Thirty-One Nil

by James Montague

  Only time will tell if it will be enough. There will be two important tests to judge whether the president has successfully appeased her people: a presidential election next year and the World Cup finals itself. If things haven’t measurably improved by then, the protesters and the violence and the tear gas will return. FIFA’s reputation has taken another hit, too. Throughout the tournament they had been wrong-footed and on the wrong side of almost every argument. As the protests grow, Sepp Blatter urged Brazilians not to use football to protest for improved social conditions. Yet Blatter was due to speak at a conference in Belo Horizonte during the Confederations Cup that would showcase how football could be used to further social goals. In any event, he left Brazil on an unscheduled trip before the conference was due to take place. Journalists were banned from attending it.

  Every team that played at the Confederations Cup qualified for the World Cup finals. Every team except Tahiti. They wilted in the final Oceania qualification stage as the normal order of things returned. New Zealand won the group and with it an intercontinental play-off against a team from CONCACAF. At the Confederations Cup final Brazil destroyed Spain. Brazilian football may be revered throughout the world, but even the most rabidly pro-Brazil Brazilian concedes it does not have a team to compete with the greats of the past, of 1970, 1982, 1994 even. Yet against Spain, and with a crowd full of pride and energy behind it, they crush the world champions 3-0. Neymar finally came of age, giving Brazil a new hero to hang its hopes on. The 2014 World Cup finals will be a chance to lay to rest the ghosts of 1950, to finally win on home soil the World Cup that Brazil had prematurely awarded itself sixty-four years ago and pull the word Maracanazo back from infamy. The question is: how much tear gas will be fired on their route to the final?

  12

  ROMANIA, HUNGARY

  Bucharest, Romania. September 2013.

  The Animal is angry and The Animal wants to make them pay. Outside the brand new Arena Naţională in Bucharest a group of perhaps one hundred men, maybe more, are marching purposefully down a green, tree-lined boulevard towards the enemy. At the front the shorter, younger members of the group proudly grasp a large Romanian flag – the red, yellow and blue tricolour – while others hold aloft burning red flares and chant:

  Ro-ma-ni-a!

  Ro-ma-ni-a!

  Ro-ma-ni-a!

  In less than an hour Romania and Hungary will play each other in a World Cup qualification match. Ever since the European qualification draw for Group D was made, this game has been highlighted by both sides as the most important of the campaign. As expected, the 2010 finalists, Holland, dominated the group and had already virtually qualified after winning all six of their first matches. Finishing second would clinch a play-off spot. It was all the rest could realistically hope for. Hungary currently occupy that space but there are just four games left and they only lead Romania by a single point. But that isn’t the sole reason for the outpouring of nationalistic pride. The Animal is here on other business. Revenge.

  The chants of the mob are drowned out by the passing helicopters and piercing wails of sirens as police riot vans screech past in the same direction The Animal is heading. Muffled explosions can be heard in the distance as Romanian fans run in the opposite direction, grown men tripping over the kerbside as tears stream down their cheeks in temporary blindness. A familiar acrid stench, one that I had become acquainted with in Egypt and then Brazil, follows them: the unmistakable smell of tear gas. Not that The Animal is too concerned by that. Animalu’, as he is known in his native Romance tongue, is the leader of the Steaua Bucharest ultras, the organised fan group of Romania’s biggest club and current champions.

  The Animal is short but powerfully built, in his late thirties with a shaven head and arms covered in tattoos. He coolly watches his parade from the back as the men and boys march towards the helicopters, the explosions and the gas. ‘Between Romania and Hungary there is a lot of tension, we cannot stand each other,’ he says in a measured, almost polite tone. Around him his younger followers jump up and down excitedly, screaming anti-Hungarian invective. The Animal calms most of them instantly with a raised arm. Except for one, The Little Animal, a teenager who is missing several teeth and spits in my face as he shouts. ‘When we played them in Hungary it was with no supporters,’ The Animal explains, as if he is reading from a manifesto. ‘Now the Hungarians come here and cause a lot of destruction on the streets.’

