Hand of God (8 page)

‘Who says I’m not?’

I smiled. ‘I suppose that means you’re coming to the game.’

The Karaiskakis Stadium, in the old port of Piraeus, looked like a half-sized version of the Emirates, in London, with a capacity of just 33,000. The impression was bolstered by the fact that Emirates Air was an Olympiacos team sponsor and because of their red and white strip, although the shirt was more like Sunderland’s than Arsenal’s. The match was not well attended, but it was enthusiastically supported. The Gate 7 boys, or Legend as they liked to call themselves, made their calculatedly intimidating presence very loudly felt behind the German goal. They had bare chests and big drums and a sort of director of operations who kept his back to the pitch for almost the whole game so that he might properly orchestrate the obscene songs and low, Neanderthal chants. From time to time bright red flares were let off in the stadium but these were ignored by the police and security, who kept a low profile to the point of near invisibility. I was surprised at how unwilling the local police were to interfere in what took place inside the ground; they were forbidden to use the security cameras inside the stadium to identify potential troublemakers, a result of some obscure privacy law.

Valentina and I were seated in a VIP area immediately behind the German dugout. At eighty euros a ticket in a country where the average monthly income was just six hundred and fifty euros you might have expected these mostly middle-aged and elderly supporters to be better behaved. Not a bit of it. I don’t speak any Greek but thanks to Valentina I was soon able to distinguish and understand words that would certainly have had the users of their Anglo-Saxon equivalents quickly removed from almost any ground in England. Words like
arápis
(nigger),
afrikanós migás
(coon),
maïmoú
(monkey),
melitzána
(eggplant),
píthikos
(ape).

The man in the seat beside me must have been in his late sixties but every so often he would leave off smoking his Cohiba cigar or eating his cardamom seeds, leap onto the top of wall, bend over the edge of the German dugout and bellow, ‘
Germaniká
malakas
,’ at the unfortunate Bastian Hoehling.

‘I keep on hearing that phrase,
Germaniká malakas
,’ I said to Valentina. ‘I get the
Germaniká
part. But what does
malakas
mean?’

‘It means wanker,’ she said. ‘That’s a very popular word in Greece. You can’t get by without it.’

I found it hard to condemn the man for his choice of language. As I’d discovered, there are worse things to be called at a Greek football match. It’s a passionate game and stupid people watch it just as often as clever ones; you can encourage respect in football, and I was all in favour of that, but you can’t stop people from being ignorant.

The match was keenly contested but the Greeks seemed genuinely surprised that the Berliners should have come at them so aggressively. Although Olympiacos competed strongly for every ball, they were quickly behind thanks to a superb header from Hertha’s talented Adrian Ramos that made me understand why Borussia Dortmund were so keen to secure the Colombian’s services after their own top striker, Robert Lewandowski, had left to join Bayern Munich in the early summer. But oddly the Gate 7 boys didn’t even pause; indeed, they carried on shouting as if the German goal had not happened.

Meanwhile, trying my best to ignore the crowd, I made tactical notes in an ancient Filofax I always used for this kind of thing:

Greeks weak at defending set-pieces. Muscular and fit-looking, but small of stature which makes them less equipped to compete in the air when good crosses swing in. Bekim Develi or Prometheus can give anyone problems if they get the right service. Develi tends to drift naturally to the right and this should probably be encouraged as Miguel Torres, likely Olympiacos’s right left-back, plays more like a right-winger than a defender
– especially if Hernán Pérez isn’t playing, which he wasn’t today. If Develi does find space, or drags out Sambou Yatabaré (most likely centre half), he is more than capable of putting Jimmy Ribbans through. I hope our referee will be better than the one here today. I wouldn’t be surprised if the penalty earned him a small bonus
.

‘It’s ages since I went to a football match,’ said Valentina as the Gate 7 hooligans, with arms extended in Nazi salutes, started another nasty song: ‘
Pósoi Evraíoi ékanes aério símera?
’ – How many Jews did you gas today?

‘I can quite understand why.’ I glanced around. ‘You’re about the only woman here, as far as I can see.’

With Hertha’s number one keeper, Thomas Kraft, feeling too ill to play, I had a good chance to assess their second string keeper, Willie Nixon, an American. I’ve always admired American goalkeepers: they’re usually great athletes and Nixon was no exception, pulling off a couple of saves that kept his team in the game. He was young, too.

