It is with a slightly goofy glow of pleasure that I write
this. Today, I took delivery of Issue Four of The Blizzard – at
present the most highly-regarded publication in the UK for ‘proper’ football
writing – and there, on page 28, is a piece penned by yours truly, nestled in a Spain-themed segment alongside the work of such distinguished football scribes as Graham Hunter, a regular on
Sky Sports’ Revista de la Liga and author of Barca: The Making of the Greatest Team in the World, and David
Winner, the man behind definitely the finest football book I’ve read up to yet in Brilliant Orange: the Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football. My piece is followed by an interview with Sir Alex Ferguson conducted by Philippe Auclair, who has written acclaimed books on Cantona and Blair(ism) and must have a degree of clout to get the russet-bugled one in a one-on-one. Meanwhile, previous
issues have featured, among others: Gabriele Marcotti, often seen on ITV’s Champions League highlights
show with Gordon Strachan and/or Andy Townsend, and author of Fabio Capello’s
biography; Sid Lowe, The Guardian’s Spanish football correspondent and regular
talking head on Revista de La Liga; as well as several colleagues of Lowe’s on the forementioned newspaper: Raphael Honigstein, Rob Smyth, Scott Murray, Jacob
Steinberg, the brilliant Barney Ronay, and the esteemed editor himself, Jonathan
Wilson, author of the acclaimed history of football formations and tactics, Inverting the Pyramid.
The honour of this Blizzard
appearance – which came about after reviewing
Wilson’s latest book, a biography of Brian Clough, for the Nottingham-based LeftLion – was the dimly hoped-for
outcome of a vague and improvised idea I had to help me have my voice heard above thousands of
‘competitors’ in the blogosphere – some with genuine expertise; fewer (although still a good few) with
writing talent – and to get my stuff to the type of readers (and commissioning
editors, more importantly) who might appreciate it. Getting busy getting
busy! It remains to be seen whether this will pay off, but this is certainly a
fair dollop of kudos.
Originally, I had approached the excellent In Bed With Maradona website, telling
them I had a piece that might interest them, one that germinated from a YouTube
surf and worked back from there to create a genealogy of the event captured in the clip at
the foot of this piece. Yet the further I got into researching it, the more I
felt it had more than enough meat on the bones to merit a broader platform (also, good
as it looks, IBWM do not pay their contributors, and the Internet is not the best place for 6,000-word articles). Around this time I was alerted by an acquaintance, Gary
Naylor, on Twitter that Wilson had read, and liked, my review of Nobody Ever Says Thank You, so I thought I might as
well pitch him the article I was
writing (and – why not? – a few other ideas while I was at it).
Even though it might have lent itself to being theory-heavy, to using some of the philosophy with which I’d grown conversant over the last decade of postgraduate study (since you ask, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of desire and radical materialism found in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, particularly Volume 1, Anti-Oedipus), the final
article deliberately steered clear of such an approach; if not quite in at the
shallow end, it certainly didn’t require a glossary of terms. Understandably
given such a background, a fairly theoretical standpoint – albeit one that
seeks to open up these strange ideas to everyday matters – will be a leitmotif of my work as I
aim to find a niche in the vast virtual landscape of words on football that gets churned
out on a daily basis (The FCF have shown great faith and indulged some of my, um, less commercial efforts)... So, my doctoral thesis was an arduous, if ultimately rewarding,
engagement with Peronism (via Deleuze and Guattari), the Argentine political movement named after the husband of Evita, and if that effort is not to prove a
colossal waste of time beyond the war medals jangling bashfully on my chest, then I have to apply
some of its concepts and remarkable insights to everyday life, football
included. Thankfully, Wilson
is keen on this approach and has accepted my pitch for another piece for Issue Six, out in September.
Anyway, the article I have in the current issue – which can
bought in .pdf form for 1p or in hard copy for £6 min. (RRP is £12) – is the
story of the curious short-term rivalry that took hold between Athletic Bilbao
and Barcelona at the start of the 1980s, a fairly fraught time in Spanish
history as the nation made the transition to democracy after 40 years of
Francoist dictatorship. Basque terrorism was at its height, and this no doubt
contributed to the Spanish military plotting for a restoration of dictatorship, Colonel
Antonio Tejero famously storming the Spanish parliament in 23 February 1982
and holding the nation’s políticos
hostage for 24 hours – a tragicomic, almost Fawltyesque episode, which was
captured on State TV.
'El tejerazo' |
Against this agitated backdrop, a rugged and highly
motivated Athletic Bilbao side assembled by the crabby Javier Clemente – who would
go on to coach the Spanish national team from 1992-98, of course – won back-to-back
La Liga titles, this following the twin titles of their neighbours Real Sociedad. These four straight championship victories constituted the
high watermark of Basque football, and happened at a time when both clubs still
operated a Basque-only playing policy – something which remains the case with
Athletic, although the criteria as to what constitutes ‘Basqueness’ is slightly
malleable (aren’t all nations?) but at any rate territorially incorporates not
only the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, but all of the
Basque-speaking provinces in both Spain (thus Navarre as well, with current
star striker Fernando Llorente having been born in Pamplona) and south-western France, these together
forming Euskal Herria – the Basque
homeland.
Thus it was that two of Spain’s oldest professional clubs –
clubs that ought to have shared an affinity, having both been the target of Franco’s
repression of regional cultures and languages (Basque, Catalan and even his own
galego) in an effort to impose
totalitarian, centralized government across the land – became
locked in an unseemly short-term squabble, akin to that which engulfed Chelsea
and Leeds United in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a rivalry that also hit a
nadir at a domestic cup final, coincidentally. With several factors adding to the simmering bad
blood (what Spaniards call morbo), the Copa del Rey final
of 1984 was a fractious affair won 1-0 by Athletic to secure a double, their
last domestic silverware. At full-time, pandemonium engulfed the field as Maradona
kicked off with his erstwhile
tormentors – his last act in the famous blaugrana colours before being sold to Napoli .
Coincidentally, this May, some 28 years later (no, not another movie in the Danny Boyle franchise), Barcelona
and Athletic, the competition’s two most successful clubs, are due to meet
again in the final. Real Madrid
have this time declined to offer their stadium – roughly equidistant from the two cities and the
largest neutral venue for the game – as host venue. Atlético Madrid’s
Vicente Calderón has instead been chosen by the Spanish Football Federation.
Anyway, if you are interested in the back story to this
brawl, why not pick up a copy of The Blizzard
and peruse ‘The Other Rival, Another Way’ – much better than the mouthful of a reluctantly conferred title I had given it: ‘Briefly en contra: Barça,
Bilbao and the Battle of the Bernabéu’, incorporating the Spanish language and the theme of short-term rivalry via a pun on
a famous film). I’m glad the editor saw fit to change it.
I have my copy and I look forward to reading it.
ReplyDeleteDon't you just love it when a plan comes together?
ReplyDeleteCongrats. Look forward to reading it.
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