Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  People talking about soccer tend to draw their metaphors from one of two fields: from art or from war. Brazilian soccer has “the rhythm of samba,” and the British have “fighting spirit.” Robson always compares soccer to war. Speaking of Bryan Robson, he told Pete Davies, author of All Played Out: “You could put him in any trench and know he’d be the first over the top . . . he wouldn’t think, well, Christ, if I put my head up there it might get shot off. He’d say, c’mon, over the top.” When Terry Butcher broke his head in a match against Sweden and played on, Robson was delighted. “Have a look at your skipper. Let none of you let him down,” he told the other players while the doctor stitched Butcher up at halftime. The tabloids liked it too: “YOU’RE A BLOODY HERO SKIPPER.” The idea was that only a British soccer player would carry on with a cracked head. This may be true. Frits Kessel, the Dutch team doctor, explains: “ ‘Work soccer players’ can deal with pain much better than super-skillful players, who depend more on their coordination. Marco van Basten, for instance, can take absolutely no pain. If anything at all is troubling him, he’s no use to anyone. He says so himself.” Since most British players are “work soccer players,” they can play on with broken skulls. Managers like Robson admire their grit, and continue to pick them. Robson’s British colleagues talk about war only slightly less than he does. After the USA beat England in 1993, his successor, Graham Taylor, told the press: “We are in a battle, aren’t we? It’s a battle we’ll stick out together.” Naturally, Taylor was more inclined to pick David Batty than Chris Waddle. As Robson said, in the days when he was reluctant to play Gazza: “You have to be utterly reliable.” Soldiers are reliable, artists are not.

  At PSV, the players complained nonstop about Robson’s training methods. Robson believed in “functional training,” a form of practice that relies on dry runs of moves. A midfield player puts the ball out wide, a fullback comes up the wing and crosses it, and a striker runs in to head the ball, all without opposition. Functional training may make sense, but since the players were sceptical of Robson from the start they laughed at it. Johan Cruyff, as manager of Ajax, had also made players do new things—he brought in an opera singer to teach them how to breathe—but Cruyff commanded respect. “The sarcasm about Robson went on all season. About Bobby Robson!” exclaimed Frank Arnesen, his Danish assistant for a year at PSV. “A manager with a career behind him that is practically unequalled in the world. I think that’s very Dutch. Holland is an extremely tolerant country, but on the other hand the Dutch have no respect for anyone.”

  The players also thought that Robson trained too lightly. English clubs often play three matches a week, and so they tend to make do with a few gentle exercises. Asked by Pete Davies whether British players thus had less chance to learn the skills of a Rijkaard, Robson agreed. Yet in Holland, where training matters, he would not change his ways. This almost led to disaster in his first season at PSV. With two games left, PSV and Ajax were neck and neck for the title, and PSV’s penultimate match was a tough one, away to FC Groningen. Robson decided that his players needed rest, and took them to Israel for a few days on the beach. The team returned tanned and rested, and proceeded to lose 4-1 to Groningen. Robson’s defense was characteristic: “We often did it when I was at Ipswich and the players there loved it.” He was saved by Ajax, who lost to lowly SVV that day, and the next week PSV won the title. His players were unimpressed. Celebrating after the final match, they dunked Ploegsma, the general manager, in the players’ bath, while Robson stood by untouched.

  Had he understood the Dutch press better it might have taken his side more. When he first arrived in Holland he seemed determined not to impress the journalists. Eight years as England manager had got to him, and in his first months at PSV he often answered questions on soccer with, “None of your business.” During an interview with Voetbal International, he jumped up from his chair at one point to hiss: “Listen fellow, British coaches are the best in the world.” At post-match press conferences he did little more than repeat the claim that the game had been “superb,” even when this was manifestly false. But in time, he understood the need to change. Dutch journalists, he explained to World Soccer, “are more like soccer reporters, rather than journalists looking for a headline. Here, they all think they are little coaches. It took me a while to adjust!”