A few minutes later, I thought I would have a chance to see what Nixon was really made of when Olympiacos won a penalty so unbelievable it looked as if the referee had pulled it out of a top hat. The German defender, Peter Pekarik, brought down one of the Greek players just outside the box – except that the big-screen replay showed he was at least a foot away when Kyriakos dropped to the ground, apparently suffering from a fractured tibia. That was bad enough but the improbably named Pelé, who took the Greek penalty kick, put the ball so high over the crossbar he must have thought he was Jonny Wilkinson; his effort was greeted with a loud and derisive chorus of boos and whistles and, around me, several shouts of
į
líthia
maïmoú
(stupid monkey).

I used to wonder exactly why Socrates had felt obliged to drink hemlock; I guess he must have missed a penalty for Olympiacos, too.

By half time the Berliners were two goals up; they scored again immediately after the break, and that was how the game finished: 3–0. Hertha had won all three games of its Greek peninsular tour and the Schliemann Cup, put up by Hertha’s sponsors, was won by the Germans themselves, which seemed a very German outcome. But it wasn’t Willie Nixon the goalkeeper who had impressed me most, but Hertha’s charismatic team captain, Hörst Daxenberger. Strong as a racehorse and 193 centimetres tall, he looked like a blond Patrick Vieira.

The Schliemann trophy ceremony, like the earlier warm-up, took place in a corner of the field far removed from Greek insults and missiles and Valentina and I joined Hertha for the muted champagne celebration in the players’ tunnel. In spite of the futility of the competition in which they had taken part I was glad for the German lads; they’d had a pretty tough time of it one way or another and were glad to be going back to Berlin. I almost envied Bastian Hoehling returning to a football club that was owned and managed in such an egalitarian way. You might say that Germans have had quite enough of autocrats and dictators. But they couldn’t get enough of Valentina who, it turned out, spoke quite good German; glasses of champagne in their hands, they were round her like wasps at a picnic. She had that effect on men. Perhaps she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in Greece but she was certainly one of the most attractive.

An hour later we returned to the hotel in a limo kindly provided by Hertha FC.

A little to my surprise no money was ever asked for and none offered; and it was only after I arrived back in London that I learned how my night with Valentina owed nothing to good luck and everything to Bekim Develi, when the red-haired Russian let slip that he had paid five thousand euros for me to have Valentina, in advance of me going to Athens.

It was a warm Saturday afternoon in August when we arrived at the King Power Stadium in Leicester for our first match of the new season. Just to the west of the main entrance single sculls were going up and down the River Soar like hi-tech swans. Full of misplaced optimism at being in the Premiership once again, Leicester’s supporters were noisy but hospitable and a far cry from the kind of hostile welcome we could expect when we travelled to Greece the following week. I wondered just how good-humoured these fans would remain when they were faced with the cost of supporting their club at away matches in London and Manchester. It was high time that TV companies like Sky and BT started to insist on ring-fencing a proportion of the money paid to the Premiership to subsidise ticket prices: there’s nothing worse for your armchair fan than seeing empty terraces.

I still hadn’t resolved our goalkeeping crisis – we still needed to replace Didier Cassell – and if there was one player of Pearson’s I really envied it was Leicester goalie Kasper Schmeichel, son of the more famous Peter. Kasper had played for Manchester City and for Leeds United before joining the Foxes in 2011; he’d also played for his country, Denmark, on several occasions, and I had the feeling that, like his father, who had played for Man U until the age of thirty-nine, Kasper’s best years as a keeper still lay ahead of him. With fourteen days left before the summer transfer window closed I was seriously considering asking Viktor Sokolnikov if we could make an offer for the twenty-seven-year-old Dane.

