Hand of God (10 page)

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why do the Germans hate us?’

Choosing to ignore the behaviour of the Greek football fans towards the lads in Hertha FC, I said that I didn’t think it was true that Germans hated Greeks.

‘On the contrary,’ I added. ‘I have lots of German friends who love Greece.’

‘Then why are the Germans so hell-bent on crucifying us for a loan from the European Central bank? We’re on our knees already. But now they seem to want us to crawl on our bellies for the central bank’s loan package.’

I shook my head and said that I wasn’t in Piraeus to answer questions about politics and ducking an honest answer like that would probably have been fine. But then Bekim – Russian-bred, but born in Turkey, the ancient enemy of Greece – jumped in and things really deteriorated when he proceeded to make some less than diplomatic remarks about public spending and how perhaps Greece really didn’t need to have the largest army in Europe. The fact that he was speaking in fluent Greek only made things worse because we could hardly spin what he said and blame his answer on Ellie, our translator. Asked if Bekim was worried about a big demonstration planned for the night of the game outside the parliament, Bekim said it was about time some of the demonstrators put their energies into digging Greece out of the hole it was in; better still, they could start cleaning the city which, in his opinion, badly needed some TLC.

‘You’ve been living beyond your means for almost twenty years,’ he added, in English, for the benefit of our newspapers. ‘It’s about time you paid your bill.’

Several Greek reporters stood up and angrily denounced Bekim; and at this point Ellie advised that it might be best if we cut short the conference.

In the car back to the hotel I cursed myself for bringing Bekim to the press conference in the first place.

‘Once was unfortunate,’ I said. ‘But twice looks like downright fucking carelessness on my part.’

‘Sorry, boss,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to cause you any problems.’

‘What devil possessed you?’ I asked. ‘Christ, their fans are bad enough when it’s a friendly. You’ve made sure that tomorrow’s going to be extra rough.’

‘It was going to be rough anyway,’ he insisted. ‘You know that and I know that. Their supporters are bastards and nothing I said is going to make the way they behave any worse. And look, I didn’t tell them anything they don’t already know.’

‘We’re a football team,’ I said, ‘not a lobby group. Not content with pissing off the Russians when we were in Russia, you now seem to have managed to do the same with the Greeks. What is it with you?’

‘I love this country,’ he said. ‘I hate seeing what’s happening here. Greece is such a beautiful country, and it’s getting fucked in the ass by a bunch of anarchists and communists.’

He shrugged and looked out of the window at the graffiti-covered walls of the streets we were driving through, the many abandoned shops and offices, the piles of uncollected rubbish, the potholed roads, the beggars and the squeegee guys at the traffic lights and on the grass verges at the roadsides. Greece might have been a beautiful country but Athens was ugly.

‘I love it,’ he whispered. ‘I really do.’

‘Fuckin’ beats me why,’ said Gary. ‘Look at the state of it. Full of fuckin’ jakey bastards and spongers on the social. I’d never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. Christ, I’ve seen some fucking squallies in my time. But Athens – Jesus, Bekim. Call this a capital city? I reckon Toxteth is in a better state than fucking Athens.’

‘Hey, boss.’ Bekim laughed. ‘I’ve got a good idea. After the match, why don’t you let Gary do the press conference, on his own.’

The following morning, before breakfast and while the temperatures were still in the low twenties, we had a light training session. Apilion was located in Koropi, a twenty-minute drive north from the hotel, and on a wide expanse of very rural land at the foot of Mount Hymettus which towers over three thousand feet over the eastern boundary of the city of Athens. In antiquity there was a sanctuary to Zeus on the summit; these days there’s just a television transmitter, a military base and a view of Athens that’s only beaten by the one out of a passenger jet’s window.

A green flag with a white shamrock declared that Apilion was the training ground of Panathinaikos FC. Surrounded with olive and almond trees, fig-bearing cacti, wild orchids and flocks of ragged sheep and goats, the air was clear and clean after the congested atmosphere of Piraeus and downtown Athens. From time to time one of the local farmers fired a gun at some birds, scattering them to the wind like a handful of seeds and startling our more metropolitan-minded players. In spite of that and the presence of several journalists camped alongside the carefully screened perimeter fence, Apilion felt like an oasis of calm. Nothing was too much trouble for the people from Panathinaikos; as the other half of the city’s Old Firm all they cared about was that they might assist us in sticking it to their oldest rival, Olympiacos. Football is like that. Your enemy is my friend. It’s not enough that your own team succeeds; any victory is always enhanced by a rival’s failure, no matter who they’re playing. Panathinaikos would have supported a team of Waffen-SS if they beat the red and white of Olympiacos.

‘Fucking hell,’ exclaimed Simon Page, staring up at the flag as we got off the bus. ‘Are we in bloody Ireland, or what?’ He clapped his hands and shouted at the players. ‘Hurry up and get on that training ground, and watch where you’re putting your feet in case you tread on a four-leaf clover. I’ve a feeling we’re going to need all the luck we can get here.’

I could hardly argue with him since our new team doctor, O’Hara, was returning to London after his wife had been taken ill. Antonis Venizelos, our liaison from Panathinaikos, was still trying to find us a replacement doctor in case of emergency.

‘The doctors’ strike doesn’t make this easy,’ he explained a little later on. ‘Even doctors who don’t work in the public sector are reluctant to work today. Operations have been cancelled. Patients sent home. But don’t worry, Mr Manson. The Karaiskakis Stadium is right next to the Metropolitan private hospital. Even though it is in Piraeus this is a very good hospital.’

He lit a menthol cigarette with the hairiest hands I’d ever seen and stared up at Mount Hymettus.

‘I have some other news that might have an important bearing on the game.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’

‘I just heard on the telephone,’ he said. ‘The Olympiacos team were paid their wages today, and in full. This will put them in a very good mood. So tonight I think they will try very hard.’

‘When do they normally get paid?’

‘I mean that it might be two or three months since those American bastards last got their wages.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I said.

Antonis grinned and popped some seeds in his mouth that he chewed like gum and which sweetened his breath. He was a handsome man with an Alan Hansen-sized scar on his forehead that travelled across his left eyebrow like tiny tramlines, lending him a vaguely Cyclopean aspect.

‘Exactly. It’s hell for everyone right now. At least it is in Greece, my friend. Nothing that happens in this country is like anywhere else. Remember that. Your boys get paid at the end of the month, just like other people in England, yes? But in Greece, the end of the month and payday might be several more weeks in coming – perhaps longer – if you know what I mean. Our university teachers haven’t been paid in months.’

‘I can’t see our lot going without their wages for very long,’ I said as Simon and some of the City players returned to the team coach. ‘They’re coin-operated; like everyone else in the English game right now.’

‘You got that right,’ Simon grumbled.

‘Sometimes,’ said Antonis, ‘the people in this country work for months without pay only to find out at the end of it that their employer has gone out of business and doesn’t have the money to pay them. In Greece getting paid what you’re supposed to be paid is like winning the lottery.’

‘But why do you call Olympiacos American bastards?’ I asked.

Antonis sneered. ‘Because American navy warships used to dock in the port of Piraeus. You see, when their sailors came ashore they used to sleep with the whores of Piraeus. Which is why we call them the sons of whores or American bastards, although quite frankly all of the women of Piraeus are whores. It’s not just us. Everybody in Greece hates Olympiacos. They’re a bunch of cheats and liars.’ He shrugged. ‘Believe me, my friends, they say much worse things about us.’

‘That’s a little hard to believe,’ said Simon. ‘But what
do
they say?’

Antonis shook his head as if what anyone from Olympiacos thought could be of no real account. ‘They think that because we’re Athenians we think we’re better than them. That we’re snobs. Which of course we are when it comes to Olympiacos. They call us
lagoi
– rabbits, because they think we run away from a fight. Which is just wishful thinking on their part. That is no surprise. They’re just a bunch of
gavroi
.’
He smiled. ‘This a kind of very small fish you find in the harbour that eats the shit from all the ships docked there.’

Simon and I exchanged a look of surprise at the level of enmity from a man who otherwise seemed perfectly civilised and urbane. I knew what the big, xenophobic Yorkshireman was thinking just by looking at his face. Since we’d arrived in Athens, he’d said it often enough: ‘Bloody Greeks. They’re their own worst enemies. I might feel sorry for the bastards if they weren’t so fucking bolshie.’

‘Good footballers, though,’ was what Simon actually said now. ‘How many times have they won the Greek League? Thirty-six times, is it? And the Greek Cup twenty-three times? And they’d have won the league this year again, if they hadn’t been docked all those points by the Hellenic Football Federation. Which is how we come to be playing them now, in the play-offs.’

Antonis pulled a face and looked away. ‘You can teach anyone to play football,’ he said simply. ‘Even a
malakas
from Piraeus. That is why they have to cheat. You might be the favourites for this match but don’t underestimate the capacity of the
gavroi
for low tricks. Tonight, it won’t just be eleven men you are playing. It will be sixteen, if you include the five match officials. And the crowd, of course; don’t forget the so-called Legend. They’re like another player, and a vicious one. There will be nothing friendly about the place you’re going tonight. And you can forget all your English ideas of the beautiful game. There’s no beautiful game in Greece. There’s no beautiful anything. There’s just – anger.’ He nodded. ‘In Greece it’s the one thing of which we have an unlimited supply.’

Whenever you see a football manager pacing up and down his technical area shouting encouragement and making signs at his team like a demented on-course bookmaker it makes for compelling television – the cameras love to see ‘the pressure written on the manager’s face’. In truth, the players shouldn’t even be looking at the manager but at the ball and, above the noise of the crowd, they seldom hear anything but the ref’s whistle, unless you’re Sam Allardyce. Most of the time you patrol your lonely ten yards of space only for the sake of appearances; your suffering shows that you care. Plus, it’s harder to sack a manager who is soaked to the skin, with mud on the knees of his Armani suit, not to mention some gob on his back.

Occupying a technical area in Piraeus is even more intimidating with thirty thousand baying Greeks at your back, and frankly it could be something more lethal than a bit of gob that’s coming your way. Just ask the Greek assistant referee who got hit with a flying chair during the Greek Cup in 2011. Venturing from the dugout at the Karaiskakis on a swelteringly hot night in August, it felt like I was leaving the safety of the walls of Troy to duel with Achilles; not recommended. But at Olympiacos it isn’t just crazy fans you have to watch out for: in 2010, despite winning the game 2–1 following some questionable refereeing decisions, the Olympiacos owner, Evangelos Marinakis, attacked Panathinaikos players Djibril Cissé and Georgios Karagounis at the end of the game.

So after just five minutes of the first half, when Bekim Develi scored from twenty-five yards with a shot that looked like a diagram from an artillery officer’s trajectory chart, I wasn’t that surprised that I should be hit on the shoulder with a banana as I threw off my linen jacket which was already damp with sweat and ran to the edge of my technical area to interrupt his thumb-sucking tribute to his new baby son, with a simple handshake.

It had all started so nicely, too, with both teams trooping calmly to the centre of the field, hand in hand with twenty-two local mascot children to the tune of Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’. What could be more calculated to create an inspiring image of UEFA’s family values and the honourable pursuit of victory in competitive sport? Even so, I sometimes wonder if any of these European football sides are aware that Handel’s music was composed especially for the anointing of an
English
king. This was followed by a minute’s near silence for the death of some Greek sportsman of whom I confess I’d never heard. But what the hell? A minute’s silence before a football game
for anything
strikes me as a good idea, especially in Greece – anything to stop those fucking drums and the warlike chants of the Gate 7 ultras. To listen that awful, masculine sound, brimful of aggression and testosterone, you would think yourself back at Rorke’s Drift in 1879, facing ten thousand Zulus.

I ignored the banana which – a later replay showed – must have come from the VIP seats. I guess VIPs are just as racist as anyone else. It didn’t hurt; not as much as a chair might have done. You can ignore almost anything when you’re a goal up after five minutes in the Champions League; the way I felt at that particular moment I could probably have ignored a spear between the shoulder blades. I turned back to the dugout and bicep-curled both arms, triumphantly.

The banana was almost immediately forgotten in the disaster that swiftly followed. Because no sooner had the game restarted than Bekim Develi missed a simple pass from Jimmy Ribbans, fell to his knees as if in penance for his mistake, and then collapsed face down in the centre circle, to the loud disdain of the Greeks. Seconds later, both Zénobe Schuermans and Daryl Hemingway began waving frantically towards our dugout. The club physio, Gareth Haverfield, didn’t need prompting from me; he snatched up his bag of tricks and sprinted onto the pitch.