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THE FOO

Sample
Edition

Issue Five - 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
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for more.

What is The Blizzard?

As our editor, Jonathan Wilson, put it at
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I cant have been the only one who
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Was there a way to accommodate articles
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important to them, be that at the
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The priority is the product rather than

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At The Blizzard, we like to be adaptable.
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Contents

Contents
The Blizzard, Issue Five

Introduction
03.

65.

Editors Note

How Ternana soared and then crashed

with Corrado Vicianis high-tempo style

World Cup Bidding

07.

James Corbett, The Fall-Out

68.

Signicant questions remain unanswered

about the World Cup bid process
32.

41.

The Asian Market

77.

Philippe Auclair, Qatar Hero

Michel Platini is often seen as the ex-pro
coming to save Fifa. But why did he vote
for Qatar?

93.

The former Brazil captain talks about

why footballers have a political
responsibility

59.

Philippe Auclair, Roy the Rover

Roy Hodgson explains how his travels
have shaped his coaching philosophy

Ian Griffiths, Sing when youre

Winning
How the need to appear successful turns
fans in Singapore from the S.League to
the Premier League

David Tryhorn, Socrates

Theory

Ben Mabley, The Gaijin of Gamba

Fan culture has begun to challenge
Japanese hierarchies. The only
European Gamba ultra explains how

Interview
48.

Steve Bartram, The Skilling

Fields
Manchester United are just one of the
clubs inuenced by the coaching model
of Wiel Coerver

Igor Rabiner, Russias Victory

Russias success in the 2018 bid was a
triumph over internal as well as external
opponents

Luca Ferrato, Like a Shooting

Star

Photo Essay
98.

Misha Domozhilov, The Hard

Core
Images of the fans who followed Zenit
St Petersburg as they won the Russian
championship in 2010

Contents

Fall

144. Sergio

Levinsky, The Culture of

Violence

110. Lars

Sivertsen, The Centre-back

and the Kitchen Knife

The absence of leadership means there

is little hope of Argentinas hooligan
problem being solved

Claus Lundekvam opens up on his battle

against the addiction that overwhelmed
him after retirement
116. Dominic

Sandbrook, My Name
is Ally MacLeod and I am a
Winner
How Scotlands humiliation at the 1978
World Cup knocked nationalism off
course

Fiction
148. David Ashton, The Glasses
A gift from a mysterious visitor changes
life for a man on a Scottish estate...

Greatest Games
155. Vladimir

Novak, Romania 4
Yugoslavia 6

121. Jonathan

Wilson, The Lions

Sleep Tonight

World Cup qualier, Ghencea Stadium,

Bucharest, 13 November 1977

Ten years after retaining the Cup of

Nations, Cameroon failed to qualify. What
went wrong?

Polemics

Five Rings
165. Olympic Stories
Five tales from the rich history of
Olympic football

133. Brian

Phillips, The Real

Problem
Is the real fan being marginalised or is he
just a rhetorical tool?

Information
New T-Shirts
186. Contributors
188. Subcriptions
189. About The Blizzard
190.T-Shirts
30.

136. Simon Kuper, Wheres Darth Vader

Gone?
Is the age of football as a substitute for war
coming to an end?

Editors Note
Jonathan Wilson, Editor
Even before the astonishing nale,
2011-12 had been voted the best
ever Premier League season. After
Manchester City had scored two goals
in injury-time to win it, there was every
reason to support that conclusion. This
was a season of superb and unlikely
games, of collapses and recoveries, of
brilliance and stupidity, of a title race
that went to the very last second. This
was drama of the very highest order, of
the sort that only sport can provide.
It feels churlish to say it, but behind the
excitement there must be a doubt and
it is this: United collected 89 points
and still didnt win the title. Only twice
before in a 38-game season have they,
by far the most successful side of the
Premier League era, surpassed that tally.
In the only season that has come close
to 2011-12 for drama, 1998-99, they
took only 79 points and won the league.
This year, United won 28 of 38 games
and still didnt win the title. Really, how
unpredictable was this season?
True, the champions arent as far ahead
of the rest as in 2005, when Chelsea
racked up 95 points, but the trend is
obvious. Where 80 points tended to be
enough to win the league in the late
nineties, now its 90. City and United
nished 19 points ahead of the rest.
Admittedly, its fair to assume Chelsea
and Arsenal will improve next season,
and Tottenham, Newcastle and Liverpool
may do so as well, but still, 19 points is a
huge margin and without signicant
investment youd be surprised if Sir Alex

