by Declan Hill
The game itself? There is a famous, much-repeated quote from Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: ‘A pretty move, for the love of God.’ ” Galeano would have been delighted. The game was perfection. Lots of goals. Skill. And spirit. It started early: in the sixth minute, Philipp Lahm, a German defender who looked so young that it seemed as though the ballboy had wandered onto the pitch by accident, suddenly cut past a defender and blasted a shot in the corner of the Costa Rican goal. I rose with the rest of the stands and we roared.
It was over. All over. How could Costa Rica, tiny Costa Rica, playing in the opening match in Germany, against the powerful Germans, now down 1-0, outplayed in the first few minutes, ever hope to come back from that goal? Someone must have forgotten to tell Paulo Wanchope, the tall, athletic Costa Rican striker, because a few minutes later, he ran through the worryingly weak German defence to equalize 1-1.
The game went back and forth, all the time played at a frantic pace. All the time the crowd, German and Costa Rican, cheered and roared at every piece of skill and magic. All the time we were caught, 66,000 of us, in the spirit that not one of us, not a single one of us, wanted to be anywhere else for that moment.
What a game. What a time to be alive.
For men like me, whose fathers and older male relatives had served so long and hard against the Nazis, it had been a worrying thought to go into a stadium with so many Germans shouting in unison and waving flags. I know that is not a politically correct thing to say, but it was true. As I approached the stadium with the flags everywhere, hackles that I didn’t even know I had rose on the back of my neck. To see tens of thousands of Germans, many dressed in identical soccer uniforms, all chanting and singing; it had too many resonances from too long ago. But after ten minutes, I realized I was wrong. Not at this wonderful tournament, staged in a glorious June where the sun shone bright and it seemed like the whole world was watching. Not when all of Germany came out, charming and hospitable. Not when some of the dreadful ghosts of the past were laid to rest.
After the game came the street party along the boulevards of central Munich. In the cobbled courtyards, steeped in history, Iranian and American fans waved to one another. They were not the only ones: fans from almost every part of the world sang and partied together. The marvellous, wonderful Germans offered around bottles of beer. The Costa Ricans staged an impromptu salsa party. The Mexicans jumped up and down, arms around one another, arms around anyone else, and we danced and sang until our throats ached. When it was over, I staggered through the train station and saw that the floor was covered with hundreds of sleeping fans. I saw three young German teenagers dressed in lederhosen and green felt hats, asleep leaning against the wall. I saw no violence, no fights, no racist shouts, no thefts, no pickpockets, no stealing. I may have been lucky, but it was a wonderful, international party. I came back to my hotel at 7.30 in the morning, exhilarated by life, by singing, by soccer.
The idea that two weeks before, and 8,700 kilometres away, I had been huddled in the back of a Thai fast-food outlet listening to plans to fix a game at this wonderful gathering now seemed ridiculous. After five days in southern Germany I flew back to Oxford full of the life of the tournament. Chin had claimed that a friendly match against South Korea in Scotland on June 4 might be fixed. It was not. I read the news that the Ghanaians had ripped the Koreans to shreds in a 3-1 victory with a sense of diminished curiosity.
Then on June 12, came Italy versus Ghana. It was one of the matches that Chin claimed might be fixed. He had said that the corrupt members of the squad would give up two games in the tournament. For the Italy game, the aim was to beat the spread. Italy was to win by at least two goals. I raced home from the university to watch it in my apartment in north Oxford. By this time, seduced by the heady brew of the opening match in Munich, I was watching mostly for the sheer pleasure of the match. I longed to see the Italian team, possibly all good men, but now the representatives of a league that had produced the infamous Moggi match-fixed games, humiliated by a team of underdogs from Africa. I watched the BBC feed flat on my couch.
Midway through the first half, I felt like I had chewed on glass. I felt sick.