  He had watched it all unfold on TV. When the first night train from Budapest arrived the evening before – pulled by a golden engine adorned with the faces of Hungary’s glorious footballing past; the Mighty Magyars Puskás, Kocsis and Czibor from the 1950s – hundreds of Hungarian fans hung out of its windows and doors, lighting flares and chanting against the țigani, an extremely derogatory word used by the Romanians for the Roma gypsies, which the Hungarians had, in turn, borrowed to insult all Romanians instead. Hundreds of Romanian riot police, dressed as if expecting a war, waited at the Gara de Nord station for the train to arrive. A stream of skinheads poured out of the carriages, most wearing black T-shirts. Some gave Nazi salutes as they passed by. One fan spat in the face of a waiting policeman. The police replied by beating them with their batons, breaking up their numbers and frog-marching small groups of supporters into the city. When they arrived they rampaged through the historic centre, smashing up cafés and restaurants as confused tourists and Romanian citizens looked on. Rumours spread on TV that a waitress had been attacked, that a café had been set on fire, that the police had lost control of the centre of the city. They replied by firing tear gas into the streets to control them, the first time anyone can remember the police using it since the revolution that toppled Nicolae Ceauseşcu in 1989. The Animal and his ultras were now hell-bent on payback.

  ‘We go to find them, to fight with them,’ The Animal explains. ‘But the police are so crazy! They stop us but they don’t stop them?’

  ‘FUCK HUNGARY! FUCK HUNGARY!’ The Little Animal shouts, louder than before, as he stomps up and down on the concrete.

  ‘They want Transylvania,’ The Animal replies when I ask him why there is such tension between the two neighbouring countries. ‘But they can’t have it, it is Romanian land!’

  ‘WE HAVE TO KILL SOME HUNGERS!’ The Little Animal screams. The conversation continues like this; The Animal calmly talking, The Little Animal shouting death threats.

  ‘After the game in Bucharest there will be a lot of fights. That is sure.’

  ‘HUNGARIA IS SHIT!’

  ‘There will be a lot of Hungarian people in Bucharest after the match. Be careful.’

  ‘SUCK MY DICK HUNGARIA!’

  The Animal finally loses his temper with his lieutenant. ‘Shhhh,’n mortii ma-tii,’ he says in an almost paternal manner. The Little Animal shuts up immediately. It’s only later I find out that ‘’n mortii ma-tii’ is one of the most horrific putdowns in the Romanian language, a shortened version of the expression which translates as: I fuck your mother’s dead family. ‘It’s our history together,’ The Animal says of the Hungarians, now that he has the floor to himself. ‘They want Transylvania. They want Romanian land. These Hungarian people,’ he says, before stopping to correct himself. ‘These Hungarian FUCKS need to go home.’ The police helicopter is now hovering above the northern entrance to the stadium, over where the muffled explosions are coming from. The Animal and his crew of Steaua Bucharest ultras stop and wait for more men to swell their numbers.

  **

  Romania and Hungary have a complex and fractious history, one that had been largely frozen under communism but which has come to the fore in recent years. The relationship between the two countries has see-sawed as empires have risen, crumbled, and borders have been redrawn around the rubble. The root of this enmity can be found in the post-First World War settlement that carved up the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hungary lost almost three-quarters of its territory to its surrounding countries, including Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine. But i
t was the Romanians who benefited most from the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when they achieved their long-held aim of seizing the region of Transylvania. More than 1.3 million Romanians of Hungarian descent – many of whom speak Hungarian as their first language – still live in Romania. Many Hungarians view Trianon as a catastrophe, a national tragedy forced on a kingdom that had existed for a thousand years. Romanians view it as simply righting a historical wrong. Even under the Ottomans, Romanian speakers were the overwhelming majority in Transylvania, but were treated as serfs by the largely Hungarian upper classes. There were even laws that prevented Romanians from living within the walls of many cities in Transylvania.

