Search: ' Yugoslavia'

The story of football’s greatest cult team
by Rob Smyth, Lars Eriksen and Mike Gibbons
Bloomsbury,  £12.99
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 328 June 2014

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If you wanted entertaining football from a European national side in the mid-1980s,  the pickings on offer were slim. Spain were a shower of hackers, Germany ruthless but uninspired, Italy suffering a post-1982 hangover, Holland in the doldrums – and England were England. There were only three shows in town: France, the USSR and Denmark.

Michel Hidalgo’s marvellous France team chiselled their names down in history by winning the 1984 European Championship, and the USSR lit up Mexico 86 in tremendous style. The Danes were left with nothing after a pair of traumatic defeats by Spain in Lyon and Querétaro. The memory of the sizzling football remains, though, and this reappraisal of them is long overdue. Despite its tendency to write subsequent Denmark teams out of history, Danish Dynamite, which grew out of a 2009 article on the Guardian‘s website, is largely terrific.

With the exceptions of Frank Arnesen and Jan Molby, all the players are interviewed, as is manager Sepp Piontek, now aged 74 and still full of combative vigour. A ruthless hatchet-man as a player in the Bundesliga,  Piontek brought a dash of cold-water efficiency to Danish football’s free-spirit mentality and coaxed results out of them that would have seemed utterly implausible just five or six years previously. The team was full of offbeat, off-kilter characters: Soren Lerby, so ferociously competitive that Morten Olsen dubbed him Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Preben Elkjaer, the party animal who never drank beer; Ole Qvist,  the goalkeeper who played out of his skin at Euro 84 and then went straight back to his job as a motorcycle police officer in Copenhagen; Ivan Nielsen, the easygoing centre-back who is now a plumber and conducted his interview while sitting on an upturned bucket in his garage.

And the football was never less than blinding. As is mentioned here, Denmark played as if it was always the 85th minute and they were a goal down. Watch one of their games on DVD today – the 5-0 thrashing of Yugoslavia at Euro 84, for example, or the extraordinarily action-packed 4-2 victory over the USSR in Copenhagen a year later – and the footage looks like an animated cartoon on fast-forward, with players flooding into the midfield from all areas of the pitch, joining up with the attack in their droves, and scoring goals from the craziest of angles. The party was too good to last.

Just ten days after dismembering Uruguay at the 1986 World Cup, the Danes exited the competition in shattering, and somehow tragic, fashion when a solid but unexceptional Spain happily picked them off on the counter-attack and beat them 5-1, scarcely credibly. And that’s more or less where the story ends – Euro 88, where Piontek’s ageing team lost all three matches, is barely mentioned, and the subsequent glory of Euro 92 is covered in just a couple of pages. This comes across as laziness and a bad call, but in all other respects Danish Dynamite is a wonderful read and an exhilarating nostalgia trip.

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Partizan pleasure, pain and paranoia
by James Moor
Pitch Publishing, £12.99
Reviewed by Marcus Haydon
From WSC 322 December 2013

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The collapse of communist-era structures had a profound effect on football in central and eastern Europe, but the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia created even deeper fault lines. Modern-day Serbia, which was home to Europe’s best team 22 years ago, now has the continent’s 25th best (or 29th worst, depending on your perspective) league according to the UEFA coefficients. Its historic powers, Partizan and Red Star Belgrade, perpetually battle for supremacy in a competition whose numbers are topped up by minnows from the country’s provinces and capital’s suburbs.

With the competitiveness of the Yugoslav era gone, the corruption and off-field problems that blight the game seem to carry added importance. Clubs are no longer arms of the state but continue to be exploited for political and commercial reasons. On the terraces xenophobia is a persistent issue, leading to attacks founded on race or, as is more common in this part of Europe, ethnicity. For James Moor, an Arsenal fan posted in Belgrade by the Foreign Office, football presented him with a conduit through which to observe and attempt to decode Serbia’s complexities. Initially it is his way of making local friends – it is they who are responsible for his allegiance to Partizan – but it ends up taking him across the country to experience firsthand the varied ethnic tapestry and supporter culture.

The book is presented chronologically, following Partizan during a season in which they are eliminated from the Champions League qualifiers by Shamrock Rovers, lose three times to rivals Red Star, sack their management team mid-season and see their two main supporters’ groups at constant loggerheads. Oh, and they win the league. Taking his posting seriously, Moor engages quickly with the country and its language, and while his anecdotes about watching Arsenal title successes on television and a clumsy description of the “English Championship League One” can leave you suspicious of his credentials, he makes up for it in the context of his new surroundings with a strong awareness of regional history and contemporary politics. A trip to Novi Pazar, where the population has a Bosniak (Slav Muslim) majority, is carefully framed with valuable non-footballing context and his detailed translations of chants, banners and terrace conversations add cultural currency to what are otherwise just descriptions of Serbian league matches from two years ago.

