Hand of God

by Philip Kerr

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  ‘A little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God’

  Diego Maradona on his first goal against England in the 1986 World Cup

  Prologue

  Never mind the Special One; according to the sports press I’m the Lucky One.

  After the death of João Zarco (unlucky) I was lucky to land the job as the caretaker manager of London City, and even luckier to keep it at the end of the 2013–14 season. City were judged lucky to finish fourth in the BPL; we were also judged to have been lucky to reach the Capital One Cup Final and the FA Cup Semi-final, both of which we lost.

  Personally, I thought we were unlucky not to win something, but The Times thought different:

  Considering all that has happened at Silvertown Dock in the last six months – a charismatic manager murdered, a talented goalkeeper’s career cut tragically short, an ongoing HMRC investigation into the so-called 4F scandal (free fuel for footballers) – City were surely very fortunate to achieve as much as they did. Much of the club’s good fortune can be attributed to the hard work and tenacity of their manager, Scott Manson, whose fulsome and eloquent eulogy for his predecessor quickly went viral on the internet and prompted the Spectator magazine to compare him to none other than Mark Anthony. If José Mourinho is the Special One, then Scott Manson is certainly the Clever One; he may also be the Lucky One.

  I’ve never thought of myself as being lucky, least of all when I was doing eighteen months in Wandsworth nick for a crime I didn’t commit.

  And I had only one superstition when I was a professional footballer: I used to kick the ball as hard as I could whenever I took a penalty.

  As a general rule I don’t know if today’s generation of players are any more credulous than my lot were, but if their tweets and Facebook posts from the World Cup in Brazil are anything to go by, the lads who are playing the game today are as devoted to the idea of luck as a witch-doctors’ convention in Las Vegas. Since few of them ever go to church, mosque or shul, perhaps it’s not that surprising that they should have so many superstitions; indeed, superstition may be the only religion that these often ignorant souls can cope with. As a manager I’ve done my best to gently discourage superstitions in my players, but it’s a battle you can’t ever hope to win. Whether it’s a meticulous and always inconvenient pre-match ritual, a propitious shirt number, a lucky beard, or a providential T-shirt with an image of the Duke of Edinburgh – I kid you not – superstitions in football are still as much a part of the modern game as in-betting, compression shirts and Kinesio tape.

  While a lot of football is about belief, there’s a limit; and some leaps of faith extend far beyond a simple knock on wood and enter the realms of the deluded and the plain crazy. Sometimes it seems to me that the only really grounded people in football are the poor bastards watching it; unfortunately I think the poor bastards watching the game are starting to feel much the same way.

  Take Iñárritu, our extravagantly gifted young midfielder, who’s currently playing for Mexico in Group A; according to what he’s been tweeting to his one hundred thousand followers it’s God who tells him how to score goals; but when all else fails he buys some fucking marigolds and a few sugar lumps, and lights a candle in front of a little skeleton doll wearing a woman’s green dress. Oh yes, I can see how that might work.

  Then there’s Ayrton Taylor who’s currently with the England squad in Belo Horizonte; apparently the real reason he broke a metatarsal bone in the match against Uruguay was that he forgot to pack his lucky silver bulldog and didn’t pray to St Luigi Scrosoppi – the patron saint of footballers – with his Nike Hypervenoms in his hands like he normally does. Really, it had very little to do with the dirty bastard who blatantly stamped on Taylor’s foot.

  Bekim Develi, our Russian midfielder, also in Brazil, says on Facebook that he has a lucky pen that travels with him everywhere; interviewed by Jim White for the Daily Telegraph he also talked about his recently born baby boy, Peter, and confessed that he had forbidden his girlfriend, Alex, to show Peter to any strangers for forty days because they were ‘waiting for the infant’s soul to arrive’ and were anxious for him not to take on another’s soul or energy during that crucial time.