Ferguson can coax similar performances

from that squad again. The competitive
imbalance between top and bottom is
vast: the blurb may say that on any given
day the bottom can beat the top, but the
fact is it happens far less often than 1015 years ago.
The reason, of course, is money. Thats
not to denigrate City plenty of clubs
have had vast resources for a variety
of reasons but there is something
worrying when even a pundit as cogent
as Graeme Souness responds to the
nal-day drama by saying, What an
advert everyone concerned with the
Premier League this year has put out.
To have a day like this on the very nal
day when its gone right to the wire and
taken extra-time for Man City to win it...
what an advert for the Premier League.
Maybe a nish like that will drive up TV
rights even further, but surely thats a
minor footnote. This wasnt an advert:
this was the thing itself, indelible sporting
drama. Maybe its unfair to criticise
Souness for his rst comment after a
breathless few minutes, but as Jamie
Redknapp went on to speak of the
product, you did wonder whether, as
Sid Lowe said, we were witnessing a
sporting culture that knows the price of
everything and the value of nothing.

June 2012

47
Interview

No boss likes to have anyone

intelligent underneath them.

Socrates

Socrates
The former Brazil captain talks about why footballers
have a political responsibility
By David Tryhorn

Do you want a beer? They have the

coldest draught beer in Brazil here.
Those were the rst words the Brazil
legend Scrates said as I met him in his
favourite bar, Pingum, in his hometown
of Ribeiro Preto in So Paulo state. He
had greeted me with a bear hug and
spoke openly about his career and his
political and footballing beliefs and
convictions. He must have talked for
over four hours.
Scrates passed away in December 2011
and it was the drink that caught up with
him in the end. By his own admission
he drank heavily. I had interviewed him
twice previously for two documentaries
I had made the rst time, he was two
hours late (sleeping off a hangover) and
the second time, he was already under
the inuence. But he never became a
George Best-like gure. He was not a
shambolic drunk. He was a bon vivant,
a larger than life gure with a lifetime
of tales to tell. Forthright in his views,
passionate, opinionated and humorous.
Always humorous.
Scrates will of course be best
remembered as the captain and
gurehead of Brazils 1982 World Cup
team. With his beard, mop of curly hair,
smoking habit and languidly graceful
presence on the ball, he became an

48

instant cult hero. A doctor who played

better backwards than most players did
going forwards according to Pel, there
was no better embodiment of Brazils
beautiful game.
But it was at his So Paulo based club,
Corinthians, where he made his biggest
impact. In 1981 and at a time of military
dictatorship within Brazil he led a
movement called Democracia Corintiana
(Corinthian Democracy), a radical plan
to democratise an entire football club
and transform Brazilian society through
football. In his beloved Brazil, Scrates
became a symbol of democracy when
there was none. In short, he was a
revolutionary. This was my nal interview
with him we were back in the bar and
he was back to talking about what he
loved most: a combination of football,
philosophy and politics.

Have you always been such a free

thinker?
Ill tell you a bit about my old man.
My father. My father didnt study he
couldnt, up there in the north-east of
Brazil but he learnt everything he
knew there. His study was free. He ate
books up. So when I was born it was
as if I was born into a library, among

David Tryhorn

so many complex social theories that

exist in this country. Its a country
with huge potential in every way but a
country that doesnt properly educate
its people. I think I was born with this
spirit the spirit of reection and of
questioning things, especially in regard
to social issues.

to believe them! I preferred not to know!

