Away Leg

James Montague, Steve Menary

Description

Fed up with being stuck at home? Are you missing the excitement and fulfilment of an overseas jaunt for an away football match? The Away Leg: XI Football Stories on the Road takes your imagination on a trip around the world navigated by a skilled team of 11 football writers. From derbies in Brazil, Georgia and Israel to the momentous rise of the Iceland men's national team, from Palestine and North Korea to a UEFA Cup final overshadowed by murder, a controversial Women's World Cup meeting between England and Cameroon, the story of South America's most remarkable Copa Libertadores final and a historic triumph by Arsenal in the UEFA Women's Cup Final, The Away Leg's team takes you to the heart of the action with remarkable tales from across the globe. Until we can all hit the road again, The Away Leg fills the void with incredible football stories, with all author royalties going to the national social care charity Community Integrated Care.

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 17 mai 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785319396
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Steve Menary and James Montague, 2021
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785319877
eBook ISBN 9781785319396
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Contents
Foreword
1. About Community Integrated Care
2. Introduction by David Goldblatt
3. The Democratic People s Republic of FIFAland by Harry Pearson
4. Statuesque by Samindra Kunti
5. Heavy Metal Futebol by Andrew Downie
6. One Nil to the Arsenal by Catherine Etoe
7. Soldiers Without Weapons by James Corbett
8. Saturday Night Lights by Arik Rosenstein
9. The Georgian Crossroads by Steve Menary
10. Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Curtain by James Montague
11. I ve Come Home by Nick Ames
12. The Final Final by Martino Simcik Arese
13. The Battle of Valenciennes by Molly Hudson
Afterword
About the Contributors
Photos
Foreword
As coronavirus inveigled its corrosive way across the world in the spring of 2020, football - like so many other parts of everyday life - changed irrevocably. When lockdown eased and matches resumed, football became a vicarious activity watched on screens, and the idea of going to a match, home or away, had become a near but intangible memory. The walk to the stadium. The smell of food wafting across open grills. The controlled anarchy of people and police and anticipation were all experiences that were so familiar, yet suddenly so far away.
As the pandemic ate away at simple pleasures like going to a football match that we all once took for granted, a wider and greater sense of community began to emerge. The idea of making a contribution, of helping out for the greater good, seemed important. There isn t really much football writers could offer. But one thing we could try to do is take you back to a different time. To produce an account of the memorable games, of matches big or small. And to do so to help part of society that was creaking under the strain of lack of investment during the worst of the pandemic: social care.
A team of 11 writers - the number seemed appropriate given the subject - would produce accounts of matches from around the world that had stayed with them. In some, the matches and results would be important; others told a larger story. From World Cups and major club finals, from Brazil to Iceland to North Korea, from big crowds and crazy fans to obscure matches and isolated countries, each writer contributed a chapter about games and trips that resonated long after the final whistle.
From personal highlights to notable games and matches that tell a larger story about football in that country, these 11 tales take fans to new places - both fantastical and familiar - and help satisfy that longing for the most human of experiences: going away to the match.
Thanks goes to the writers that joined in helping create The Away Leg , to David Goldblatt for his introduction and to Pitch Publishing for taking on an idea that will help Community Integrated Care continue to provide vital social care services at a time that they are needed more than ever.
Steve Menary, New Forest, November 2020
About Community Integrated Care
Community Integrated Care has pioneered inclusive social care for more than three decades. Founded in 1988, it helped to lead the Care in the Community Agenda - supporting the first person with a complex learning disability to secure their own tenancy in Britain.
From these proud origins, the charity has grown to become one of the UK s largest social care providers. It supports around 4,000 people who have learning disabilities, autism, mental health concerns and dementia, working from the Highlands of Scotland to Hampshire in England.
Community Integrated Care is committed to not only providing high-quality care services but to also helping to create a more inclusive society. It has developed a range of award-winning partnerships with major sports and cultural organisations, led national campaigns to build and change attitudes and understanding, and is lobbying for better respect and support for the social care sector and its frontline heroes.
It has been recognised with a range of national honours for its impact and innovation, including being named as the 2019/20 Charity Times Charity of the Year.
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 Ume 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 S o 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 S nchez 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 Reykjav k in 2017, and for the first time, miraculously this isl