  If all of this wasn’t ludicrous enough one of City’s Africans, the Ghanaian John Ayensu, told a Brazilian radio reporter that he could only play well if he wore a piece of lucky leopard fur in his underpants, an unwise admission that drew a flurry of complaints from the conservation-minded WWF and animal rights activists.

  In the same interview Ayensu announced his intention to leave City in the summer, which was unwelcome news to me back home in London. As was what happened to our German striker, Christoph Bündchen, who was Instagrammed in a gay sauna and bar in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza. Christoph is still officially in the closet and said he’d gone to the Dragon Health Club by mistake, but Twitter says different, of course. With the newspapers – especially the fucking Guardian – desperate for at least one player to come out as gay while he’s still playing professional football (wisely, I think, Thomas Hitzlsperger waited until his career was over), the pressure on poor Christoph already looks unbearable.

  Meanwhile, one of London City’s two Spanish players in Brazil, Juan Luis Dominguin, just emailed me a photograph of Xavier Pepe, our number one centre back, having dinner at a restaurant in Rio with some of the sheikhs who own Manchester City, following Spain’s game against Chile. Given the fact that these people are richer than God – and certainly richer than our own proprietor, Viktor Sokolnikov – this is also cause for some concern. With so much money in the game today players’ heads are easily turned; with the right number on a contract, there’s not one of them that can’t be made to look like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

  Like I said, I’m not a superstitious man but when, back in January, I saw those pictures in the papers of a lightning bolt striking the hand of the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer that stands over Rio de Janeiro, I ought to have known we were in for a few disasters in Brazil. Soon after that lightning bolt, of course, there were riots in the streets of São Paulo as demonstrations against the country’s spending on the World Cup got violently out of hand; cars were set on fire, shops vandalised, bank windows smashed and several people shot. I can’t say I blame the Brazilians. Spending fourteen billion dollars hosting the World Cup (as estimated by Bloomberg) when there’s no basic sanitation in Rio de Janeiro is just unbelievable. But like my predecessor, João Zarco, I was never a fan of the World Cup and not just because of the bribery and corruption and the secret politics and Sepp bloody Blatter – not to mention the hand of God in ’86. I can’t help feeling that the little man who was named the player of the tournament in Argentina’s World Cup was a cheat, and the fact that he was even nominated says everything about FIFA’s showcase tournament.

  As far as I can see, about the only reason to like the World Cup is because the United States is so bad at football and because it’s the one time when you’ll ever see Ghana or Portugal beat the crap out of the USA at something. Otherwise the plain fact of the matter is that I hate everything about the World Cup.

  I hate it because the actual football played is nearly always shit, because the referees are always crap and the songs are even worse, because of the fucking mascots (Fuleco the Armadillo, the official mascot of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, is a portmanteau of the words futebol and ecologia – fuck me!), because of all the expert divers from Argentina and Paraguay and, yes, you, Brazil, because of all the England ‘w
e can do it this time’ hype, and because of all the cunts who know nothing about football who suddenly have a drivelling opinion about the game that you have to listen to. I especially hate the way politicians climb on the team coach and start waving a scarf for England when they’re talking their usual bullshit.

  But mainly, like most Premier League managers, I hate the World Cup because of the sheer bloody inconvenience of it all. Almost as soon as the domestic season was over on 17 May, and after less than a fortnight’s holiday, those of our players who had been picked for international duties joined their respective squads in Brazil. With the first World Cup match played on 12 June, FIFA’s money-spinning competition gives no time at all for players to recover from the stresses and strains of a full Premier League season and affords plenty of opportunities for them to pick up some serious injuries.

  Ayrton Taylor looked as though he was out of the game for two months and seemed certain to miss City’s first match of the new season against Leicester on 16 August; worse than that, he was likely to miss City’s Group B play-offs against Olympiacos in Athens the following week. Which – with our other striker now the subject of intense speculation as to the true nature of his sexuality – is just what we don’t need.

  It’s at times like these I wish I had more a few more Scots and Swedes in the team as, of course, neither Scotland nor Sweden qualified for the World Cup in 2014.