[laughs]

When you were a player you used to

remove the sports supplement in the
newspaper when you offered it to a
teammate to read. Did you not believe in
your profession?

A footballer has a lot of power. Its the

only job in which the employee has more
power than the boss. He has the masses
in his hand and the capability to mobilise
them. But he has to realise that he has
this power and use it wisely when there is
a social cause to ght for.

No, that wasnt the case at all. I did that

to encourage those around me to read.
Brazilian footballers tend just to read
the sports section. Id buy the paper,
take out the sports pages and leave the
rest for one of my colleagues to read.
I was trying to highlight the fact that
the most important news wasnt to be
found in the sports supplement it was
important to read about politics, the
economy and other related affairs. So I
did it to try and get people to read about
other things.
So you had nothing against sports
news?
No, although I would never read it
anyway. When I played I never once read
the sports news.
And now?
Now I read it. When I played I would
never read it because I think it can only
interfere with the job youre paid to do.
Positive or negative criticism will affect
you one way or another so I preferred
not to pay any attention to it. If someone
speaks highly of you then you might start

You have often said a footballer has

great power but lacks the education to
use it properly. Could you expand on
this? What power do you actually think a
player has?

One of mans main objectives since the

dawn of time has been to acquire political
power so that he can have an effect upon
the community in which he lives. There
are various ways of gaining political power
but all of them lead to the same result
political power generates popularity
and popularity generates political power.
Footballers have this popularity and so they
have incredible political power because
the media hangs on their every word. How
far-reaching their message is then depends
on their status as a player and how popular
their team is. But its an incredible thing to
possess, not to mention the fact that they
have great economic power at least the
better players do.
Do you think Brazilian footballers
have much economic power?
Certainly in relation to my era. The riches
on offer here are far greater than they
were 20 or 30 years ago. The change
might not have been so dramatic in
Europe as it has been in Brazil and
players still dont earn as much as they
should due to a lack of organisation

49

Socrates

and administration, but at least it is

better than it was. The chances of
becoming rich by playing football are
far greater these days. And wealth gives
you independence, political power and
the freedom to manage your own life.
The only thing they lack is education.
Education, knowledge and information.
What can a player do with all that
power?
Transform society. During my time as a
player I was able to transform society. I was
an active participant in the democratisation
process of my country because I was
famous and popular. And so I used my
political power to change society. All you
need is a social conscience, a political
understanding and a desire to ght. The
only problem is that most players dont
have that level of education and so they
dont live their lives in that way despite all
the power that they have.
But surely most players prefer to look
out for themselves?
It depends on how actively they want to
get involved. People can be apathetic.
Do you think players have a
responsibility to look beyond themselves?
I think they have a social responsibility,
especially in a country like ours that is
lacking in so much. Footballers can be
the spokespeople of their communities
you can be like an MP without a seat.
They just have to realise that they can
change the society in which they live.
Thats my vision.
But there is often a code of silence
among Brazilian players. They rarely

50

speak out for fear of punishment...

We have a society that is politically
unaware. Thats one of our biggest
problems alongside this lack of education.
And thats due to a couple of the regimes
we have had over the past century. We
have had two dictatorships that have
taken up nearly 50 years of that time and
so youre eventually left with a generation
who lack the same sense of political
awareness. In truth, that relates to all
of society and sport is a part of that
possibly the most visible part of society.
Can you tell me a little about your
plans to ensure players can only turn
professional on nishing their secondary
education?
Thats one of my hopes and Im ghting
for it in Congress. The way I see it, a
footballer is a national gure hes
someone who is incredibly well known
and listened to even more than the
president of Brazil. Hes the ultimate
symbol of status and success. And
especially for those less well off, hes a
life objective he is where thousands
want to be. So if this guy has got to
where he is with the bare minimum in
terms of education and knowledge then
hes encouraging future generations to
aspire to the very same thing. And then
what happens?

