The group couldn’t have been any harder: the World and European champions alongside the champions of Africa and South America. The journalists being garlanded in Belo Horizonte aren’t just there to find out about a team and coach about whom they know nothing. There is a macabre fascination, too. How much blood will be spilt? The three games will surely be massacres, won’t they? There is only one question that remains unanswered: how many goals is too many goals? ‘We want to score a goal or maybe get to half-time at 0-0,’ Etaeta admits after we meet for the first time. The Brazilian journalists have all left now, each with their own string of shells. The Tahitians have brought hundreds with them, all neatly bundled up in large plastic bags and kept in a battered cardboard box behind the conference room door. Collecting friends was more likely than collecting goals. ‘We are honest,’ Etaeta says. ‘Tahiti has not come to win.’
Etaeta holds an important honour in Tahitian football. He scored Tahiti’s first ever goal in World Cup qualification, back in 1992. Another goalscorer during that (failed) attempt to qualify for USA ’94 that day was Reynald Temarii, a former player for French team Nantes who would rise to become president of the Oceania Football Confederation and make it on to FIFA’s powerful executive committee. He would later have to step down in disgrace when a British newspaper sting filmed him allegedly selling his vote over who would host the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals in return for money to fund a football academy. He maintained his innocence but FIFA upheld its punishment, a one-year ban from ‘all football related activities’ and a 5,000 Swiss Franc fine. Temarii isn’t here and no one mentions his name. Instead Etaeta talks about his team’s status as underdogs and how he built his squad in the first place. ‘I prefer to have good people than good players,’ he says. ‘Then we build step by step, tactically and then physically.’ In Brazil the team has experienced many of the trappings of international football for the first time. Most of the players have never travelled this far from home before, or even stayed in a five-star hotel. Their preparations have been mixed. Etaeta watched Tahiti lose their final warm-up match against Chile’s Under 20 team 7-0. The fear was, if Chile’s Under 20s could do this to them, what would World and European champions Spain do? Although Nigeria are the first game, to take place at Belo Horizonte’s Mineirão Stadium, Spain are the opponents that have been giving him and his team sleepless nights, both with excitement and fear.
Etaeta had to devise two solutions to two very different problems. The first was how to stop his players from being star-struck. Etaeta’s ingenious solution involved a few hours on Google Images and a roll of Sellotape. ‘I found pictures of Iniesta, Xavi and Torres,’ Etaeta says, explaining how he would fix the photos on the dressing-room wall and make his players stare at them. ‘I said to them: “Hey, look, look at him, take your picture now, don’t take the picture when we play them in the Maracanã.”’ With Tahiti’s weakness for a celebrity cured with some lo-res printouts of Fernando Torres in his blond-haired Liverpool glory days, Etaeta had a tougher time working out how to deal with the second problem. How could he acclimatise his players to the noise made by Brazil’s notoriously vociferous crowds? Especially when they enter the famous Estádio do Maracanã. His solution was just as left-field: ‘I put my players in a room with the recording of a crowd,’ he recalls. ‘I say: “Hey, hear this, this is what it will sound like in the Maracanã. They will shout, they will cry, they will whistle.” In Tahiti we don’t hear that. We play in front of a hundred, maybe two hundred people in the stadiums.’
With the recordings of a roaring crowd in their ears and their appetite for celebrity footballers satiated, Tahiti’s players are ready to play the world’s superstars. One player in particular is preparing for a game that has the potential to be as infamous as American Samoa’s 31-0 defeat. Given what happened to American Samoa’s Nicky Salapu after that game – the psychological torment, the bullying and the despair – I’d begun to worry about Tahiti’s goalkeeper. Mickaël Roche is tall and blond. He was born on Tahiti to Tahitian and French parents. ‘I have a job as a physical education teacher in Tahiti so I work every day with the children,’ he says sweetly. The team has a few hours before their last training session. They should be resting but most of the players are in the lobby of their hotel, wanting to be seen by the press. Roche, though, is thinking of home. ‘All the children, they are all really excited what’s happening to their teacher. Their teacher is playing the Confederations Cup. I think maybe, maybe, they are a little proud!’ The children, it turns out, were equally as star-struck by Roche’s appointment with Spain’s heroes as Roche himself. ‘They always ask me: “Sir, please, get me the T-shirt of Iniesta” or “please get me the T-shirt of Xavi.”’
Eddy Etaeta carries himself as if preparing for the worst. He talks quietly and is slight hunched, as if already defeated. He knows that the only victory Tahiti can win is the PR battle. A FIFA official has been parachuted in to manage their time in front of Brazil’s unquenchable press, to hand out the shell necklaces from the box of hundreds, to produce a glossy brochure and DVD of the team, to regale people with stories about the working-class professions the players will return to. ‘We want to win the hearts of the crowd and the citizens of the world,’ Etaeta finally says before he takes the team for their last training session. ‘Ninety-nine per cent of footballers are amateurs. Just one per cent are professional. We represent this ninety-nine per cent of the world.’
