Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  I said to the paper’s sports editor, “Italian clubs insist that their players behave in public. Gazza does not behave.” The Italian papers were not like the British tabloids, he replied. He himself had been offered a photo of Gazza, standing in the showers, holding a teammate’s private parts and waving at the camera, but had turned it down, and so had all his colleagues. Why had he? “The picture was not elegant.” I asked whether the Lazio fans were known for a somewhat Fascist style. He said: “The Nazi-skins are Lazioli, but not all Lazioli are Nazi-skins. Not all Germans are Nazis.”

  In January 1991, six months after the World Cup, I had written the following article in the Berliner Tageszeitung, a German daily. There are as many interpretations of Gazza as of Hamlet, and this is mine.

  GazzalandEvery year Britain’s feared satirical magazine Private Eye elects the Bore of the Year. The winner is the person who in the previous twelve months gained the most publicity with the fewest achievements. This year the election will be a formality: the soccer player Paul Gascoigne is going to win his umpteenth title of 1990.

  Nobody calls the fat little soccer player Gascoigne anymore. Since the World Cup probably even his mother calls him “Gazza”—I didn’t ask her, because nowadays she charges £300 per interview. England’s adoration of Gazza has taken on unheard-of, ridiculous forms. There are a number of Gazza books and newspapers on the market; his single, the worst of all terrible soccer players’ songs, reached second place in the charts; and the British tabloids live off him. The Sun has even published the Gazza family albums, which chart his development from small, fat, ugly, red-haired kid with freckles into small, fat, ugly, red-headed international with freckles.

  Each country has the heroes it deserves. Why do the English worship Gazza? I must admit that even to many of us it is a mystery. Gazzamania, that much is clear, took off after the World Cup semi-final between England and Germany in Turin. There were only a few minutes left to play when Gascoigne committed an unnecessary foul, got a yellow card and was thus suspended for the hoped-for final. Gazza began to cry.

  The TV cameras captured the sight perfectly, and on millions of English sofas tears began to fall too. Gazza’s tears even inspired the intellectual TV station Channel Four to make a successful documentary series about men who cried in public.

  Admittedly, Gazza’s crying is uncommonly moving. He admits in confidence that he sometimes cries tactically. There is the famous story of his first meeting with hard man Jack Charlton, now manager of Ireland. When Big Jack became manager of Newcastle, he called in the teenaged Gazza and threatened him with the sack unless he lost weight. The meeting ended in mutual tears. “The lad has had a hard life,” Charlton defended himself afterwards.

  Gazza comes from the poor city of Gateshead in the Northeast of England, where his father has been unemployed for almost 20 years. It is often said that Gazza grew up on fish and chips, but in fact, in his neighbourhood fish was an almost unattainable luxury. Nowadays he plays for London’s glamor team Tottenham Hotspur, but every week he drives home to drink at his father’s working man’s club.

  He is a man of the people and the people know it. To the English, he is the true Englishman, who matches the Continentals without behaving like a Continental. He does not speak a word of a foreign language, has no desire to learn either, and yet he has an un-English skill and tactical intelligence. That is why he is beloved: he is precisely the symbol that Britain needs today. Before Gazza, the English were always being told that “the Europeans” were rich, spoke languages, kept their streets clean and played clever soccer. Our country had an inferiority complex. Only a few still believed in Margaret Thatcher’s constant claims of British superiority. That is why she was replaced by John Major: like Gazza, he plays European and yet remains unmistakably English.

  Shortly before her fall, in a desperate attempt to identify herself with the new Britain, Mrs. Thatcher invited Gazza to Downing Street. Apparently they hugged each other, and Gazza later revealed that the prime minister was “nice and cuddly, like me.” But then he does tell tales about women. Until this tête-à-tête, Mrs. Thatcher was probably the only person in Britain who was not familiar with Gazza. All she knew about soccer was hooliganism.

