And those of us here in Asia, after being spoiled rotten by having a World Cup actually in our own time zone 4 years ago, are seriously short of sleep since the matches in the round robbin stage basically run from 9pm to 5am, everyday, for 14 days.
What IS football ?
Is it a sport played between 22 players and a ball? Or is it just an excuse for base human tribalism? (One could argue that the World Cup is essentially about tribalism writ large - nationalism, continentalism, ethno-centrism …)
This is the main question (and the excuse!) behind Tim Parks‘ hilarious book “A Season With Verona: Travels around Italy in search of illusion, national character, and goals”. Parks, the quintessential English expatriate in Italy, isn’t just a fanatical supporter of the mediocre provincial football team Hellas Verona (whose place in Italy’s top tier of football, Serie A, has been supplanted since the time of writing by bitter local rivals Chievo Verona), he’s also a talented Booker Prize-shortlisted writer and father of 3 Italian teenagers (one of whom, his eternally pessimistic son Michele, shares his obsession with football and the Hellas Verona team and provides much father-son anecdotal hilarity).
Parks chose to structure the book as a weekly column, following the team and their famously racist, bigoted and fanatic supporters to every single game, home and away, for an entire season, and we follow him on a most unusual travelogue of a very different side of Italy compared to usual rambles around Tuscany and Umbria. This is the real Italy - the Italy where everyone and everything revolves around football, where stadia have replaced cathedrals as focal points of communities, and where football often seems merely a thin mask for fierce local tribal animosities dating back to medieval and renaissance eras, all served up with a generous dose of irony, wit and humour.
Yes, this is a serious book, but a ton of laughs too!
Some passages, such as the one describing the life of the young modern footballer, sheltered, pampered, supervised, minds emptied of all but football, bodies sculpted into Roman and Greek statues, natural talents trained and honed to near-perfection, bought and sold, almost like racehorses or greyhounds, all from a young age, are classics of sports writing and a caution for all young boys dreaming of the riches and glory of David Beckham. Others, such as a masterful analysis of a famous football poem, the many amusing translations of insulting chants (yes, now I can actually understand some of the background chants when I watch Italian Serie A games on TV!), or the simple evocation of the atmosphere at a match as one person among thousands of fans singing as one, demonstrate Parks’ wide range as a writer.
The intense emotional investment in this sport would be familiar to any football team supporter the world over. What makes this book exceptional is that, simply, there are remarkably few really good books about “the beautiful game” out there which aren’t specifically for fanatics or about the business/corruption side of the sport. Parks’ clean prose, keen observations of what makes Italians so Italian, remarkable access to fans, players and team officials, and a well developed sense of the absurd help us laugh along with him on his madcap odyssey, enjoying the highs, lows, and just plain dull-as-ditchwater boredom as Hellas Verona endures a tough season trying to stay afloat in Serie A.
Somehow, this amazingly simple sport has a strange compelling beauty which draws billions to watch and play it globally, on TV, at the stadia, on the local pitch or street. In the words of the Emirates Airline advertisement - we all truly speak one language.
Hey, even my parents, who only watch football once in 4 years, found Argentina’s ruthless 6-0 demolition of Serbia and Montenegro such an incredibly aesthetically beautiful experience that we were collectively stunned into speechlessness at the simple sight of 11 men thinking and moving as one.
Signing off
Biblioboy
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