This is a Sample Edition - the full version

of this article appears in Issue Five of
The Blizzard.
The Blizzard is available on a pay-whatyou-like basis in both download and hard
copy formats from www.theblizzard.co.uk.

109
Fall
...the police, the ambulance people,
I threatened them with a huge
kitchen knife.

The Centre-back and the Kitchen Knife

The Centre-back and the

Kitchen Knife
Claus Lundekvam opens up on his battle against the
addiction that overwhelmed him after retirement
By Lars Sivertsen

On the face of it, the former

Southampton captain Claus Lundekvam
is a typical ex-footballer. Having been
forced to retire because of injury in
2008, he lives in a house near the sea
in his native Norway with his wife Nina,
their two children and a dog named
Lucky. He works as a regular pundit for
TV2, the largest commercial broadcaster
in Norway. All is well with Lundekvam.
Except the story is slightly more
complicated than that. A few years ago,
shortly after his retirement, things went
very badly wrong. I would drink two
litres of hard liquor and do between ve
and ten grams of cocaine every day,
he recalls. At that point Id given up. I
accepted that as a human being I was
nished. Lundekvam, known to English
football fans as a solid if unspectacular
defender, became an alcoholic and a
drug addict. And now he hopes to serve
as a cautionary tale to others.
During the 1990s, Scandinavian players
became increasingly popular with English
clubs. They had a reputation for being
dependable on the pitch and unfussy
off it. They adapted well, both to English
football and to English culture. Few
players personify this stereotype more
thoroughly than Lundekvam. Having

110

moved to England in the autumn of

1996 as an unknown, slightly gangly
23-year-old centre-back, he quickly
established himself as a regular in
Southamptons defence. Matt Le Tissier
described him as being like Alan Hansen:
very comfortable in front of his own
goal, less comfortable in front of the
oppositions. Gordon Strachan, who
managed Lundekvam between 2001
and 2004, went even further in deriding
the Norwegians attacking prowess,
suggesting at one point that referees
should book Lundekvam for timewasting when he goes up for corners
and that if a corpse were to lie in the
penalty area it would get its head to
more crosses than Lundekvam did. A
career total of three goals at club level
would seem to indicate that the Scot had
a point. Still, while he was unlikely ever to
do anything particularly productive in the
opposing box, he was equally unlikely to
let you down at the back. And because of
that, he ended up making more than 400
appearances for Southampton over the
course of 12 seasons, captaining the club
for several years and earning himself a
testimonial at the end of it all.
I was extremely determined to perform
well, he explains. Leaning back on a

Lars Sivertsen

sofa at TV2s studio complex in Bergen,

Lundekvam speaks with a calmness
that constantly threatens to slide into
detachment. Listening to him, you
instantly understand what Strachan
meant when he said, He was carried
off at Leicester and someone asked me
if he was unconscious. I didnt have a
clue. Thats what hes always like. And
although his face doesnt give away
much, its impossible not to spot the
nostalgia tinged with pride when he talks
about his career at Southampton. The
thing Im most proud of is when I signed
a new contract, he says. Not becoming
a professional footballer in the rst place,
but having proved to myself that I could
hold my own in one of the best leagues
in Europe, that was the most important
thing. And after settling down on the
south coast, signing for anyone other
than Southampton was never on the
cards. I loved it there, he says. I didnt
know anything about Southampton
before I went there, but I grew up by the
coast and I loved the sea, so for me it
was perfect.

bloody week. And after ve-a-sides and

a punch-up with Souness, its perhaps
understandable that Lundekvam and his
teammates needed a drink. It was pretty
much every day, after training we would
meet up at the local pub, he says. It was
part of the culture, part of being social. I
think I beneted from being out with the
guys; I was accepted in the group very
quickly, quicker than other foreigners. I
was part of the gang. Harry Redknapp
once bemoaned the difficulties of
integrating foreign players into a squad
because they dont even drink. There
were no such problems with Lundekvam.
In terms of alcohol, there was a free
ow of it, he says. But I never felt that
the alcohol affected my performances. I
knew what I had to do to perform. The
suggestion that he might have played
drunk, as Tony Adams famously did,
is instantly brushed off. I dont really
understand how he managed to do that.
It shouldnt be possible. I can admit that
I came to training with a hangover some
times; maybe I still had alcohol in my
blood and I was always dreadful.

