Even as John Aloisi was
driving home the winning penalty on that mad night in November,
they were already at it. While we mere punters were celebrating
joyously, drunkenly, wantonly, the publishing accountants clicked
into gear like cat burglars taking advantage of a massive street
party. They were busy: adjusting schedules, ordering reprints, contacting
authors to update their now out-of-date books, asking the odd popular
writer without a jot of interest in the game if they could perhaps
write a sokkah book for them. A gravy train had arrived and they
were getting on board.
Maybe I'm a little too
cynical. But it's hard not to notice that publishers with little
prior commitment to the world game have acknowledged its marketability
in Australia and are pushing out World Cup books by the truckload.
It's a good thing; it's a bad thing. A number of the books reviewed
here bear the traces (if not the open editorial wounds) of this
new publishing imperative.
For
example, I wish Les Murray's By the Balls
had not been subtitled, memoirs of a football tragic . It's too
marketing-department and tacky, conjuring the image of a small-minded
man pretending to love something in order to gain advantage. In
truth, Murray is a stalwart of the game in Australia who almost
single-handedly cemented SBS's reputation as the Soccer Bloody Soccer
channel. His relation to football is romantic, perhaps heroic, but
never tragic.
This is the first full-length
book telling of Murray's transition from Hungarian boy Laszlo Urge
to Australian football identity. It describes the Urge family's
escape from Stalinist Hungary in 1956 and their arrival in Wollongong
a year later. Young Laszlo was struck immediately by the lowly status
of the game he loved. How could it be that football was not popular
in Australia? Why did the identity and strength given to him by
‘his' team, the magnificent Magyars of the early 1950s seem
to mean so little in his new country where the eggball codes reigned.
Thankfully, Murray found
football in Australia via his family's involvement in Hungarian
community teams, first Wollongong-based Pannonia and then Sydney
team, Budapest (later St George).
Football gave a sense
of belonging to Murray (and to legions of European migrants) and
his story is one of a debt gladly repaid through his activism for
the sport in Australia.
By the Balls
ends on a sobering note. As football becomes ever more a business
in which financial success drives what happens on the field, the
beauty and ethics of the game are in peril. For Murray, what ‘quarantines
the game and its virtues is national team football'. When the accident
of birth determines selection and national pride is the reward,
the excesses of football capitalism can be averted. Consequently,
the World Cup is the ‘pinnacle of the world game'. As he confesses,
this may be a tad ‘romantic'. The next four weeks will tell.
Matthew Hall's The
Away Game contains the stories of a number of footballers
who left Australia to advance their careers. It was an important
book in its first edition (2000) partly because it was published
at a time (post Iran) when everything seemed lost for the international
ambitions of our star players. It had all the poignancy of a story
of wasted youth.
As
Hall acknowledges in the new edition, a lot has changed in the past
six years but he fails to explain just what, how and why things
have changed. One definite change is in the contents of the book.
New material has been added, some has been excised, and the chapters
have been re-ordered to draw attention to current Socceroos.
Unfortunately, this major
structural change has been not been accompanied by thoughtful editing
– ‘get this out in a hurry' seems to be its editorial
method. We are repeatedly told information that we have already
read. Updating has occurred without much thought as to how it might
relate to the rest of the book. I got to the point where I just
wanted the book to end. It was like being told the same story over
and over.
While the book needs
re-organising it is still worth dipping into. The (first edition's
opening) chapter on Joe Marston, the Aussie who went to Preston
in the 1950s, is a classic Australian sports story.
The Away
Game is an important book in that it reveals the repeated
patterns of shoddy treatment meted out to young Australian players
– the three brave players who independently admitted they
were sometimes reduced to tears of loneliness in their rooms at
night are testimony to this. If only the publishers had cared more
about its integrity.
Maarten Meijer's Guus
Hiddink: Going Dutch is a biography of the man who
will take some of the players in Hall's book to the World Cup.
Marketed as an ‘intimate
biography of the super coach', it is nowhere near as intimate as
we'd like, reproducing the stereotypes of Hiddink that circulate
through other media without revealing much that is new or enlightening.
The large font ensures a 260 page book when 150 pages might have
done.
Moreover, it seems that
the bulk of the book was written shortly after Hiddink's Korea career
came to an end. The Australian material feels very much tacked on
– another case of MPS (the Must Publish Soccer syndrome).
If Roy Hay and Bill Murray
wrote about AFL the way they write about association football in
Australia they'd be local heroes. Hay has a long and distinguished
track record as a scholar and working journalist while Murray is
a highly respected international scholar, having published the classic
history, The World's Game.
With The
World Game Downunder, Hay, Murray and their contributors
have produced a fascinating but necessarily disjointed history.
A precursor to a big history the two editors are writing, the collection
gives us insight into the way football in Australia, unable to move
beyond second-rung status, has progressed in waves of interest and
appeal only to fall into troughs of neglect and abuse.
All those with more than
a vague interest in the history of football in Australia will want
to get their hands on it.