The camera had panned across the team benches, and there just behind the Ghanaian coach, Ratomir Dujković, was a group of officials. I could almost swear that the man from the KFC was there. I waited, hoping that the television director would choose to swing the camera back. He did not and I spent some of the rest of the match with my head cocked at an odd angle trying to peer around the sides of the screen.
The Ghanaians were playing oddly. Sometimes beautifully, the midfield controlling it, touching the ball one to the another. But in the final thirty-five yards, the forwards always seemed to miss the goal or put the ball into touch.
Their spirit seemed odd as well. They did not signal or slap hands when they were together on the field. Their faces were always dead. The Ghanaian team had 53 per cent of the possession. But they never seemed to do anything when they had the ball. A couple of times a Ghana player almost seemed to stroke the ball into touch at the thirty-five yards. I thought of Chin’s comments about how to lose a match. How a corrupted team has to keep the ball, do small things, then give the ball way.
As for their defence, both Italian goals came not from attacking prowess but from dreadfully simple mistakes by the opposing defenders. The commentary of the BBC studio experts after the match was scathing about Ghana. Martin O’Neill, the former player and now the manager of Aston Villa of the English Premier League, who looks like a studious priest, was particularly harsh: “There is absolutely no excuse for that,” he said about the first goal. “They have been warned all the way through the first half … They were punished.”
It is all subjective. Possibly the players were simply too nervous to be world-beaters. I had never watched Ghana play before; maybe this subdued energy was simply their natural way of playing. Yet the result was exactly what Chin had claimed that it would be: Italy had won by two clear goals, enough to record a loss on the Asian gambling market. To this day, I have no definite idea if there was something wrong with the game, but on a scrap of paper that I had grabbed during the match I wrote in big, block letters my opinion:
THIS WAS A FIXED GAME.
It was time to go back to Germany. It was time to put aside the heady enthusiasm of the opening game and visit the Ghanaian team hotel and headquarters. It was time to figure out if the man sitting near the Ghanaian coach was the KFC man. It was time, finally, to understand if what I had seen in Bangkok was a wisp of fantasy or something more solid: a genuine attempt to fix the games at the biggest tournament in the world.
The first Ghanaian I saw in Germany was taking out the garbage. In the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of Ghanaians had escaped the grinding poverty of their homeland and moved to Germany. They still work mostly in menial jobs as janitors, gardeners, or garbage collectors. He was there among the crowds at the Würzburg station. A middle-aged man, probably in his fifties. He was silent and dignified, collecting pieces of garbage. There was no outward racism. No one that I saw called out or threatened or treated him badly. But what most white Germans seemed to do was ignore him. It was as if the space that he occupied did not have any cells in it. It was simply blank. I saw about a dozen Africans in Germany that June, and it was usually the same. No overt racism. No American-style fear. Simply utterly blank spaces where people were but were not supposed to be.
When you leave the train station in Würzburg, you can see a hill stretching up past the railway line covered with vineyards. Würzburg is a lovely town. The Main River flows past a wonderful collection of historic buildings that make up its centre. The local joke is that the town has more churches than houses, and certainly down near its gorgeous seventeenth-century law school, the joke seems true. Nothing much has happened in Würzburg since 1631, b
ut suddenly for a few days in June 2006, it felt like the whole world was looking at the town. The Ghana camp was at a hotel in the centre of Würzburg. After the Italy game, the Ghanaians had beaten the favoured Czech team 2-0. Then the night that I arrived, Ghana had just beaten the United States 2-1, and half the town was down at the Maritim Hotel to welcome the team home.
I went down to the hotel. I had no idea what I was doing. When I left the U.K. to go to Germany, I had expected that the World Cup camp for the Ghanaian team would be in some castle high on top of a German mountain. Access would be restricted and tightly guarded. Security would be tight to stop would-be suicide bombers, scandal-seeking journalists, and match-fixing gamblers.
It was blessedly, wonderfully, and worryingly not like that. When I reached the hotel, a huge party was going on. Half of the inhabitants of Würzburg seemed to be at the doors of the hotel to welcome the team back. I watched the crowd. They were straining to get into the hotel. There were flag-draped, middle-aged Ghanaians dancing in the streets while bemused small-town Germans cheered them on.