Playing for Southampton between 1996

and 2008, Lundekvam experienced
rst-hand the revolution English football
went through, both on and off the pitch.
There was an enormous change in every
way: the way we trained, how everything
was set up, the facilities, how everything
was sorted out for us, he says. Today
there are sports scientists, Prozone
analysts, nutritionists and experts of
every conceivable kind. In 1996, there
werent. It was chaotic, he remembers.
I was brought over by Graeme Souness
and he used to join in during training.
He thought he still had it as a player and
he would join in for ve-a-sides and
it always ended in a punch-up. Every

In spite of the odd hangover in training,

Lundekvam was enjoying his football.
The rst four seasons we didnt have the
best of squads, but we had Le Tissier and
we had a fantastic spirit, and that kept
us up. There were two or three seasons
when we had great escapes. I remember
one season we had nine points at
Christmas, we were second from bottom
and we managed to stay up. It was a
fantastic feeling. We then managed
to establish ourselves in mid-table
for a few seasons and that was a big
accomplishment for Southampton as a
club. One highlight has to be the FA Cup
nal against Arsenal; that was a big day.
It was incredible. When youve been in

111

The Centre-back and the Kitchen Knife

England for a while and you really get the

English footballing culture under your
skin, when you see how much it matters
to the fans, then you understand what
the FA Cup really means. So to get to be
a part of that, it was huge. As a person,
Lundekvam seems every bit as steady
and unassuming as he was as a player.
As time went by and English football
hurtled into the new millennium, there
were notable changes not just on the
training ground and in how everything
was set up, but in the culture. Players
increasingly became prima donnas,
Lundekvam says. Especially with the
foreigners, less so with the British
players as far as I could tell. At least
not with the ones who came from the
old school, the ones who had been
taught that they had to work hard and
clean their own boots. I think theres
something to that, but it all started to
change. I was basically an adopted
Englishman towards the end and I
would spend a lot of time with James
Beattie and Wayne Bridge and guys like
that. We went to London to hang out
with the Chelsea players and the Arsenal
players and that sort of thing. And you
could tell with the foreigners, especially
the French guys, that they thought they
were bigger and better than everyone
else. When youre a Premier League
player now, you live in a kind of bubble
where everything is taken care of for
you. You hang out with all kinds of
celebrities, movie stars and pop stars
and whatever, thats the kind of circles
you socialise in as a Premier League
player at least these days it is.
According to Lundekvam, there is a
potential problem with the fact that top
footballers have now become almost

112

fully integrated into the celebrity and

showbiz-scene. The drinking culture
in football has always been there and
will always be there, he explains. You
have parties when you can, after games
and especially after wins, but thats
completely normal and itll always be
like that I have no problem with it.
But in society today there are so many
other drugs that are out there, drugs
that are very easily available in that circle
of people I was talking about. There
is an almost free ow of other drugs,
especially cocaine. Its available to a
much greater extent than before.
For Lundekvam, the problems only really
started after he retired. I was injured for
almost a year. I had three operations on
my ankle before I realised that it was the
end. But I was 35, so I wasnt bitter about
it, really. Id experienced a lot and I even
got a testimonial at the end of it. But
adapting to life outside of football and,
more importantly, outside of the spotlight,
proved difficult. I think I was looking for
something to replace the adrenaline rush,
the buzz you get, that feeling of really
being alive. You get used to performing
in front of thousands every week and
when thats gone then suddenly theres a
huge mental void which becomes almost
impossible to ll. At least for me. I just sat
at home or did what I wanted to do, go
on holiday, whatever.

