Tears at La Bombonera

Christopher Hylland

Description

Tears at La Bombonera is author Christopher Hylland's six-year journey living, working and travelling through South America - where football is a way of life. From Buenos Aires to Colombia's Caribbean coast, and back again, Hylland experiences the history and fanaticism at some of South America's football clubs along the way. Football is a global language, and he shares the stories and experiences from the terraces. It's a place where what happens on the pitch can rank low in terms of quality, but means so much off of it; where everything else, most notably the culture of the game, is unrivalled. Hundreds of thousands of football-mad visitors flock to South America every season. To the iconic stadia such as La Bombonera and Maracana; to lower division teams in the shadows of some of the world's poorest slums and favelas. Tears at La Bombonera is a book rich in human interest, including the author's own personal experience of adapting to a new continent and way of life.

Sujets

• América del Sur
• South America

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785319044
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Christopher Hylland, 2021
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Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785317590
eBook ISBN 9781785319044
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Contents
Foreword
An Introde to Eduardo Galeano
List of important phrases
1. Boring, boring Arsenal de Sarand
2. Racing Club s mufa
3. Martyred Markitos at Defe
4. The theft of the Argentinian Wembley
5. Tears at La Bombonera
6. Brazil s Hiroshima
7. Semi-finals and UFOs
8. The supercl sico of international football
9. Santiago de Chile: the atrocities at Gate 8
10. A short excursion to Excursionistas
11. La Paz: the gringo trail
12. Lima: Foals to the slaughter in deepest, darkest Per
13. Bogot : English referee scores winner against Millonarios
14. Medell n: Plata o plomo and el narco-f tbol
15. Cali: Garabato s curse
16. Lima calling
17. In Patagonia
18. Rosario: Lepers versus Scoundrels
19. Buenos Aires: Half plus one
Epilogue
Chronological list of games attended in South America (2009-2019)
Acknowledgements
Dedication
To Rafael, Siri, Nicolas and Fride
Foreword
Football is just there - at the bus stop, the water cooler, the internet chat room. We take it for granted. We take the size of football crowds for granted - numbers that equal the population of a reasonable-sized town crammed into a single building. We take the importance of the game for granted, the way that it is so central to the identity of millions and that its development serves as an alternative history of the last century and a half.
But let s go back, say, to 1880. No one could possibly have predicted that the game would take on such status - and even less that, in just 50 years, South America would have become its centre.
As late as 1922 one of Brazil s greatest writers couldn t see it. Graciliano Ramos wrote a piece arguing that this football lark would never catch on, that it would be nothing more than a short-lived craze and that his country had no need for such foreign cultural imports.
How could he have got it so extraordinarily wrong? Ramos was undoubtedly brilliant, and, with communist leanings was at least theoretically equipped with an internationalist perspective. But he was writing from a small town far from the big urban centres further south, where the dynamism of change was bewilderingly fast. Cities like Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo had gone through a remarkable expansion, swollen by waves of immigrants. A new urban population was ready for fresh traditions - and football was the new phenomenon they found.
The game was simple to learn and with few barriers to entry. It arrived full of First World prestige, introduced by the British. As it went down the social scale - with remarkable speed - it was re-interpreted by the locals, transformed into a graceful, balletic activity ideal for those with a low centre of gravity. And this re-interpretation led to international triumphs and recognition for a region that otherwise felt peripheral, far away from the rest of the world.
The First World War is clearly vital. It may well have spread the popularity of the game in Europe - playing football was a vital rest activity for troops behind the lines. But Europeans were primarily concerned with killing each other in a grotesque industrial slaughter. South America, meanwhile, forged ahead with a much healthier form of pseudo-conflict. The first Copa America was played in 1916, with Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Chile competing. In the early years it was held annually, and it brought about a rapid rise of standards, the consolidation of a distinctive South American style and the idea that national prestige was at stake.
