The Time I Hated Tony Wilson

Reviewed by Jesse Fink

Tony Wilson, Australia United: Adventures at the 2006 World Cup, Germany, Geoff Slattery Publishing, $29.95

There was a time when I hated Tony Wilson. From memory, give or take a month, it was August 2006 and I'd heard through the publishing grapevine that his book about the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Australia United, was going to be on the shelves by Christmas that year.

Christmas!?! The World Cup had only just wrapped up. The jury was still out on whether Fabio Grosso had dived or not. I'd commenced writing my own book about the Socceroos' charge to the second round in Kaiserslautern but wasn't even out of the research stage. I'd barely completed watching the DVDs my friend Thang Luong had recorded of Australia's four matches. I was having enough trouble polishing my preface. A whole book?

Who was this bastard?

I'd been told Wilson was big in Melbourne. Had some radio show. I consulted Google and found he had a website. He'd even set up another website for the book. By that stage my own manuscript, 15 Days In June, was just a pile of paper and Post-It notes pockmarked with coffee-stain rings.

He'd well and truly stolen my thunder.

Let me state for the record here that writing a book is not an easy task; I find writing blogs or features on football a breeze, I've been doing it for years, but until you attempt writing a 80,000-word manuscript nothing can prepare you for how much hard slog is really involved. The research. The writing. The rewriting. The cutting. Above all, the thinking. My admiration goes out especially to people who manage to write books while combining full-time work and the demands of family life.

So as a first-time author on a year's sabbatical from gainful employment I thought writing 15 Days would prove a doddle.

It was anything but.

Most days I would write for 14 hours straight and end up on the couch at midnight scoffing a tub of ice cream and watching Jerry Springer just to mentally unwind. My wife Julie would come home and recoil with horror at the hideous beast I had become. I put on some serious weight. I developed a mad glint in my eye á la Colonel Kurtz. I ended up sinking into a deep depression and sat by idly as first my marriage and then my sanity unravelled.

The only thing that mattered to me, however, was finishing the book. I ended up doing that in March 2007. Wilson finished his in September 2006. Granted, 15 Days is also about the Asian Cup, and I was trying to make it as contemporary as possible before its release that July, but Wilson's achievement in writing Australia United so quickly deserves unqualified praise.

Even now I don't know how he did it. My anger with him was long ago replaced with grudging admiration, though I haven't missed the dark irony that he was in the midst of a honeymoon while reviewing my book for Das Libero while I was in the midst of a divorce reviewing his.

Bastard.

Australia United, it is true, is a vastly different book to 15 Days. Wilson's would best be described as a comic travelogue, and mine, as Wilson writes himself, an attempt "to place the Socceroos achievement in its historical context, to record and celebrate the football that was played that year, as well as the prevailing off-field mood".

But even so, I was surprised at the journey we shared as writers, from beginning our respective stories with John Aloisi's penalty kick in Sydney, to our descriptions of events ("blooming canola" is used in both tomes to describe the breathtaking sight of gold-shirted fans in their thousands), to characters we encountered along the way, from The Panel's dry-witted Santo Cilauro (I was standing next to him when Mark Viduka asked for some Late Show tapes, an anecdote amusingly retold in Wilson's book) to my wild-haired peripatetic cousin Cameron Fink. It was particularly fascinating to read what Cam got up to with Wilson when he wasn't hanging out with me and my friends. From Australia United, it appears he spent most of his time picking up women of dubious age.

Wilson tries to pack a lot in and sometimes his digressions (a long section of bullet points on the history of the Berlin Wall, a recrudescence of his diary entries for the Uruguay game in 2001) or hammy jokes ("It was for him to decide whether Togo or not Togo") don't help the story move along, which is either the fault of Wilson trying to write too much or his editor not having a strong hand over the text.

But equally Wilson, for all his flippancy (I'm sure he'll admit to that), can come up with something deeply meaningful or insightful about the game, such as on page 32 about the role singing plays in football, and its poverty in sports such as Aussie Rules:

In Aussie Rules [singing is] almost completely absent – maybe because the grounds are bigger, and so don't lend themselves to the intimate act of singing. Maybe it's because integrating two sets of fans dissolves potential choirs. Maybe it's because the thrill-a-minute, wham-bam action of Aussie Rules doesn't sit well with singing, which flourishes in a lull . . . football is the code where where singing thrives before, after and during games, and where the songbook is vast and ever-changing. It's not, as many heathens claim, because the game is boring and there's nothing else to do. It's more that between the intense but often sporadic climactic highs and cathartic lows – there is down time. Time to study the patterns the players make in position or the with the ball as they strive for advantage. Time to fear. Time to fret. And certainly, time to sing.

Or his poignant description on page 37 of the sense of triumph fans felt just getting into the grounds:

In seconds, they were inside, celebrating the moment with raised arms. Along the turnstiles, others were doing the same. I was at a sporting event where the very fact of entry was being celebrated like a 20-metre, curling wonder strike.

A book such as Australia United is an important addition to a growing genre because fans of the game rarely get to read books written by fans of the game. Wilson's is a refreshing voice in the Australian football media milieu because he doesn't profess to be any sort of expert and there is no pretension in anything he writes, no scores to settle. Wilson didn't receive press accreditation for the tournament and, writing here as someone who did, I was amazed at the number of charlatans passing themselves off as as football "journalists" in Germany. There were people walking around with press badges who had no reason to be there.

As a result, this is the sort of book your average press-conference hack could never produce. Australia United celebrates the fraternity of football, the happiness, the anguish, the hookups, the food, the drink, the smells, the sights, the hangovers, the mad Cannonball Run-like clambering for tickets... all the things that made 2006 World Cup so memorable and fun for those intrepid Socceroos fans who took the trouble to go to Germany.

It's not all levity. Wilson is mindful to credit the tournament, as I do in my book, for its symbolism as a bridge between Germany's past and its future and he is nothing if not enthusiastic with his voice recorder. I doubt there was anyone Wilson came across in Germany who wasn't leant on to contribute a few quotes to Australia United.

Yet, above all, Wilson's modus operandi is to milk a joke, and as a comic writer he never misses an opportunity to do just that, even in the darkest moments, such as on page 176, in a passage about Australia's elimination from the tournament at the hands of those infernal Italians:

We dragged our feet down the stairs to the undercroft of the grandstand . . . I glanced around at the stony faces descending the stairs. On the bottom step, one man was in the foetal position, completely overwrought. Nearby, two gold shirts had laid their inflatable kangaroo flat on the ground, with an Aussie flag pulled right up to its ears as a sheet. One of the mourners made a gentle attempt to close its brown rubber eyes. The last rites had been delivered to a great campaign.

It's clear Wilson will be champing at the bit to make it to his third World Cup (his first was France '98) either in his assumed guise as an überfan or, maybe this time around, as an accredited journalist. They might come along only every four years, but, as Australia United persuades us convincingly, they're worth the wait, emotional investment and considerable financial expense.

That said, though, you really have to wonder whether South Africa 2010, with its myriad problems, is going to be able to replicate the mood of camaraderie and fellowship that defined Germany 2006. I'm sure Wilson will take his chances, as I will mine.