Any doubts about Schmeichel’s ability were swiftly squashed when, just five minutes into the game, we were awarded a penalty. Prometheus powered the ball straight for the bottom right corner of the net, and how Schmeichel got a hand to it seemed nothing short of miraculous. That would have been impressive enough but, having batted the ball straight back at Prometheus, Schmeichel then launched himself across the whole width of the goalmouth, to the very opposite corner, where he just managed to prevent the Nigerian scoring on the rebound. Almost as important as the Dane’s agility was the way he cleverly managed to psych out our man even before he took the penalty kick. After Prometheus had placed the ball on the spot, Schmeichel had calmly walked out of his goal, picked the ball up, dried it on his shirt, and then cheekily tossed it back at the African, who angrily waved Schmeichel back into his goal. Some referees might have given a keeper a yellow card for doing that, but on the first day of the season? It looked like mind games and if it was, it worked.

A team’s overall psychology is never helped when you miss a penalty; and this was dealt a further knock when our captain, Gary Ferguson, scored an own goal which left the home side one-up at half time. Shit like that happens; you learn to shrug it off. What worried me more was seeing Prometheus berate his own team captain. I’m no lip-reader but I think Gary gave the kid a few choice words back, although how he restrained himself from smacking the boy in the mouth is beyond me. Generally speaking, when you’re the captain a smack and a curse tends to work better than just a curse.

‘Forget it, Gary,’ I told him, loudly, in the dressing room. ‘This is football not fucking Quidditch. If you’re a defender and you’re doing your job properly there are always going to be occasions when you’re going to score an own goal. It’s just statistics. A ball you’d clear from your box, nine times out of ten, will go the wrong way because this isn’t snooker and there are no perfect angles. You got your knee to it; and it came off your knee, that’s all. Nobody with a brain in his head could blame you for a goal like that.’

I looked at Prometheus who was busy changing his pillar-box red Puma evoPOWER boots for a pair that looked like they’d been made from an old tabloid newspaper:
Why Always Puma?
said the red headline on the side of the boot.

‘Are you finished pissing around with those fucking boots?’

At last I’d caught his eye.

‘Everyone in football makes mistakes,’ I said. ‘It’s that kind of game. If nobody made those mistakes the game would be as boring as England’s group for Euro 2016. And there’s nothing more boring than that. What I don’t ever want to see is anyone else in this team thinking that they have the right to apportion blame. Especially when they’re not without fault themselves. Finding fault, chewing ears off, arse-kicking and handing out bollockings – that’s my fucking job. Or Gary’s when the match is in actual progress. And if I ever see it happening in this team again I will bite the guilty party on the arse like a fucking hyena. I like my job and I don’t need anyone’s help to say what needs to be said. Clear?’

‘Why you pickin’ on me, man?’ asked Prometheus. ‘I didn’t do nuthin’. All I said to the cap here was that those big, hairy, white Scotsman’s knees of his was goin’ to lose us the game if he wasn’t bloody careful. It was like, a joke, y’know?’

It was no wonder Fergie threw boots around the dressing room; at that particular moment I wanted to take that ridiculous boot out of his hand and ram it down his throat. Gary was muttering, ‘Shut the fuck up,’ while Bekim was shaking his head, silently. Others just turned away as if they didn’t want to see what was going to happen next.

I smiled. ‘It was like a joke, yes, except that it wasn’t fucking funny. You don’t make jokes to your colleagues when they just scored an own goal for the simple reason that they might be feeling a little sensitive. It’s never funny when someone scores an own goal, unless it’s the other team that scores it. I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you, sonny – and don’t ever interrupt me again or I’ll tell Gary to shove one of his big, hairy, white Scotsman’s knees into your small, hairless, black Nigerian balls. That is if you’ve got any balls. Understood?’

Prometheus said nothing which seemed to indicate that he’d got the message. I rocked back on my heels for a moment and glanced around the dressing room. There was no one else I felt deserved any particular criticism; Leicester had ridden their luck, and that was all there was to it.

‘It’s a fact,’ I said, ‘that on the first weekend of the football season, newly promoted clubs often do well. They fancy their chances against one of the big boys. And why not, when they finished the season with – what did they get in the Championship – eighty-six points? They deserve to be in the Premiership and if they can’t give us a good game today, when they’re all fit and rested because only a couple of them saw any international duty, they never will. I guarantee if you play this same team at the end of the season you’ll walk all over them. So, don’t be surprised if their tails are up today. But keep your shape, and keep the ball; pass it around. Toblerone football, like we practised in training. Let them lose themselves in the magic triangles. If necessary, make them so fucking impatient to get on and win the game that they come to you. That’s when you open them up.’