At a football complex twenty minutes’ drive north, the Tahiti team takes shooting practice. It is reminiscent of watching the US Virgin Islands train when I saw them prepare for their match against Haiti in 2011. No one hits the target. ‘This is just amazing for them,’ says Davidson Bennett, a Tahitian TV journalist who has travelled from French Polynesia for the game, as we watch balls balloon over the goal. ‘A big football match in Tahiti has maybe two hundred in the crowd. This training field is ten times better than our best field in Tahiti. It’s a kind of a Ferrari for them.’ When they finish, the entire team and coaching staff gather in front of the lines of Brazilian TV cameras which are desperate for some scraps of information. The team begin singing.
Tahiti isn’t a country. Rather, it is the biggest island that makes up French Polynesia. The issue of which anthem to play is complicated further by the fact that French Polynesia is still a French colonial possession. So Xavier Samin, another of the team’s goalkeepers, wrote a song especially for the team, ‘Chanson des Toa Aito’. Song for the Iron Warriors, Tahiti’s nickname.
Play play together warriors
Friends, my brothers, play, play again
We will fight them
Wearing the colours of the country
Come on red and white
Come on the red of the Iron Warriors.
The FIFA man would later print copies of the song and hand them out to the press.
**
There were only two bona fide Tahitian supporters in the crowd at the Mineirão Stadium in Belo Horizonte – the mother and father of goalkeeper Mickael Roche – but Tahiti could now call on the backing of thousands. Military and civilian helicopters buzz overhead as 20,000 supporters make it to the match, the largest crowd the Tahitians have ever seen. When they enter the pitch the crowd chant Tahiti’s name while mercilessly booing their Nigerian opponents. Brazil is a hugely ethnically diverse country, mixing the descendants of white settlers with those of the black slave trade that Brazil excelled in, along with its indigenous Indian population. On any street in Brazil, skin colour can range from milk-white to coal-black with every shade in between. Not that you would have guessed that from the crowd in the Mineirão, an overwhelmingly white sea of faces.
Parity lasts for all of three minutes. More goals quickly follow despite Nigeria contriving to miss chances with increasing wonder and ineptitude. The massacre that the world has expected is indeed coming to pass. Then comes the moment that Etaeta and his Tahiti team had dreamed of. A rare attack leads to a corner. The ball is sent over an
d Jonathan Tehau – one of the four-strong Tehau clan in the squad – rises higher than anyone else and heads the ball down into the goal. It is greeted by the crowd as if Tahiti have won the World Cup itself. The players celebrate by gathering together and mimicking the paddling of a canoe, something they have clearly practised. At half-time Nigeria lead Tahiti 3-1. Maybe they won’t be thrown to the slaughter after all.
At half-time I speak to Igor, a young, mild-mannered Brazilian journalist from São Paulo who writes for ESPN. He is getting ready to leave. It isn’t just the fact that the match has been a foregone conclusion, even with Tahiti scoring. There is still little chance of a second-half comeback given that Tahiti play a spectacularly open brand of football: attacking, brave and futile. Igor has heard that a protest planned to coincide with the match is bigger than many people had thought. The day before he had told me of a few small-scale protests that had been planned, one at a nearby church and another that would begin at the main square in Belo Horizonte and march on the stadium. A huge manifestações had erupted in São Paulo before the Confederations Cup began. The local government there had raised the price of public transport in the city, angering those relying on buses to get to work. Brazil’s transport infrastructure is still stuck in the third world. People have to travel three or four hours on a bus to get to and from work, and now they will have to pay extra for the privilege. Many Brazilians, Igor explains, are deeply unhappy about the World Cup, especially the cost of hosting it. The Confederations Cup is supposed to be a dress rehearsal for Brazil’s coming-out party: a World Cup, and, two years later, the Olympic Games in Rio, that will be the icing on the cake of an economic boom that, in 2012, saw Brazil overtake the United Kingdom to become the sixth largest economy in the world. Brazil had even been honoured by a now ubiquitous economists’ acronym, BRIC, standing for Brazil, Russia, India and China, the economies of the new century. Under left-wing President Lula, Brazil had boomed. Millions were raised out of poverty and the confident middle classes had borrowed heavily to fund Western lifestyles. But the 2008 economic crash hurt Brazil, too, and the reality of preparing for the coming party had not quite met the expectations.
Billions have been spent on the stadiums while Brazil’s infrastructure – transport, hospitals, schools in particular – was still stuck in the developing world. Corruption smothers everything. The cost of the stadiums themselves has tripled the original estimate. Solidarity protests have begun to spread throughout Brazil, but they are strongest in the cities that are hosting the Confederations Cup. Earlier I had seen banners being prepared in Belo Horizonte’s main square denouncing FIFA, denouncing the World Cup and denouncing the government. They are, to the protesters, all part of the same problem.
The protest near the stadium has been styled as anti-World Cup, anathema to those who have been sold the cliché of Brazil’s obsession with football. The media, especially those controlled by the all-powerful Globo media conglomerate, characterise these protestors as refuseniks, elitists, borderline communists even. A small, unwelcome voice spoiling Brazil’s big day. Besides, the march from the centre of town to the stadium is six kilometres. I doubt many people will have the stamina for that. But Igor wants to see first-hand what the protesters have to say. We agree to meet later, once the match and press conferences have finished.