This is a Sample Edition - the full version

of this article appears in Issue Five of
The Blizzard.
The Blizzard is available on a pay-whatyou-like basis in both download and hard
copy formats from www.theblizzard.co.uk.

132
Polemics
...the real fan is a rhetorical device
deployed to strengthen whatever argument the deployer wants to make.

Wheres Darth Vader Gone?

Wheres Darth Vader Gone?

Is the age of football as a substitute for war coming to
an end?
By Simon Kuper

If you had to choose a holy English

year since the Second World War, it
would be 1966. The year is almost
as much a landmark as 1066, when
William the Conqueror created the
modern nation. For all the fuss about
club football, the biggest football
matches, the ones that ll living-rooms
all along the street, have always been
nation versus nation. When a national
team plays, you sometimes get half a
countrys population or more watching
on TV. In Germany, for instance,
seven of the eight highest-rated TV
programmes until 2008 involved the
national football team playing in a big
tournament. No club game can have
that kind of impact. Nationalism is the
strongest animating force in football
support. You could even argue that
since 1945 in Europe, football has
replaced war as the main outlet for
nationalist emotion.
However, in the last few years something
signicant has changed: emotional
nationalism is fading from international
football. Its being replaced by a gentler
kind of party nationalism people with
ags painted on their faces drinking beer
and irting with fans of the other team
and also by post-nationalism. Just
as old-style nationalism is becoming
less important in politics, its fading in
football too.

136

Mihir Bose, in his recent history of

modern sport, The Spirit of the Game,
dates the start of sporting nationalism
back to Baron de Coubertins creation
of the modern Olympics. Nationalism
wasnt what De Coubertin wanted, of
course: he thought that playing sport
would turn gentlemen of different
nations into brothers. Thats why the ve
rings in the Olympic ag were interlaced:
friendship between continents. But in
fact, once the modern Olympics took off,
and after international sporting xtures
became common in the 1930s, countries
began to seek prestige by winning them.
Mussolini was probably the pioneer, the
rst leader to take propaganda through
sport seriously. But during the 1930s
the practice became quite widespread
among politicians. At the 1936 Olympics,
Albert Foerster, the Nazi Gauleiter of
Gdansk persuaded Hitler to come and
watch Germany thrash little Norway at
football. Goebbels, who watched the
match with Hitler, wrote in his diary,
The Fhrer is very excited. I can barely
contain myself. A real bath of nerves.
The crowd rages. A battle like never
before. The game as mass suggestion.
But to Foersters mortication, Germany
lost 2-0. It seems to have been the only
football match Hitler ever saw.
So football nationalism emerged in the
1930s, but there is one caveat: back

Simon Kuper

then, fair play was as central to national

prestige as winning. Watching a football
international in the 1930s seems to have
been almost an impartial experience, like
going to the theatre. Even the infamous
Germany v England friendly in Berlin in
1938, when the England team gave the
Hitler salute just before kick-off, wasnt
considered at the time to be just about
winning. On the Monday after the game,
The News Chronicle newspaper ran the
front-page headline, THE GAME AND
NOT ONE FOUL. The Times said Len
Gouldens cracking goal for England
in the game drew gasps of admiration
from the crowd and is the talk of the
town today. True, there was a new
football nationalism, but games then
werent played in the same angry spirit
they would be after the war.
From 1939 through 1945 a different
sort of nationalism took over. But after
1945 something remarkable happened:
war died out in Europe. The Harvard
psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book
The Better Angels of Our Nature, points
out that there have been no interstate
wars in western Europe since 1945, and,
skirmishes in the Caucasus excepted,
none in eastern Europe since Soviet tanks
invaded Hungary in 1956. Pinker writes,
Keep in mind that up until that point
European states had started around two
new armed conicts a year since 1400.
After 1945, Europeans no longer
expressed nationalist emotions through
war. Instead they began to express them
through international football. This
probably started in Germany in 1954
after the West Germans won the World
Cup in the mud of Bern. The story of
that day is one of the founding myths of
the Federal Republic: crowds of people