  Many believe that Gazza will soon be lying beside Mrs. Thatcher on the scrap heap. His predecessor, the brilliant Northern Irish winger George Best, was also ruined by hysterical publicity. The chairman of Newcastle United, Gazza’s first club, has called Gazza “George Best without brains.” Gazza in turn has said that Best is “scum,” to which Best has replied that at least he was by far the better player of the two. But then Gazza’s fame does not have much to do with soccer.

  Beneath the article the Tageszeitung printed a picture of Thatcher and Gazza with the caption: “Margaret Thatcher with Paul Gascoigne. Shortly afterwards she was forced to resign.”

  Years have passed and some passages from the article read strangely now. Gazza has learned a little Italian, but the main problem is that John Major today hardly seems a prototype of European élan. I accept that he and Gazza are by no means identical characters, and they may never become close friends, but when Major replaced Thatcher and promised to deal with the Continentals, he stood for a Britain that would be less out of things and yet would remain thoroughly British. The nation loved him. Major and Gazza came in on the same ticket, and within five months of each other.

  We can now see that at the time of my article Gazzamania was at its peak. When Gazza appeared on the television talk show Wogan soon after the World Cup he was introduced as “literally the most famous and probably the most popular person in Britain today.” The person still periodically delights us by advising Norway to fuck off, or by belching at Italian journalists, or even by scoring for England, but nothing he has done since crying in Turin and driving through Luton in false breasts has excited as much joy in millions of English people with no interest in soccer.

  The World Cup was Gazza’s stage, and not just because he played well and England won matches. The tournament was the best opportunity we have had to contrast him with the Continentals. The first thing one noticed was that, fat and red-faced, he did not look like them. Nor did he even want to: he told Ruud Gullit, the suavest Rastafarian in the business, that he was “a long-haired yeti.” The Continentals spoke to the press in several languages, while he refused even to speak in one, and somehow he contrived not to seem as rich as they did. “What did they pay for you then?” he asked Ronald Koeman, Holland’s Continental libero. (Frank Rijkaard laughed and replied, “A hell of a lot!”)

  As a player, Gazza did to the Continentals what they normally do to Tony Adams. When he back heeled his way past two Dutch defenders, English friends explained to me that it was the “Cruyff turn”: the supposed speciality of Johan Cruyff, the Continent’s most cosmopolitan soccer thinker. Gazza had proved that we did not need to be like him to play like him.

  Gazza’s crowning moment at the World Cup was his foul on Berthold. He did slide into Berthold, but then, as Continentals do, Berthold played dead. The German bench rose in pretend horror, and the referee, whose name was Wright but who was a Brazilian and therefore a Continental, produced the famous card.

  Then Gazza cried. Continentals cry too—Maradona does—but they do it on purpose, like characters from their operas. Gazza cried because a nasty thing had happened to him. He probably also hoped that Wright, upset at the tears, would take back the yellow card, but that hardly qualifies as scheming. These were the tears of a child, and they were seen by more Britons than had ever watched a single TV program.

  I say Gazza was our two fingers up to the dreaded Europeans. I may be quite wrong. What is undeniable is that anyone writing a mental history of postwar Britain will have to explain Gazza’s tears.

  CHAPTER 9

  A DAY WITH HELENIO HERRERA

  THE MAN WHO TAUGHT the world how to play defensive soccer is Helenio Herrera, and I was delighted when he agreed to speak to me.

  As I s
ee it, there are four approaches to soccer that dominate today. There is the long-ball game, played particularly in Britain. There is total soccer, spread by the Dutch to teams like Barcelona and AC Milan, Dynamo Kiev and Sâo Paolo. There is the happy-go-lucky style that we associate with Brazil, but that I was to see at its purest in South Africa, where it is known as “piano and shoeshine” soccer. And there is catenaccio, the defensive system with the Italian name. Few teams play pure total soccer, or pure long-ball soccer: most borrow elements from all the styles. In the dourest defensive team, an unpredictable winger can provide the Brazilian touch. However, every team in the world tends to one or other of these four basic systems. In other chapters, I try to explain why the Dutch, the British and the Brazilians play the way they do. In this chapter, I ask how catenaccio arose.