  Still, nationalistic and patriotic concerns were largely buried behind the Iron Curtain and the tensions kept in check. But in the 1990s the sense of injustice began to creep back. In 2010 the election of a more nationalistic government in Hungary – the right-wing Fidesz party – succeeded in reigniting the issue. One of the Fidesz party’s first laws handed citizenship – and with it voting rights – to Hungarian populations abroad, angering its neighbours for encouraging their citizens to look towards Budapest rather than their own capitals. Behind Fidesz was an even more radical group. That election saw Jobbik come third with close to a million votes. Jobbik is an ultra-nationalist, radical right-wing political party that has been accused of following anti-Semitic policies and which calls for the return of a ‘Greater Hungary’. You can usually spot a Jobbik march in Budapest. The party’s politicians might be young, articulate and clad in expensive suits, yet a Jobbik rally is made up almost exclusively of the same white, male skinheads in black T-shirts who now dominate Hungary’s football terraces. The first World Cup match between Hungary and Romania the previous March, a 2-2 draw, was played behind closed doors because of anti-Semitic chanting when Israel played a friendly in Budapest in 2012. ‘That empty stadium was a clear sign of radicalism in Hungarian football,’ says Vörös Szabolcs, a foreign correspondent for the conservative Magyar Hirlap daily newspaper, who was at the game. ‘Twenty thousand people were outside the stadium, we could hear voices, we could hear the screams of the trainers. Sadly there were anti-Romanian chants, as usual.’

  In the weekend before the Romania–Hungary match in Bucharest three Hungarian league teams were fined a total of 1.2 million forints (£3,000) for anti-Romanian and anti-Slovakian chants. In a warm-up match against the Czech Republic the fans chanted ‘Transylvania is Hungarian!’ They promised to mount an ‘invasion’ of Romania before the game in Bucharest and flew the Székely flag, the flag of a historically ethnically Hungarian area that is now marooned in the centre of Romania and that many Hungarians would like to see gain autonomy. ‘The people on and around the football field, I wouldn’t say they are all radicals, but I would say 80 per cent are,’ says Szabolcs of the changing nature of both Hungarian politics and football. ‘Decades ago families went to football matches. Now it is not the case. Football is the sphere of telling our hurts, telling our problems in a radical way.’ So radical in fact that even Romania’s foreign minister had intervened over the anti-Romanian chants being used in the run-up to the match. ‘Such words should be condemned, they do not belong on a football pitch. Let’s not hide behind the finger here, extremist attitudes exist everywhere, they happen in Romania as well,’ Titus Corlăţean told the country’s Antena 3 news channel a few days before the Hungarian fans invaded Bucharest. ‘The best answer will be to beat the Hungarians at football.’

  It is a high-stakes game that no one can bear the thought of losing. Not the players, the coaches, the supporters, the politicians and not The Animal himself. I leave the Steaua ultras to regroup and follow the hovering police helicopter that marks where the Hungarian supporters are to be found. The road in front is blanketed in smashed glass, turned-over tables and chairs. The juddering hum of rotar blades becomes louder as I walk towards the stadium. The shouts are indecipherable over the noise but become clearer the closer I get. They are only interrupted by the periodic bursts of explosions and breaking bottles.

  Ria!

  Ria!

  Hun-ga-ria!