The final score is 6-1 but the goal is all that matters to Tahiti. It is not a humiliation for Etaeta. The Tahiti team give their post-match press conference and speak of their happiness at only conceding six goals. Of scoring. Of the joy they feel at the support from the crowd, who have clutched the underdog to their collective breast. ‘We lost to a hard score, 6-1, but we are very, very happy,’ Etaeta says after the match, perhaps the only coach in the history of the game who would wear a smile after losing by such a margin. ‘I said when the draw for the tournament was made that if we score one goal it is a great performance for us.’
Yet, as the sun began to set in the second half, an invisible cloud wafted through the stadium. It was the briefest of appearances: a sharp, sulphuric, constricting air like a thousand match-heads that, even in its briefest and most diluted form, hinted at violence. Tear gas. A kilometre away, unbeknown to the crowd inside the stadium, the planned protest had reached the gates. A few Brazilian journalists suggested that the protests that had been planned were small and, in any case, passed without incident. I had caught the bus back to the city, and it was taking an unusual, suspiciously circuitous route home away from where the protesters were supposed to meet, when I received a call. It was Igor. He had been shot.
**
The bus drops me off back near Praça Sete de Setembro, 7 September Square. It is named after the date of Brazilian independence from Portugal in 1822 and it is here that the protest began earlier in the day. It is also here where, at 11 p.m., the tired and the injured have returned. Around a thousand protesters are left, a fraction of the 15,000 who had marched on the Mineirão in what would later be described as the first organised mass protests since the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1980s. A sign hung from a nearby balcony that read: ‘Anti Copa’. On the pavement the words ‘A FIFA é Foda’ have been written in chalk: ‘Fuck You, FIFA’. The roads have been blocked off by military police, who watch the protesters from afar. A bank of police horses chew on piles of hay left for them on the road, their dung covering the streets along all four exits.
Daniel Sanabria, a technician in his twenties, is standing nearby cradling his arm, an ice pack on top of a bloody bandage. He peels it off to reveal an ugly red welt on his left hand. ‘A bullet,’ he explains as a young woman tends to his wounds. ‘Tonight this is about all of Brazil, we are moving against corruption,’ says Tainara Freitas, a teacher, who is trying to rebandage Sanabria’s hand. ‘We have been suffering for too many years. This year we rise. We have woken up. We are on the streets like in Turkey and Greece. They have made us wake up about this. The World Cup in Brazil is about too much money. There are too many poor people suffering. The World Cup isn’t good for Brazil. It will bring tourists and money but this is not good for poor people.’
They all told the same story. How the march had approached the barricades with military helicopters overhead. How the police responded not with warnings, but with tear gas, firing rubber bullets into the crowd, beating protesters who burned barricades in return. Igor isn’t here. He is in hospital. ‘The police came with a brutal force,’ he explains when we speak on the phone. ‘I didn’t see the protesters do anything. The police threw a bomb and it explodes in the middle of the protest. Then police began to shoot.’ It was then he was hit in the back by a rubber bullet, as he ran away. ‘In that moment I just ran. I thought that if I looked back the police would probably shoot me again.’ The rubber bullet that knocked him off his feet left a huge, multicoloured bruise on his back, but nothing more. He’d live, unlike one protester who died falling off a nearby overpass when the riot was in full swing. Igor wasn’t a violent revolutionary, or a favela kid born into violence who wanted to rip up the world and start again. He was a thoughtful, articulate journalist just doing his job. So much so that he tried, if not to excuse, then at least to explain why the police opened with such violence. ‘I don’t think the police are well prepared,’ he offers. ‘They are badly paid. They have a bad life. They act like this because they are scared.’ So why did the police shoot him? He is in no doubt. The Confederations Cup. ‘I spoke to one of the highest ranked police guys in the state yesterday. He told me 3,500 policemen were on the streets because of the game. They are acting to avoid conflict near the stadiums. The police and FIFA don’t want the protesters anywhere near the stadiums.’
FIFA, and in particular Sepp Blatter, have become the bad guys, too, complicit in what the protesters see as a financial stitch-up. They point to the fact that for Brazil to host the World Cup they have to agree not to levy any taxes on FIFA and also change the law to allow alcohol to be served at the stadiums. Previously beer had been banned because
of violence in domestic Brazilian football. Some opposition MPs said the issue was about more than football violence and alcohol. It was about FIFA challenging the sovereignty of the Brazilian state. Blatter, alongside the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, was booed by the Brazilian crowd at the opening ceremony. ‘People are using the platform of football and the international media presence to make certain demonstrations,’ Blatter said after the incident. ‘You will see today is the third day of the competition this will calm down. It will be a wonderful competition.’ That was yesterday. Sanabria and Freitas, nursing their wounds on 7 September Square, instead now saw the Confederations Cup as an even more legitimate platform for protest. It was just the beginning.
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