For Uruguay and Argentina, and soon afterwards Brazil, football was a chance to shout to the rest of the world the powerful message that we are winners . Later, the game spread north, often carried by Argentines and Uruguayans. The diaries of the future Che Guevara, when he wanders on a motorbike up through South America in the early 50s, show that the mere fact of being from Argentina gave him and his friend credibility and status as football experts. The countries of the north of the continent have little pretension of shouting we are winners . For them, reaching the World Cup and hearing their national anthem played in front of the planet is a way of shouting out a message that we exist!
This is the broad sweep of the process, seen from on high. But football takes place close to the ground, on the bus to the stadium and in the bar after the game, among the dreams and frustrations of daily life.
Christopher Hylland has ridden the bus, has drunk at the bar, has got close enough to the coal face to see whether those tears in La Bombonera are shed in triumph or sadness, in joy or in despair. Welcome to a land of a thousand stories.
Tim Vickery
An Introde to Eduardo Galeano
EIGHT HOURS. The double-decker coach left the Retiro bus terminal and drove out of the sprawling city of fury, la ciudad de la furia , Buenos Aires. The tall buildings of the city centre were soon replaced by two- or three-storey apartments, before an open, vast nothingness dominated the scenery out of the window. The lights of the bus were switched off and it quickly became pitch-black outside. I fell asleep.
The journey took us up the River Paran to the carnival town of Gualeguaych . Across the river, Fray Bentos was peering over from Uruguay and it was here we had to alight at 2am to pass through the small immigration office. Back on the bus and back to sleep, the next stop was Montevideo. I was finally making a pilgrimage to Eduardo Galeano s home city. Apart from a handful of footballers, no Uruguayan is more famous than the writer and intellect Galeano. I had pored over his books The Open Veins of Latin America and Football In Sun and Shadow upon arriving on the South American continent in 2013. Galeano died aged 74 in 2015 and the whole continent mourned his death.
I had hoped to make the trip earlier. In 2014 a friend and I had bought tickets for the ferry crossing the River Plate in the hope of catching the supercl sico del f tbol uruguayo : Club Atl tico Pe arol versus Club Nacional de Football. However, due to Paul McCartney playing at Estadio Centenario the same weekend as the scheduled cl sico , something had to give and the match was postponed by a week. The ferry tickets were inflexible and nonrefundable - not that my Spanish was up to demanding my money back.
After the McCartney-postponement, it took me another four years to get over to Estadio Centenario. A friend from Buenos Aires had a Nacional-supporting cousin living in Montevideo who could sort out tickets. All I had to do was get on the right bus and find a hostel. The first part went smoothly enough. The second part, less so. At 7am I got off the bus at Terminal de Buses and walked towards the town centre. I had chosen a hostel across the road from Caf Brasilero, a place where almost every day Galeano sat down to write. And around the corner was a bookshop, Linardi y Risso, where a young Galeano attended deep, intellectual debates which formed his political ideations.
None of these places would be open. The hostel door was locked and nobody answered, despite furiously ringing the bell for 15 minutes. I was more disappointed that the caf and bookshop were closed. Montevideo was a sleepy town compared to Buenos Aires across the river, which was strange because Uruguayans drank more of the stimulating and insomnia-inducing yerba mate than even their Argentinian cousins. Every third person on the street was carrying a mate and a thermos. The bus drivers were the worst: they would drive with one hand on the wheel, the other holding a mate gourd with the thermos tucked under the same arm, every other minute leaning forward to pour a little bit more water into the green leaves.
I had set aside Sunday for the continuation of the Galeano tour but, at a loss with what to do with myself, I bought a different green-leafed product. Marijuana had been legalised by Pepe Mujica s government in 2012 and edibles were available in a handful of shops. I would have to keep the visits to the caf and the bookshop on the list for another visit. The first stop on the Galeano tour, however, would be a success.
Galeano was a big Club Nacional de Football fan. I woke up early on Saturday and walked back to the bus station to meet my friend from Argentina. Eli n had me worried: he was over an hour late. He had my ticket and I was forced to wait. He wasn t answering his phone and the majority of fans who had been gathering at the terminal had already left to walk the one mile through Parque Batlle to the ground. Getting to the stadium, there was a long queue to get in but we didn t miss any of the game. We made it into the historic Estadio Centenario and took our seats for the 1-1 draw between Nacional and Pe arol.
Galeano s men took the lead but a late equaliser from Pe arol would see the spoils shared. More importantly, the equaliser denied Nacional the chance to close the