Adventures in the Golden Age by Archie Macpherson

Author:Archie Macpherson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black & White Publishing
Published: 2018-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

17

SLUMS AND SLAMS

If LA could be described as a dream factory, then the city we then arrived in gave the impression it was the product of someone’s nightmarish imagination. Crowded, noisy, smelly, dilapidated cars bumper to bumper in congested streets – and that was in the fashionable middle of the city where our hotel was. We had split off from the squad who were making their way to their own residence, which was to be described later by Charlie Nicholas as ‘a prison’. For the rest of our stay in the centre, we were to witness an astonishing ritual. Thousands of Mexicans would congregate in the square around the hotel to sing and dance in celebration of their national side, every single day. And every single day, almost on the dot, at 4 p.m., the heavens would open. The monsoons were of biblical proportions, but did not deter the celebrations, thoroughly drenched though they became. The crowd knew what they were letting themselves in for. But it seemed to sum up the spirit of defiance of these most genial people who had suffered all kinds of hardships, including the disastrous earthquake which had hit the city only eight months previously. By simply being there, it made you feel you were lending some kind of support to the spirit of consensus that had transformed a football tournament into a symbol of national survival.

But there was another side to the city. It changed my view of this tournament. If the centre of the city was far from appealing, then it was a veritable Shangri-La compared to the neighbourhood that housed the stadium where Scotland would play their first and last game. They called it Nezahualcóyotl, or, thankfully, Neza for short. It was a stinking slum area, which we were told had a population of about one million. There were beggars everywhere. Ragged bundles in the streets would turn out, on closer inspection, to be mothers with kids, wrapped together to shelter from the frequent monsoons. The appalling and obvious misery underscored the disgrace of bringing a World Cup to a country so burdened by unrelenting poverty. In fact, to make matters worse, their currency, the peso, plunged during the tournament. If you combine that with the persistent clammy heat, and the altitude problems, it would have seemed to any ordinary mortal that it was something of a mystery why Mexico had been chosen at all.

‘Corruption,’ was one of the words Ernie Walker quietly used to me when I quizzed him about it eventually in the FIFA hotel, the Camino Real, in the centre of the city. Although Ernie was justifiably to rise in stature within FIFA, and particularly UEFA, he expressed mistrust of Sepp Blatter from the first time he ever mentioned his name to me, and he hated João Havelange, the then FIFA president, with a vengeance. These were the earliest warnings I ever heard about the unethical, incestuous nature of the structure of FIFA, which in later years was to collapse under the weight of its own dubious morality.

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