This was the flip side of the subtle racism that I saw at the station and throughout Germany. Over the next few days around the hotel I saw that Africans were not ignored; now they were happy people who danced in the streets. I had a drink across from the hotel with a Ghanaian. Enthusiastic Germans there exclaimed about the happy Africans and gave us lots of thumbs-up about their spirit. Here is the problem: the Ghanaian I drank with was a founder of his own welding supply company in the West Ghana gold mines. He had been a gold miner himself for five years. He was a tough businessman in one of the toughest environments in the world. But to the people in the bar, he was a happy African. It is the inability to see a person as a person, rather than as a blank space or a cliché, that defines racism.
I drank a glass of wine with the ex-miner. Two Ghanaian players in white T-shirts wandered past the window. They were holding hands. I was touched. Amid the hurly-burly of flags waving, fans dancing, and cars honking, they looked like two villagers, who happened to be World Cup players, wandering almost innocent through the joyful chaos that they had helped to cause.
“The world says thank you for beating the United States,” gushed the middle-aged German woman in the hotel lobby to the Ghanaian player. She was dressed in black leather trousers and had dyed-blonde hair. She held the young player’s hands for too long and smiled. “You know everyone hates the United States. They are doing all these bad things in Iraq. They have such a terrible reputation around the world and you beat them!” She beamed at the player. He said nothing and had the decency to look embarrassed.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Everything that I read spoke of stern-faced officials pushing back the hordes of people to keep teams separate from potential dangers. There was an article from the 2002 World Cup by the London Evening Standard sternly stating that “FIFA had not established any specific rules to limit the contact between players and officials at the World Cup and bookmakers.” FIFA’s reply in the article had been:
FIFA dismisses the possibility that players or officials could be open to temptation, saying no player would want to do anything but their very best at a World Cup … FIFA says the security will be so tight that players, managers and officials will not be contactable.
Well, that may have been true in Japan and Korea, but it certainly was not true in Germany. I had got so close to one of the players within ten minutes of arriving that I could see how red his ears turned when he was embarrassed.
In fact, over the next six days, I contacted pretty much all of the players, managers, and officials that I wanted to. I did it by taking a strategic decision within about twenty seconds of arriving at the hotel. First, I took a deep breath. Then I mentally counted my remaining euros from the gambling executive lecture. Then I took another deep breath and walked up to the reception desk and booked a room. It is an expensive hotel and a long way, both figuratively and literally, from my place in the backstreets of Bangkok. However, I got a room on the second floor, just past the dining hall where the players, officials, and soon I would eat. Now I could and would wander around talking to anyone I wanted to. I thought to myself repeatedly over the time I spent there that if it were this simple for a penny-pinching academic researcher, it must be very easy for a rich gambler.
Even booking into the hotel was probably unnecessary. Everyone and anyone seemed to wander around almost at will. I watched the televised matches of other games, sitting two along from the most famous African players of their generation: Abédi Pelé and Tony Yeboah. There was something disconcerting in both how young and how normal the atmosphere was around the Ghanaian team. If you have ever been in a sports tournament, then you know the atmosphere: half family, half athletes preparing for the bout. Injuries are discussed. A round of small commitments dominates the time. Two of the younger players came down from the elevator, late for the reception at the town square.
“What time is it?” snapped Anthony Baffoe, one of the stars of the great Ghana team of the early 1990s who was helping out the current squad.
The two of them smile, embarrassed.
“You were supposed to be down here at six thirty. Let’s go.”
One morning I saw Michael Essien, the Ghanaian star of Chelsea, having breakfast a few tables over from me. On the television screen during games, he looks like a snarling pit bull of a player. In person, he seemed far younger and less muscular. All the players looked like that. So young and normal. It seemed a contradiction that at the centre of the marketing hype, the nationalistic fervour, the countless TV programs and newspaper articles, the World Cup is just another tournament of young players playing soccer.