  He never quite adjusted to Dutch tactics. “In England mostly everybody plays 4-4-2. Tactically, the English game is completely predictable. But here you never know quite what you will come up against,” he confided to World Soccer. “Sometimes they’ll come at you with one central striker; sometimes they won’t play a striker at all but play with two men wide. Then, midway through a match you have to ask yourself what do you do with your two center backs who have no one to mark?” Robson never seemed sure. He had PSV playing first 4-2-4, then 4-3-3, 3-3-4, 5-2-3 and 4-4-2. “Our play worries us,” said general manager Ploegsma, at a time in Robson’s second season when PSV were still unbeaten in the league. Then Robson fell ill, Arnesen took over, and suddenly PSV were playing 4-2-4 every week.

  PSV officials came to sound defensive when talking about Robson. “It was a period when there wasn’t much on the market,” Ploegsma admitted to Voetbal International. “We asked ourselves, ‘What are we looking for?’ ” Values like discipline, experience and respect were important to us. Then we looked at who was available.” PSV approached Franz Beckenbauer and Dick Advocaat before offering Robson the job. “Whether Robson is tactically, and all that sort of thing, suited to PSV, I don’t know,” said Ploegsma. “We didn’t ask ourselves that. We had a different priority.”

  Months before Robson’s contract expired, Ploegsma was promising Dutch journalists off the record that it would not be renewed. It was, in fact, Voetbal International who broke it to Robson that he would be leaving PSV. When he left, the magazine called him “the amiable Briton,” and quoted PSV’s chairman Jacques Ruts as saying that Robson had had problems “as a foreigner.” Ruts explained: “If an Englishman says, ‘I’m afraid I would have difficulties with that,’ a lot of Dutchmen think he means, ‘I’ll do it, but I have problems with it.’ ” Not bloody likely! The Englishman is saying, politely, that he is absolutely against it. Well, I’ve spotted that sort of problem in the relationship between Robson and the squad.” But PSV’s fullback Berry van Aerle had the last word. He told Nieuwe Revu: “Robson’s a nice man, really a very nice man. But the only thing he taught me in two years was English.”

  CHAPTER 12

  AFRICA (IN BRIEF)

  “I say that magic, in soccer, cannot exist. The proof is Cameroon. It is not the strongest nation in magic, and it is better at soccer than the countries where magic is strong, like Benin, Togo, or Nigeria.” Roger Milla in France Football, 1981.

  HERE ARE THE FACTS, being the African history of the World Cup.

  The first African nation to play in the World Cup was Egypt, in 1934, when any team that turned up was welcome. Egypt played one match, losing 4-2 to Hungary.

  Later, World Cups became events for which teams had to qualify, but for decades FIFA arranged no qualifying rounds for Africa. Eventually FIFA gave way, and the modern African history of the World Cup starts in 1970, when one place was reserved for the continent. Morocco won it, and at the finals in Mexico, they lost 2-1 to West Germany, 3-0 to Peru and drew 0-0 with Bulgaria. Poor results, but no walkovers.

  In 1974, Zaire became the first Black African team to qualify for the World Cup. The Zairean performance in West Germany is the worst by any African team at the World Cup so far, and the European press loved it. Zaire seemed to live up to the crude European stereotypes. Journalists spread stories that the players had taken monkeys with them to eat during the tournament, and that they had the tactical grasp of savages. Zaire lost 2-0 to Scotland, 9-0 to Yugoslavia and 3-0 to Brazil, and the Zairean kleptocrat President Mobutu (still in office today) may have considered recalling the team.

  The players had other problems too, many of which came to lig
ht when Mulamba Ndaie was sent off against Yugoslavia for kicking the referee.

  When the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland asked Zaire’s Yugoslav coach Blagoyev Vidinic for his view of Ndaie’s expulsion, Vidinic said the offence warranted a red card. He added: “I have only one small reservation. It wasn’t Number 13 who kicked the referee, but Number 2, Ilunga Mwepu.”

  Ndaie said: “You can tell from the referee’s behavior that they can’t tell us apart. And they don’t try to either. I cried terribly when I was sent off. I told the referee that it wasn’t me, and Mwepu said, ‘I did it, not he.’ But the referee wasn’t interested. All the referees here are against the black race, and not only the referees. Scotland’s Number 4, the captain, shouted at me a couple of times during the match, ‘Nigger, hey nigger!’ He spat at me too, and he spat in Mana’s face. Scotland’s Number 4 is a wild animal.” Scotland’s Number 4 was Billy Bremner.

  The press also asked Vidinic to explain why he had substituted his goalkeeper, Kazadi, when Zaire were only 3-0 down to Yugoslavia. The substitution had helped start rumors that Vidinic was a Yugoslav agent, and the rumors persisted when Vidinic refused to discuss his decision at the post-match press conference, saying only that he would explain all the next day. He kept his promise: “Mr Lockwa, the representative of the Ministry of Sport, said after the third Yugoslav goal, ‘Take that keeper off.’ I did.”

  “These are my specific problems,” Vidinic sighed. “But I assure you: I’ll never again give the government permission to make changes in my team. When I trained Morocco (he had taken them to the 1970 World Cup) I also rejected interference by the Moroccan king. Shortly before one match he gave me a note with his preferred lineup. I said, ‘In that case, I leave straight away.’ ‘All right,’ he said, ‘but if Morocco loses in your formation then things will happen.’ ” Vidinic paused. “Well?” demanded the assembled press, “what did happen?” “Oh, we won of course. Better yet, against our arch-rivals Algeria.”

  These interviews all took place outside the Zairean hotel. Vidinic and the players would not talk to the press inside the hotel, which was full of officials from the Ministry of Sport.

  Zaire was the only African team ever to justify the tag of “minnow.” They were an odd lot in any case, but undoubtedly, also, African soccer improved after 1974. Professor Paul Nkwi explained to me in Cameroon: “We can now see how people play. On the radio you had to hear how a player swerved past four players. Everyone sits around the TV in the quartier. When my little boys watch France they know the differences between the high balls of the British, and the small passes of the French and Germans, and they have brought that into Cameroonian soccer. The Zaireans were not aware of the difference.”

  Zaire withdrew from their qualifying matches for the 1978 World Cup, the nation’s Sports Minister citing “certain deficiencies” in the team and the “unpatriotic behavior” of some players. Tunisia qualified in 1978, beat Mexico 3-1, and were unlucky to lose 1-0 to Poland and to draw 0-0 with West Germany. In 1982, Cameroon drew with Italy, Poland and Peru, while Algeria beat West Germany and Chile and lost to Austria. Both African teams failed to reach the second round because of marginally inferior goal differences. In 1986, Algeria did badly, earning just one point from three matches, but Morocco won England’s group to reach the second round.

  In 1990, Egypt drew against Holland and Eire before losing to England, and you may remember Cameroon. After winning their group they beat Colombia, and then lost to England. It was a needless defeat, but Roger Milla told France Football that it pleased him: “I’ll tell you something: if we had beaten England, Africa would have exploded. Ex-plo-ded. There would even have been deaths. The Good Lord knows what he does. Me, I thank Him for stopping us in the quarter finals. That permitted a little pliancy.”

  The African results at World Cups make an interesting tally. From 1978 to 1990, African nations played 24 World Cup final matches in which they gained 23 points. (I am awarding two points for a win and one for a draw.) During that period, their performance did not improve. If anything, it very slightly dipped: in 1978, Africans gained three points from three matches, in 1982 seven from six, in 1986 five from seven, and in 1990, eight from eight. Remember also, that because African teams are seeded as minnows, they never meet true minnows like El Salvador or New Zealand. Every point the Africans earn is fiercely contested. In short, it says little for the world’s bookmakers that Cameroon could startle them as late as 1990 by reaching the quarterfinals.

  “There’s still an idea here in Europe that Africans can’t do anything better than the whites,” complained Alloy Agu, the goalkeeper of Nigeria who plays for Club Liège in Belgium. “Don’t look at color, look at what we can do! Black, white, yellow: we’re all the same. Still, if you’re black, you’re well-dressed, and you drive a nice car, they want to see your papers.”

  For a long time we said that Africans could not play soccer. After 1990, we invented an explanation. Africans can play, we said, because they were born that way. They are naturals. They have no idea of what they are doing. “If they can get their organization right off the pitch, their natural ability, athleticism, flexibility and the way they play the game will be far too much for us,” the then-England manager Graham Taylor told the Independent on Sunday in 1992. Even some Africans believe this: Alloy Agu claims that African players “have a natural suppleness.” He fails to understand that though Roger Milla, Lakhdar Belloumi, and Peter Ndlovu are natural athletes, Trevor Steven, Les Ferdinand, and Nigel Winterburn are too. The Africans played soccer a lot as children, and so did our players.

  We also believe that Africans have no notion of tactics. “They go out there to enjoy themselves,” say our commentators. Remember how defensively Cameroon played in the “Group of Death” in 1982, and against Argentina and Rumania in 1990? When three Cameroonians hurled themselves at the Argentine striker Claudio Caniggia, and Benjamin Massing was sent off, newspapers described the fouls as “stupid,” or cited excess enthusiasm. When three Uruguayans bring down an opposing striker making for goal, we call them “cynical.”

  Africans never train and have no tactics. They have magic instead. European journalists always ask African players about witchcraft. (“I’m the witchdoctor around here,” answered Vidinic. “I touch them on one leg and say, ‘You score with him.’ ”)

  Certainly, faith in witchcraft is strong enough for the Botswanan FA’s mouthpiece, the Botswana Sports Magazine, solemnly to warn its readers that, “There is no evidence that matches can be won using muti alone.” Almost every team in Africa practises muti, or Juju (though the Zairean FA once banned it).

  Muti takes various forms, often spectacular. A team’s witch doctor cuts players with his knife, players urinate on the ball, animals are killed, and potions are sprinkled on jerseys or boots or changing-room doors. If a winger needs speed, the witch doctor might sacrifice a fly. In Zambia, when Profund Warriors had a long home winning streak, visiting teams stopped using the changing-rooms and changed in their minibuses instead. To avoid using the main entrance, they would then take the pitch by jumping over the perimeter fence, and voilà, Profund suddenly began to lose at home. In wealthy South Africa teams fly witch doctors to matches, and in many countries they earn more than players.

  But though many players believe in the rituals, many others do not. Also, needless to say, the value players set on muti depends on their mood. Mark Williams, a feared goal scorer in South Africa, told me that he had had no time for his manager’s muti while he was at Mamelodi Sundowns. “Maybe it’s psychological,” Williams said, “that if you don’t like someone you won’t eat his food, because at Cosmos we had a muti-man and everyone accepted it and got on with things, but with Tshabalala I hated it. The boots would always be prepared with the potions and sometimes I would take my own boots with me, because I felt happy in them—I always used to score in those boots, always—and you’d be quietly trying to put them on and he’d be looking at you and you’d think, ‘Oh no.’ ”


  For most African players, witchcraft is little more than their form of superstition. No one I met in Africa began telling me about witchcraft, though when I asked, I got answers. If you ask Italian players if they are carrying rosaries, a few will say yes, but that does not mean it is their only hope of winning matches. Witchcraft matters less than we think. The manager of South Africa, the Peruvian Augusto Palacios, told me that as a devout Catholic he refused to stage muti ceremonies. “Any player can practise muti in his home if he wants to,” he said, “but not here in camp. I try to explain to my players that I respect their culture but that muti is superstition and is only psychological.” Would he stop a player from using muti? “It is part of their tradition. If a player cannot afford the materials for his muti we would pay for them, but there will be no team ceremonies.” Witchcraft on the expense account. Had any player asked for a muti ceremony? “Never.” By cross-examining every Black African World Cup team about witchcraft the moment they step off the plane, we imply that they are believers first and world-class soccer players second. “We hate it when people ask us if we burn chickens before a match,” the Cameroonian François Omam-Biyik said during the 1990 World Cup. Omam would probably not mind if this were the tenth question he was asked, but it is always the first. (The second is, “Did you play barefoot as a child?”)

  Of course, you don’t have to be African to believe in magic. The Dutchmen Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten have a personal medic-cum-psychologist, Ted Troost, who punches them, orders them to feel as light as a feather, and grabs them by the testicles. They feel better for it. Gullit and Van Basten are two of the most written about players in the world, but foreign journalists rarely mention Troost. Bryan Robson, injured again at the World Cup of 1990, flew in the faith healer Olga Stringfellow to cure him. (She failed.) Terry Paine, the former England player, now manages Wits University in South Africa, and when I asked him about muti he began telling me about British muti: some players take a hot bath before a match, some put on their right shoe before their left, and some insist on going out of the tunnel eighth. Playing 825 league games in England had given him great respect for African witchcraft. He told me a story of his team arriving at a ground in Durban: Paine was unlocking the dressing-room door when his players begged him not to. “Look!” they pointed. “There’s muti on the door!” Paine opened it regardless. “That day we lost 1-0, after 17 matches undefeated,” he recounted mournfully.