  And I can’t decide what’s worse: worrying about the ‘light adductor strain’ that stopped Bekim Develi playing for Russia in their Group H match against South Korea; or worrying that the Russian manager Fabio Capello was playing him against Belgium before he’d given Develi a chance to properly recover. You see what I mean? You worry when they don’t play and you worry when they do.

  If all that wasn’t bad enough I have a proprietor with pockets as deep as a Johannesburg gold mine who’s currently in Rio looking to ‘strengthen our squad’ and buy someone we really don’t need who’s not nearly as good as all the TalkBollocks pundits and callers insist he is. Every night Viktor Sokolnikov Skypes me and asks my opinion of some Bosnian cunt I’ve never heard of, or the latest African wünderkind who the BBC has identified as the new Pelé, so it must be true.

  The wünderkind is Prometheus Adenuga and he plays for AS Monaco and Nigeria. I just watched a MOTD montage of the lad’s goals and skills with Robbie Williams belting out ‘Let Me Entertain You’ in the background, which only goes to prove what I’ve always suspected: the BBC just doesn’t get football. Football isn’t about entertainment. You want some entertainment, go and see Liza Minnelli fall off a fucking stage, but football is something else. Look, if you’re trying your damnedest to win a game, you can’t really give a fuck if the crowd are being entertained while you do it; football is too serious for that. It’s only interesting if it matters. Just watch an England friendly and tell me I’m wrong. And now I come to think of it, this is why American sports are no good; because they’ve been sugared by the US television networks to make them more appealing to viewers. This is bullshit. Sport is only entertaining when it matters; and, honestly, it only matters when it’s all that fucking matters.

  Not that there’s anything very honest about the way football is played in Nigeria. Prometheus is just eighteen years old, but given that country’s reputation for age-cheating he might be several years older. Last year, and the year before that, he was a member of the Nigerian side that won the FIFA U-17 World Cup. Nigeria has won the competition four times in a row, but only by fielding many players who are much older than seventeen. According to a large number of bloggers on some of Nigeria’s most popular websites, Prometheus is actually twenty-three years old. The age disparities of some African players in the Premier League are even greater. According to these same sources, Aaron Abimbole, who now plays for Newcastle United, is seven years older than the age of twenty-eight that appears on his passport; while Ken Okri, who played for us until he was sold to Sunderland at the end of July, might even have been in his forties. All of which certainly explains why some of these African players don’t have any longevity. Or stamina. And why they get sold so often. No one wants to be holding those particular parcels when the fucking music stops.

  That’s just one reason why I won’t ever become the England manager; the FA doesn’t want anyone – even someone like me, who’s half black – who’s going to say that African football is run by a bunch of lying, cheating bastards.

  But it isn’t the true age of Prometheus, who plays for AS Monaco, which is currently occupying the journalists grubbing around the floor for stories in Brazil – it’s the pet hyena he was keeping in his apartment back home in Monte Carlo. According to the Daily Mail it bit through the bathroom plumbing, flooding the whole building and causing tens of thousands of euros’ worth of damage. A pet hyena makes Mario Balotelli’s camouflaged Bentley Continental and Thierry Henry’s forty-foot-high fish tank look sensible by comparison.

  Sometimes I think that there’s plenty of room for another Andrew Wainstein to start a game called Fantasy Football Madness in which participants assemble an imaginary team of real-life footballers and score points based on how expensive those players’ homes and cars are, and how often they get themselves into the tabloids, with extra points awarded for extravagant WAGs, crazy pets, lavish Cinderella-style weddings, stupid names for babies, wrongly spelt tattoos, daft hairstyles and off-menu shags.

  I bought Fergie’s book when it came out, of course, and smiled when I read his low opinion of David Beckham. Fergie says he kicked the famous boot in Beckham’s direction when his number seven refused to remove a beanie hat he was wearing at the club’s Carrington training ground because he didn’t want to reveal his new hairstyle to the press until the day of the match. I must say I have a lot of sympathy with Fergie’s point of view. Players should always try to remember that everything depends on the fans that help to pay their wages; they need to bear in mind what life is like for the people on the terrace a bit more often than they do. I’ve already banned City players from arriving at our Hangman’s Wood training ground in helicopters, and I’m doing my best to do the same with cars that cost more than the price of an average house. At the time of writing, this is £242,000. That may not sound like much of a restriction until you consider the top-of-the-range Lamborghini Veneno costs a staggering £2.4 million. That’s almost chump change for players making fifteen million quid a year. I got the idea of a price ceiling for players’ cars the last time I looked in our car park and saw two Aston Martin One-77s and a Pagani Zonda Roadster, which cost more than a million quid each.

  Don’t get me wrong, football is a business and players are in that business to make money and to enjoy their wealth. I’ve no problem with paying players three hundred grand a week. Most of them work damn hard for it and besides, the top money doesn’t last that long and it’s only a few who ever make it. I’m just sorry I didn’t get paid that kind of loot when I was a player myself. But because a football club is a business, it behoves the people in that business to be mindful of public relations. After all, look what’s happened to bankers, who today are almost universally derided as greedy pariahs. Perception is all and I’ve no wish to see supporters storming the fucking barricades in protest against the disparity in wealth that exists between them and professional footballers. To this end I’ve invited a speaker from the London Centre for Ethical Business Cultures to come and talk to our players about what he calls ‘the wisdom of inconspicuous consumption’. Which is just another way of saying don’t buy a Lamborghini Veneno. I do all this because protecting the lads in my team from unwanted publicity is an increasingly important way of ensuring you get the best out of them on the football pitch, which is all I really want. I love my players like they were my own family. Really, I do. This is certainly how I talk to them, although a lot of the time I just listen. That’s what most of them need: someone who will comprehend what they’re trying to say, which, I’ll admit, isn’t always easy. Of course, changing how play
ers handle their wealth and fame won’t be easy either. I think that encouraging any young men to act more responsibly is probably as difficult as eradicating player superstitions. But something needs to change, and soon, otherwise the game is in danger of losing touch with ordinary folk, if it hasn’t done so already.

  You’ve heard of total football; well, perhaps this is total management. A lot of the time you have to stop talking to players about football and talk to them about other things instead; and sometimes it all comes down to persuading average men how to behave like gifted ones. In this job I have learned to be a psychologist, a life counsellor, a comedian, a shoulder to cry on, a priest, a friend, a father and, sometimes, a detective.

  1

  I’d gone on holiday to Berlin with my girlfriend, Louise Considine. She’s a copper, a detective inspector with the Metropolitan Police, but we won’t hold that against her. Especially as she’s extremely pretty. The picture on her warrant card makes her look like she’s advertising a new fragrance: Met by Moschino, the Power to Arrest. But hers is a very natural beauty and such is the power of Louise to charm that she always reminds me of one of those royal elves in Lord of the Rings: Galadriel, or Arwen. That does it for me, anyway. I’ve always loved Tolkien. And probably Louise, too.

  We did a lot of walking and saw the sights. Most of the time we were there I managed to stay away from the television set and the World Cup. I much preferred to look at our hotel room’s wonderful view of the Brandenburg Gate, which is among the best in the city, or to read a book; but I did sit down to watch the Champions League draw on Al-Jazeera. That was work.

  As usual, the draw took place at midday in UEFA’s headquarters in Nyon, Switzerland. The club chairman, Phil Hobday, was in the bemused-looking audience and I caught a glimpse of him looking very bored. I certainly didn’t envy him that particular duty. While the moment of the draw drew near, I was Skyping Viktor in his enormous penthouse hotel suite at the Copacabana Palace in Rio. As we waited for our little ball to come out of one of the bowls and be unscrewed by the trophy guest – a laborious and frankly farcical process – Viktor and I discussed our latest signing: Prometheus.