The first thing to do was track down anyone who was an Under-17 coach. Chin had claimed that his runner was an Under-17 coach. They were two youth coaches with the delegation: Sam Arady and Cecil Jones Attuquayefio. I asked to meet them on the restaurant patio. Before they arrived, I paced nervously up and down, wondering what I would say if it either of them turned out to be the same man I had seen a few weeks before in Bangkok. I need not have worried. As soon as I saw them, I realized that neither of these men was the person I had seen in Thailand. They were much older and they were extraordinarily talented men. Between the two of them, they had coached teams to successes in, among other things, an Under-17 Africa Cup, an Under-17 World Cup, and an Olympic medal. I asked Arday what his best moment had been in a long, storied career:
The best moment I have had with Ghanaian football was in Barcelona. It was the first time an African team had won a medal in the Olympics, and for me, it was like something had happened to my life. And when we went to the [Olympic] village and we saw our team, I was very happy … It is something I will cherish and cherish forever.
Until I spoke to Chin, I had never really taken much notice of Ghanaian soccer. It was a huge oversight. In terms of youth soccer, Ghana is an international powerhouse. In the last twenty years, the number of Under-17 World Cups either won or placed second by the Ghanaians is just behind Brazil. The morning that I spoke to them, the Serbian team had failed in the World Cup. They had failed ignominiously badly. The Ghanaian coach was Serbian. I told Arday and Jones that they should fax in their resumes to the Serbian FA. They laughed. But there was a painful side to their laughter. It is considered a joke that an African coach should submit his resume to a European team, even when an African coach has won youth continental championships, youth World Cups, and Olympic medals. It is racism that still afflicts the sport in Africa. I asked them about this issue.
This is the problem in the whole of Africa, and I think that we African coaches have not been given the opportunity to offer ideas that would be very crucial to the development of football in our country or Africa in general. When it comes to the coaching of the national team, they want to go for an expatriate. They don’t seem to have confidence in us. In this whole of Africa, Ghana included, they have never had confidence in us, and therefore it is difficult for us
even to have access to the national team.
This attitude may have something to do with the mysterious para dox that has plagued Ghanaian soccer for the last twenty years. They dominate youth soccer to such a degree that their only consistent rivals are Nigeria and Brazil. At the senior level, over one hundred Ghanaian players are playing or have played in the top European leagues. Yet they have never, until 2006, shown what they are capable of on the world stage at the senior level. The team that typifies this paradox is the one of the early 1990s. That team should have dominated African and international soccer. Its stars – Abédi Pelé, Tony Yeboah, and Anthony Baffoe – were high-ranking European players. Abédi Pelé was voted African player of the year three times; he had won a European Champions League medal with Olympique de Marseille. On paper there was no way that they should not have challenged for the World Cup. Yet they did not. In 1993, there occurred a heartbreaking game that every Ghanaian fan remembers only too well. The team was to play the winners of the 1990 World Cup, the Germans, in Germany. In the first half, the Ghanaians played like they were the World Cup winners and were leading 1-0. The second half was so bad that it would have been funny, if it had not been so painful: the Germans came storming back, utterly outplaying the Ghanaians. They even scored three goals in one minute, and won the match 6-1. In Ghana it is known as the “Bochum Disaster,” and one popular theory that explains the odd match is that at half-time the Ghanaian officials came into the dressing room and explained that there would be two different levels of pay for the game: the foreign-based stars on the team would receive one level of pay ment, and the Ghana-based players would receive another, much lower, pay. The players who played in the Ghana league were not happy with the proposal and made their discontent clear in the most obvious way possible.
The man who first told me that story was the best of the Ghanaian journalists, the cerebral and insightful Michael Oti Adjei. He runs a TV talk show on sports in Ghana and loves his country and team with a passion. We struck up a friendship and one day over coffee, he tried to explain to me how much this team meant to his country: