling powers. On the
rare occasions when the team won the
Jersualem derby against Hapoel, the cry
around the city was “Evel BaHistadruth!”
(“The Histadruth is mourning!”).
Beitar were the underdogs. The team
played in the tiny YMCA ground, a stone’s
throw from the luxurious King David
Hotel. For years there was no proper
stadium in Jerusalem; until 1991, the
religious parties in the city refused to
permit the building of one for fear that
it would lead to the mass desecration of
the Sabbath. Huddled up on tiny stands,
Beitar fans, most of them — ironically,
given Hapoel’s origins — working-class,
built a strong emotional relationship with
the team. Many historians see Beitar’s
first major trophy, when they beat the
old power of Maccabi Tel Aviv 2-1 in the
1976 Cup final, as prefiguring the 1977
election in which the Likud took power
for the first time.
Beitar had the appeal and passion of
a rebel. Many fans talk about their first
Beitar game in terms of a conversion,
of an irresistible power sweeping them
off their feet. It was primal and often
dangerous, but it was authentic. They
won their first championship in 1987 in
emphatic fashion, playing home games
at the Bloomfield stadium in Tel Aviv, 40
miles from their Jerusalem home.
Although they were relegated in 1991,
the nineties were Beitar’s zenith. A
magnificent stadium was finally built and
the team spent just a season out of the
top flight. In 1993 the newly promoted
Beitar won the championship for the
second time, this time in the newly-built
Teddy Stadium.
It was the most frightening venue in
Israel, a true bastion of invincibility.
This is a Sample Edition - the full version
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The Blizzard.
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55
101
Foreign Soil
“Stan Cullis hinted darkly at ‘funny
ideas’ being punted about, at a time
when, frankly, any kind of idea was
a funny idea.”
The Bomb and the Bowler Hat
The Bomb and the Bowler Hat
How modern football was shaped in an internment
camp in Berlin
By Barney Ronay
English football has always been a
tightly-buttoned affair. Beneath its
hollered everyday excitements it is
essentially a Gary Cooperish entity:
taciturn, anti-bunkum, disinclined to
hold forth at length on its own inner
life. Quite frankly English football just
doesn’t want to talk about it. And so,
unusually for such a vivid, emotive
occupation, football in England lacks any
real intellectual back-story, a clear sense
of doctrinal debate or feuding principals.
For the vast majority of its professional
life this has been a game that has existed
only in its deeds, the broad silhouette of
its protagonists and the turf wars of its
own minute geography.
It is a peculiar state of affairs in a nation
that, in pretty much every other field,
can be relied upon to produce mobhanded academia. Witness the great
flopping, writhing intellectual life that
surrounds music, art, politics, television
and even other major sports. Attempts
have been made periodically to talk
about football in a manner that looks
beyond the merely physical. Walter
Winterbottom introduced the scholarly
tactics lecture to his England team
meetings. “Art is many things to many
men,” he wrote at the start of chapter
two of his book Soccer Partnership.
“Football is a wonderful game. A hundred
flowers grow in its garden,” he mused a
102
bit later. Unsurprisingly, Winterbottom
met with a degree of scoffing resistance.
Stan Cullis hinted darkly at “funny ideas”
being punted about, at a time when,
frankly, any kind of idea was a funny idea.
Tommy Lawton openly ridiculed the use
of a blackboard, shouting in one team
meeting “Look, Walter, let’s stop all this
guff!” before walking out.
This is not an isolated hostility. Looking
back over 120 years of professional football
it is a genuine struggle to stitch together a
written history of a discursive intellectual
life of English football, of a playing ideology
rather than simply playing systems. Charles
Hughes did at least attempt to graft an
interest in theory and ideas on to his long
ball prescriptions. Those opposed to him
often took an even more damaging path,
rejecting the idea of theory altogether. For
a while the stance of the carping antiintellectual gained a cultish ascendancy —
the yob-genius philosophy of Brian Clough
with his “there’s-a-ball-go-and-play-withit” minimalism.
Anti-intellectualism has also promoted
isolation. If a recently-enrolled football
GCSE student were asked to sketch
in the theoretical background to the
current ideologically-robust Barcelona
team you can imagine the kind of stock
answer that would emerge: mention
of Dutch football in the 1970s, of
Barney Ronay
the birth of the short-passing game
in Spain in the 1920s, of the central
European advances of the inter-war
years. Not much from England though:
no creed, no doctrine, no noticeable
style influences here. Other disciplines
may have had their salons and their
movements, their Bloomsbury Sets
and their cubist brotherhoods. But to
date English Football has never worn a
beret and paraded the left-bank of the
Seine arm in arm with a consumptive
philosopher or published its own ars
gratia ars manifesto on a hand-cranked
bedroom press.