Despite making a living from diplomacy, Moor manages to avoid the occupational trait of using a great number of words to say very little of note on complex or controversial issues. Equally, he is also not guilty of simply feeding the reader polemics from his terrace acquaintances without first coupling them with some objective analysis of his own. The prose can at times get drawn a little too much into the “banter” of the matchday experience – a questionably large number of things are “awesome” – but the enduring feeling is that it’s heartening to see work such as this published.

As Jonathan Wilson points out in the foreword, this is essentially “a book about the second most famous team in Belgrade” and, accordingly, both Moor and his publisher deserve great credit for bringing it to print at all. Hopefully the knowledge and insight offered in this example will inspire more publishers to show similar faith.

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A History of the Goalkeeper
by Jonathan Wilson
Orion Books, £20
Reviewed by Jonathan O’Brien
From WSC 314 April 2013

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Of all the “name” football writers on the merry-go-round today, Jonathan Wilson is arguably the best value, even if a few of his many theories and pet obsessions tend towards the overly self-indulgent. He’s a busy man, too – running the quarterly Blizzard while producing columns for the Guardian and Sports Illustrated and roughly one book per year. The Outsider is his sixth tome since 2006, the kind of workrate that sees a lot of writers spread themselves too thinly. But Wilson’s prodigious energy doesn’t seem to dilute the quality of what he comes up with and this meticulous study of the goalkeeping art is characterised by the attention to detail that he brings to everything he writes.

Starting with a study of football in the 1800s, he demonstrates how the mere fact of being a goalkeeper has always carried with it the smell of the scapegoat. In Victorian times the position was occupied by small boys, “duffers” and “funk-sticks” (milksops who had failed to perform elsewhere on the pitch). As the years went on and the sport evolved at snail’s pace, deaths were commonplace for keepers – Celtic’s John Thomson, accidentally kicked in the head during a match in 1931, being an infamous example.

Wilson has put in plenty of air miles, heading for locales as far-flung as Brazil and Russia. The latter country, which once produced great keepers by the lorryload, has nursed a special obsession with the position since before the 1917 revolution (an assertion backed up with quotes from none other than novelist Vladimir Nabokov). Brazil, contrariwise, has had mostly white keepers due to some strange socio-racial issues – the odd exception such as Dida not withstanding. Although, as Wilson shows, English football has nurtured a similar instinctive distrust of black keepers.

African keepers, specifically, sit even lower down the food chain of perception. Two of the best, Cameroon’s Thomas N’Kono and Joseph-Antoine Bell, enjoyed a (mostly) friendly 20-year rivalry after learning from Yugoslavian legend Vladimir Beara. N’Kono was the natural, Bell the hard worker. N’Kono shone at the 1982 World Cup, got a move to Spain out of it and became an Espanyol hero. Bell had to wait until the disastrous USA 94 campaign to play in the finals, by which time he was 39 and too far over the hill to do himself justice.

Wilson’s fondness for idiosyncratic structuring sometimes weakens the book’s sense of direction. The Brazilian chapter abruptly veers into Scotland for several pages, then heads back to Brazil. Not that the material therein isn’t interesting or informative – the passages concerning the appalling bad luck that plagued Jim Leighton’s long career are particularly vivid – but layering the material in such an odd way seems unnecessarily perverse.

In the main The Outsider is a terrific history of its subject. It wears its knowledgeable perspective lightly and deftly works its vast research into the text without battering you over the head with it. Wilson can always be relied upon to come up with something a little bit different and a little bit special, and this has plenty of both.

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The rules which determine international eligibility must be looked into, argues Steve Menary

Equatorial Guinea’s run to the quarter-finals of the Africa Cup of Nations augurs badly for the credibility of future international tournaments. Only five players in the co-hosts’ squad were born in the country. Nine came from Spain, Equatorial Guinea’s former colonial rulers, but players such as Thierry Fidjeu and Narcisse Ekanga – the perpetrator of a shocking dive regularly revisited on YouTube – seemingly have no links to Equatorial Guinea at all.

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One Belgrade club has floundered since the assassination of their infamous and highly feared owner in 2000. Richard Mills reports

Earlier this year Serbian pop singer Svetlana “Ceca” Ražnatović was finally charged with embezzlement over the sale of footballers and the illegal possession of firearms. These charges date back nearly ten years and relate to transfers from Obilić Belgrade Football Club. Ceca took over the running of Obilić when her husband Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović was assassinated in 2000 after an extraordinary life which included bank robberies, prison breaks, commanding a paramilitary organisation and indictment for war crimes. In death Arkan continues to be a legendary figure among Serbian nationalists, but the plight of his football club has been less well documented.

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