  I took a night train from Rome to Venice, wandered around the city all morning trying not to spend money, and then met Herrera’s wife, who took me to their medieval palazzo on a canal. She is a fashion journalist, and it was plainly she who had chosen the house: it was the most beautiful private home I have ever seen, though Herrera and his son had broken many of its windows playing soccer indoors. The palazzo’s interior was an unusual mix of objets d’art and caricatures of Herrera, many of them depicting him as a magician. As he was to remind me several times, his nickname had been Il Mago.

  I found Herrera daydreaming in his study, with its view over the canals. A stocky figure with neat, grizzled hair, he is in his seventies but looks 20 years younger, and behaves 60 years younger. These days he is a soccer pundit on Canale 5, Silvio Berlusconi’s TV channel, and he had come a long way to Venice: “My parents were poor Andalusians, so they went to Argentina, where I was born. But they were poor in Argentina too, so when I had four years we moved to Morocco, which was French then. My school was almost totally French, and now there are only Arabs there.” He seemed astonished that such a great change had managed to occur without his participation. “From 14 or 15 years old, I played with the Arabs, Jews, with the French, with Spaniards. That is a school of life. Then, at 17 or 18, I went to Paris, because I was a good soccer player.”

  He became a manager, and in the 1950s and 1960s he was the most famous manager in the world. In his three years at Barcelona, he won two Fairs Cups and two Spanish titles, but he had to leave when Barça lost to Real Madrid and fans assaulted him outside the team’s hotel. At Inter Milan, he won two European Cups and three league titles. He also managed Spain, France and Italy (not at the same time). Asked once where he would finish in an Italian popularity poll, he replied: “Behind Sophia Loren, but only because she has a better figure.” It was in Italy, with Inter, that he earned his place in history.

  Catenaccio has become a synonym for the defensive style. In Italian, the word means “padlock.” In soccer, it describes a system in which the sweeper stays behind his defense, and his team marks man to man, forming a padlock in front of the goal, and letting the opposition attack. It is boring soccer, but as we see at every World Cup, it works. Most nations draw from it, but it is an Italian speciality: the Azzurri won the World Cup of 1982 with Giacinto Scirea, their sweeper, spending whole matches in his own half. My aim was to find out what it was about Italy—its culture? its history? its soccer culture?—that made catenaccio thrive there.

  “I was the first player ever to play sweeper!” he told me. “It was when I was in France, it was, oh, about 1945”—Occupation or no Occupation, for Herrera dates have a strictly soccer-related significance—“and we were playing like this.” He drew the old W-M formation on a file. “ With 15 minutes to go, we were winning, 1-0, I was him,” he pointed at his paper, “the left-back, so I tapped him, the lefthalf on the shoulder, and said, ‘You take my place, and I’ll go here behind the defense.’ (Already when I was a player I thought like that.) And we won, and when I became manager, I remembered that.”

  That’s what he says. According to Brian Glanville, it was the Swiss coach Karl Rappan who invented catenaccio in the 1950s. When Herrera came to Inter, the club was playing a moderate form of it. Herrera refined and exaggerated the evil system, won European trophies with it, and thus spread it around the world.

  The logic behind catenaccio, he said, was that in the old W-M system the lone central defender was helpless if two forwards came through the center: “So for hard matches I used a sweeper. Away is hard.” But he had also said, I quoted, that catenaccio was necessary to combat lesser teams. “Yes, against the bad teams also,” he conceded. “But my critics, they all used a sweeper! The English criticized most, but Wright played sweeper.” Whether he meant Mark Wright at the Italian World Cup—Bobby Robson’s bow to Herrera—or Billy Wright in the 1950s, I do not know.

  I suggested that he had made soccer a duller game. “Catenaccio is much criticized because it has been wrongly used.” He drew another formation. “In my system these two”—the center backs in front of the sweeper—“were markers, but the fullbacks had to attack,” and he energetically drew long lines forward from the back positions. “Facchetti, Giacinto Facchetti, could attack at Inter because of me. When I put Facchetti in the team he was a teenager, and everyone said, ‘Ohohoh!’ ” He threw up his hands in mock horror. “I said, ‘This man will play for Italy!,’ and he was captain of Italy 70 times! But the managers who imitated me did not let their backs attack, and they used catenaccio as a defensive system.” He shook his head in grief.

  Who had given him his ideas? “Gabriel Hanot (the Frenchman who invented the European Cup) is the only one who is better in intelligence”—better than Herrera himself. And which managers had he influenced? “All, in some way,” and he nodded sagely. “I have a TV here, and I see managers say, ‘It was M. Herrera who gave us the ideas to win matches.’ ” Had his cosmopolitan background shaped his ideas? “Ideas come from the intelligence. From nowhere else.”

  As well as giving us catenaccio, Herrera had introduced to soccer unique methods of motivation. “I invented training camps. When I started at Inter, I used to get phone calls at two on Saturday night from tifosi, fans, saying, ‘Balbo is still in the disco!’ But also, at most clubs it was like this: you come in for practice in the morning,” and he mimed, at top speed, a player shaking hands, nodding to teammates right and left, exchanging a word here, a word there, running like a cartoon character onto the field, running back, showering and running home. Herrera dismissed the image with a shake of his head, and intoned his mantra: “One team, one family.” “When I came to Inter,” he told me, “there was a terrible ambience. There were boards everywhere about past championships, very impressive you understand, but so distant.”

  So, “on Friday evening we would go into seclusion. We would go for a walk, to take in oxygen, and I would talk to players individually: ‘How’s it going? How’s your wife?’ and so on. I hung up boards in the changing rooms saying ‘SPEED’ and ‘TECHNIQUE,’ and later we had great speed with Jair and Mazzola. I told the masseur, ‘The players will talk with each other while they are lying on your couch. Tell me what they say, but only what concerns the club. The rest,’ he added grandly, ‘does not interest me.’ ”

  And: “I don’t like the restaurants in this country, where there is a table here, a table there, a table over there. I wanted,” he spread out his hands, “one big table for the whole team. I would sit at the head, and we would talk: ‘How’s it going? How’s your wife?’ and so on. Then, on the day of the match, I would sit down with the whole team and . . .” Nostalgia overcame him, and he produced a magnetic board, a referee’s whistle and a small case of magnetic soccer players. Using me as his imaginary team, he mimed a tactical talk.

  It was at this point in the presentation that Herrera would introduce his more eccentric methods. Glanville writes that he would throw a ball at each player in turn, while yelling, “What do you think of the match? Why are we going to win?” The players had to shout answers like, “We’ll win because we want to win.” Finally, Herrera would hold out a soccer ball, and the p
layers would extend their arms towards it and shout, “It is the European Cup! We must have it! We shall have it! Ah ah ah!”

  “It is important to touch the ball before the match,” Herrera explained to me. “The players are nervous, it is a big match, there is a big crowd, but the ball: that is their life. Then I made the players hug each other. Not kiss, just hug! And I told them, ‘We are all in the same boat!’ They would hug, not so,” he mimicked a tentative embrace, “but—” and he threw himself into imaginary action, and repeated several times, “I have confidence in you, and you have confidence in me. Then they would start throwing themselves at each other spontaneously! Then they would get changed, and I would say, ‘Speak to each other! Defense, speak among yourselves! Une équipe, une famille.’ ”

  At Inter, Omar Sivori grew so riled that once, during a game, he blasted the ball straight at Herrera on the bench. I told Herrera that Gerry Hitchens, an Englishman at Inter, had said, “Mr. Herrera is a genius, but leaving Inter for Torino was like coming out of the army”; in fact Hitchens never said the part about genius. “Hitchens, is he still alive?” Herrera asked curiously. “Yes it is true,” he agreed about the army, “but we often sang too. When we lost a match I would say, ‘Now we’ll sing!,’ and we’d sing for hours on the bus home. When we lost in Sevilla once, we danced on the bus.” He took a few steps. “The flamenco.”