clustered around the only TV set in their

neighbourhood, the train carrying the
players home being mobbed at every
station, people celebrating on the streets
in both West and East Germany, and
nally, at the official celebrations in
West Berlin, when the national anthem
was played, the West German president
Theodor Heuss frantically trying to coach
the crowd in the correct new lyrics so
that they wouldnt sing the old, taboo
line, Deutschland, Deutschland ber
Alles. Of course most people sang it
anyway. It was the national anthem
they knew. The German phrase most
associated with that day is, Wir sind
wieder wer, We are somebody again.
In other words, football had begun to
create a proud new nation.
Over the next four decades, rst World
Cups and then European championships
gained in importance, as more people
bought TV sets and as interest in football
began to spread through all classes of
men though not yet among many
women. This is the era when World
Cups became the most watched TV
programmes on earth; a Philips executive
once told me that sales of Philips TVs
spike in even years, when there is a major
football tournament. The most extreme
TV viewing gure I know of is the 12.3
million Dutch people three-quarters
of the countrys population who
watched at least some of the HollandUruguay semi-nal of the last World Cup.
(The Holland-Spain nal actually drew
slightly fewer Dutch viewers). HollandUruguay was the biggest shared postwar
Dutch experience, just as Frances
victory in 1998 was the biggest shared
French communal experience since the
Liberation with the difference being
that in 1998, unlike in 1944, all the French

137

Wheres Darth Vader Gone?

were on the same side. In the decades

after the war, national football teams had
come to constitute the nation. Those
11 young men in synthetic shirts were
the nation made esh more alive
than the ag, more concrete than gross
domestic product, less individual than
the president or queen. In the Dutch
popular mind, for instance, the Dutch
football team now is the Netherlands in a
way that nothing else quite is.
Nationalism always needs an enemy,
and in this era from the 1950s through
the 1990s the enemy for most European
countries became Germany. English
footballs anthem, Three Lions, is
mostly about matches against Germany
which makes it particularly ironic that
while the Germans were on their way to
winning Euro 96 in England they liked
to sing the song on their team bus. But
it wasnt just the English. Frances worst
football moment much more painful
than Zinedine Zidanes sending-off in
the 2006 World Cup nal was losing
to West Germany in Seville in the World
Cup semi-nal in 1982. The Dutch,
the Danes, perhaps half the countries
in Europe date the best and worst
moments in their football history to
matches against Germans.
To some degree, we all know why. Here
is Lou de Jong, a grey Dutch professor
who spent about 50 years writing the
official history of the Netherlands in
the Second World War in umpteen
volumes, talking to a newspaper after
the best moment in Hollands football
history, victory over West Germany at
the European Championship of 1988:
When Holland scores I dance through
the room. Of course its got to do with
the war. After that match millions of

138

Dutch people celebrated on the street,

in the largest public gathering since the
Liberation. The French TV commentator
Georges de Caunes said that for French
males of his generation, the ying kick
inicted by the German keeper Toni
Schumacher on Frances Patrick Battiston
that night in Seville reawakened feelings
from the war.
But the anti-German feelings werent
just to do with the war. The nearinvincible post-war West German teams,
from 1954 through 1990, were the
might of the wealthy post-war Federal
Republic incarnate. That peaceful might
provoked resentment, even hatred. The
German-British writer Philip Oltermann,
in his new book Keeping Up with the
Germans, writes, I sometimes wonder if
Germany in my lifetime has been hated
with more passion than it ever was in
the 1910s or 1940s. Holland-Germany
matches have provoked clashes
between fans on the countries shared
border, the closest the European Union
gets to war; and after England-Germany
at Euro 96, Germans and people
who were mistaken for Germans and
German cars, were beaten up in towns
around England.
Yet in those post-war decades we all
needed Germany, because the country
gave meaning to international football.

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