A Cultured Left Foot by Musa Okwonga

Author:Musa Okwonga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co
Published: 2011-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Guts

In the eternal melodrama that is professional football, there are two types of pantomime villain: those players who are tough, and those who are gutsy. To be a great player, you’ve got to have a foot in both camps, between which the distinction is ultimately a simple one: the tough are those who give it, and the gutsy are those who go looking for it. In a sense, it’s this latter group of players who truly shape the game of football. They’re the ones for whom opposition fans have a peculiar affection, a special place in their hearts for personal and profound loathing.

The supporters, then, have a hate figure around whom they can unite. But that’s not to say that the gutsy player doesn’t gain from this anti-hero status – there are several of them who seem to find the hatred from the stands almost nutritious. Certainly, John Collins considered this vitriol to be a wholesome meal: he told me that part of the fun in football was scoring in a big match away from home, knowing that you were directly responsible for the resentful silence of eighty per cent of those watching you.

Fiorentina’s Gabriel Batistuta felt this just as strongly. After a sensational strike against Barcelona in the Nou Camp – an eruption from his right foot that had the goalkeeper ducking for cover – he ran towards the crowd of one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand and pressed his fingers to his lips. Batistuta, having rendered the atmosphere in the stadium more joyless than that of a coffin, shouldn’t have been so complacent that he’d survive the experience. The Nou Camp faithful are notorious for their rage when their faith has been betrayed, or their patience unduly stretched. Luis Figo, when he moved from Barcelona to Real Madrid, famously found himself the target of not only horrific abuse but also mobile phones and the head of a suckling pig, each of which were rained down towards him as he approached the pitch. The rationale for throwing the pork missile was unclear: its originator may have been making the point that pigs might fly before Figo was again welcome in that football ground. Nevertheless, Figo manfully endured this trial by fire.

The Portuguese great also illustrated an important point, although he might not have been grateful for doing so at the time: that it takes a very special kind of personality to absorb all of the emotion that’s poured into the recipe of a football match. Guts are therefore a skill as vital as a sound first touch. They’re an invisible muscle that can put the body under more strain than any arduous weight session, and, from time to time, even the strongest may fail to carry themselves. Marcel Desailly, watching Zinedine Zidane as France approached the 1998 World Cup final, asked himself if one man ‘could withstand so much passion’: Zidane, then the obsession of a nation, had been sent off for an apparently needless stamp on a Saudi Arabian player in the group stages.

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