Except maybe once or twice — and
then only quietly. History is made up
of stories, some of which still require a
little a little colouring at the edges. The
story of the Ruhleben prison camp is
explicitly documented elsewhere as part
of the wider history of the First World
War. But it is also a story that belongs
to football, where it has remained on
the fringes as a fascinating oddity. It is
even possible that something brilliantly
illuminating happened there, part
Escape To Victory, part footballing salon,
part late-colonial Woodstock distilled
through sternly moustachioed men
of empire. And even if it is impossible
to know for sure, the facts are still
deliciously persuasive.
At which point the wind chimes start to
tinkle, your screen starts to blur and the
zebra-striped time tunnel starts to echo
with premonitory rumbles. It seems odd
now to think that even after the start
of the First World War British nationals
were quite happily wandering around
Germany’s major cities unmolested.
Even after Britain entered the fray it was
necessary at first simply to register with
a police station and regularly present
documents. Before long however
it became clear to that large-scale
detention would be necessary. For the
first time in modern mainland Europe a
form of concentration camp would be
called into being, clumsily and with no
pre-planning.
Among the first to open its gates was
Ruhleben Prisoner of War Camp, a
civilian detention camp set up six miles
to the west of Berlin on a site that
was originally a race course. The first
shipments of camp detainees were male
citizens of the Allied Powers who just
happened to be in Germany at the time:
teachers, students, mariners, holidaymakers, overseas workers and the odd
unwitting British husband.
In time this collection of disparate
individuals related only by nationality
would evolve into something truly
remarkable, a phenomenon described
by John Davidson Ketchum, an
academic imprisoned there for the
entire war, as “the fullest picture known
to me of the actual growth of a human
society... a world so complete and
many-sided that its existence in a prison
camp is almost unbelievable”.
Not so initially. Ruhleben had very
few facilities at its inception. The men
brought there were effectively dumped,
imprisoned without structure or routine.
The early days were terribly harsh. The
men wore wooden clogs and donated
winter coats. They slept in straw-filled
horse boxes crawling with lice and
washed at a single stand-pipe.
Eventually the German authorities
bowed to the Geneva Convention
103
The Bomb and the Bowler Hat
and allowed the camp detainees to
begin administering their own internal
affairs. And so gradually a mini-society
began to evolve. A postal service,
the Ruhleben Express, was set up.
Books and sports equipment were
finagled and a printing press devised.
The prisoners conjured up their own
police force, plus a camp magazine
and library. Displaced high-flyers,
exiled experts, travelling scholars, these
captured citizens began to reveal the
depths of their communal ingenuity
— and so Ruhleben bloomed, a love
letter to the resourcefulness of a
certain strain of British organisational
pluck, and an expression of the creative
cultural eclecticism often overlooked in
the dubious legacy of empire.
Overseen by a permissive and admiring
camp commandant (who would
later be disciplined by his less lenient
superiors) the site was transformed
under the eyes of its sentries. A
surviving map shows tennis courts, a
YMCA, a casino, a post office, a tea
house, office buildings, wash houses
and two full-sized football pitches.
And so as the war continued in France
a Spandau ballet unfurled at Ruhleben,
a wartime melting pot of ideas and
education enjoyed by a complete crosssection of British society. One prisoner
wrote in a pamphlet published after
the war “from the manor house to the
slum, scarcely a breed or profession
was unrepresented. All were jammed
together in a small stableyard —
company directors and seamen, concert
musicians and factory workers, science
professors and jockeys... We were
indeed a mixed crowd. I have walked
along to the kitchen with the Earl of
104
Perth (nicknamed Pearl of the earth) a
coloured and a fireman.”
The cast of Ruhleben in this period was
almost comically diverse. Among those
pulled together were
F Charles Adler, a student of Gustav
Mahler and world famous conductor
Sir James Chadwick, Nobel laureate
physicist who first conceived of the
nuclear bomb
Prince Honolulu, legendary horse
racing tipster of the 1920s whose
catchphrase was “I gotta horse!”,and
who via Pathé news films became the
most well-known black person of the
time in Britain
“Bertie” Smylie , legendary
sombrero-wearing alcoholic editor of
the Irish Times
Geoffrey Pyke, writer, inventor,
garden-shed genius and a man who
once demonstrated his invention of
aircraft carriers made out of ice to
Winston Churchill in his bath
A campus spirit evolved out of these
men of many disciplines. Lecture courses
were delivered and fevered full-time
educations embarked upon.
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