If The World
Game Downunder represents academic publishing at its
best then German Football, edited by Alan
Tomlinson and Christopher Young sits towards the other end of the
scale. An interesting book crippled by its turgid and sometimes
impenetrable prose, it is constructed around essays that seem to
tick all the ‘appropriate' scholarly boxes: immigrants in
football; women in football; hooliganism; fandom and so on, without
coming together to make a coherent argument.
The
defence that this is an academic book speaking to academics doesn't
wash either. Sports history, as an academic discipline, doesn't
need to model itself on critical theory, sociology or discourse
analysis to do its job. It should be able to develop its own forms
of communication that engage sports aficionados. Indeed, Hay and
Murray show the way.
Nonetheless,
German Football contains
some significant and important essays from which I learned a great
deal.
Until the First World
War, football was a minority sport in Germany, a nation that treated
sport with contempt. (The game's English origins didn't help either.)
In fact football never fully established itself in the national
imagination until Germany's 1954 World Cup final victory over Hungary,
a vital moment in the regeneration of postwar German identity (as
well as being a major tragedy in Laszlo Urge's young life).
That victory helped to
strengthen arguments for a national club competition. I was surprised
to learn that the German national competition, the bundesliga began
as recently as 1963 (only 14 years before Australia's NSL).
The subsequent West German
triumph, in 1974, gave the nation a different kind of legitimation
in a context of massive social upheaval, radical politics and domestic
terrorism.
But I wanted more than
this. I wanted a story of German Football and not footnotes at its
edges.
Calcio:
a history of Italian football , by John Foot is a
magnificent compendium/encyclopaedia of a book. It demonstrates
just how important football has been in the unification of Italy
and how significant its World Cup triumphs have been for the development
of Italian national sensibility.
Foot is demonstrably
in love with Italian football ( calcio ). He adores it; he is obsessed
by it; now and then he hates it – but never for long. The
game is both object and vehicle of his passions. The book is superbly
written and richly layered. The longest by far of all those under
review here, it was the easiest and most delightful to read. Over
220,000 words went by almost without a hitch. It suffers from a
little repetition but (unlike The Away Game
) its echoes are both understandable and forgivable.
Calcio
is organised around the vital themes of the Italian game: history,
referees, players, managers, Italian style, the media, the World
Cup and others. In covering these so thoroughly Foot kicks up recurring
problems in calcio and Italian society.
By this account, Italians
live their lives in a constant state of antagonism: the referee
is out to get them; FIFA is out to get them; the English gave them
the game but play it badly and are out to ruin it; everyone hates
them and they hate each other.
Moreover, Italians seem
to accept corruption as an unavoidable part of their lives and their
sport. It's OK to bribe referees; it's OK to pre-determine results
to the satisfaction of both teams; it's OK to dive and cheat in
order to advance the interests of the team. Foot gives the example
of an English player, new to Italian football, who refused to fall
down after a heavy challenge in the penalty area being criticised
broadly for failing to dive and get a penalty for his team. Teams
that try too hard when they have little to play for are accused
of playing outside the spirit of the game!
There'd be something
offensive (if not racist) about all of this if Foot were not deeply
immersed in Italian culture and thereby also able to find and express
the joy and spirit at calcio 's heart.
This immersion produces
the book's one narrative flaw – and it's a big one. The English
critic David Goldblatt argues that Foot is too compromised to say
what he really thinks about Italy and calcio. So Goldblatt says
it for him: ‘Italy and Italian football are a disgrace', a
corrupt and corrupting world unable to mend its fractured history
or escape its legacy of fascism.
I suspect Foot agrees.
It's hard to finish this book without feeling profoundly depressed
about the possibility of Italy and calcio emerging from its corruption
in the near future. I don't want to agree with Foot – because
national stereotypes are usually wrongheaded – but his story
is presented with such weight and passion that it's hard not to.
If there's a significant
thread to be drawn from this collection of books it is this: football,
the World Cup and nationalism are inextricably entwined. World Cup
victories are always significant events in a nation's history –
the exception might be Brazil, which seems to take such things in
its stride. The failures of teams like Hungary and Holland to win
the Cup when they seemed the team most likely have also left their
mark on ideas of their respective national characters.
A common idea seems that
national sentiment and confidence can only form fully on the back
of a nation's World Cup exploits – a notion that raises questions
about Australian nationalisms, all of which have formed in the absence
of major success in the world game. If we have (as a nation) defined
ourselves on the sporting field it has been in an anti- or post-colonial
mode, against England and other Commonwealth countries. We have
never been in a position to succeed in a genuinely popular and global
sport.
But we have glimpsed
a possible future with the recent successes of the Socceroos. And
we have been given intimations of a previously unseen kind of multicultural
nationalism at recent World Cup qualifiers. It is intriguing to
think on the kind of effect Australian success at the World Cup
(if it ever comes) will have on ideas of who we think we are and
our place in the world.
Reviewed by
Ian Syson
ISSN
1834-9277 (Print)