  On either side of the road frightening looking Jandarmeria Romănă, a military faction of Romania’s police forces, stand guard with their weapons in hand. Some have nightsticks, some merely riot shields. Scattered among their number are several officers carrying what look like oxygen tanks with a rubber hose attached to the nozzle. It doesn’t spray water or foam but tear gas. Rather than simply hurl a canister into a riot, Romania’s police prefer administering the gas at close quarters, preferably, it seems, at face level. By the sulphuric smell in the air it has recently been used, too. One officer sprays a burst of gas on the ground as I walk past, raising his one free hand to imitate sniffing under his arm. ‘Deodorant,’ he laughs. His colleague next to him shakes his head, looking at the angry mob he has just helped to quell. ‘Why?’ he asks in perfect English, ‘why are they so angry?’ Behind a final line of police a few thousand identical looking, angry men are penned in like cattle, singing nationalist songs and flying nationalist flags. Around them dozens of Romanian film crews are perched on fences, TV vans and kiosks. They, too, are wondering the same thing, incredulous at the alien army that has just invaded their capital. Why are they so angry? Thankfully, The Animal and his group are nowhere to be seen to complicate matters yet. Instead, the Hungarian fans have arrived flying the Székely flag, denouncing all Romanians as țigani and fighting any non-Hungarian who gets in their way. Which is something of a problem for me. The Romanian Football Federation has refused to accredit me for the game. I’d only managed to get a ticket for the sold-out match after the Hungarian federation agreed to give me one. I was to watch one of Europe’s most inflammatory fixtures sitting with the Hungarian fans. Five metres away they are still throwing flash bombs, smoke grenades and flares at the police. As the police advance on them to force them into the stadium, I weigh up my options. I am clearly not Romanian, but neither do I look Hungarian. Do I play it safe and watch the game from the comfort of a nearby bar, or jump into a crowd of people who hate foreigners and journalists in equal measure? I take a vow of silence, hide my camera and microphone and slip through the police line, joining the crush towards the stadium gate as another chant against the gypsies rises.

  **

  Budapest, Hungary, a few days earlier.

  Many ghosts walk the streets of Hungary’s imperial capital. Budapest is a city that, since it was occupied by the Ottomans, has been razed to the ground, occupied, rebuilt, merged, destroyed, occupied again and finally rebuilt. In fact, it used to be two cities: Buda, on the western banks of the Danube, and Pest, on its eastern. The two were merged in 1873, sparking an economic and cultural boom that saw the city become the joint capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its narrow streets and beautiful squares proudly herald the heroes of past liberation struggles, both successful and unsuccessful: the nineteenth-century fight for independence from the Habsburg family; the traumatic loss of the First World War; the Jewish genocide of the Second World War; the heroic but ultimately futile uprising against Soviet occupation in 1956. None of the names of the dead are forgotten. History is alive in Hungary, as are the resentments of past defeats. But of all the ghosts that walk its streets, none is more feted, more revered and more alive than that of Ferenc Puskás.

  Puskás can legitimately claim to be the greatest player in the greatest team never to win the World Cup. His name adorns multiple street signs, a metro station and Hungary’s national stadium. His statue stands in Budapest’s third district honouring a national hero who, between 1945 and 1956, scored eighty-four international goals in eighty-five matches. During that time Hungary, and Puskás, reached a World Cup final, won gold at the 1952 Olympic Games, went unbeaten in thirty-one matches and memorably travelled to Wembley to beat the then omnipotent England 6-3. The return match in Budapest ended 7-1 in their favour. Puskás scored twice. A huge mural eulogising that Wembley match covers one side of a building on Rumb
ach Sebestyén utca in Budapest’s seventh district, the city’s Jewish quarter, where the second largest synagogue outside Israel can be found. The Magical Magyars changed the way football was played, introducing the world to Total Football long before the Dutch appropriated the term. They lost only one game between 1950 and 1956, and that was the 1954 World Cup final, the so-called Miracle of Berne. Yet even that defeat isn’t what it seems. Hungary had already beaten West Germany 8-3 in an earlier round, but the Golden Team contrived to throw away a 2-0 lead in the final to somehow lose 3-2. The victory was met with euphoria back in Germany. It was just nine years after the end of the Second World War and the newly divided country was still examining its conscience after the horrors of the Nazi regime. The World Cup, though, saw the national anthem played in public for the first time and victory witnessed an outpouring of national pride. Several German academics have suggested that the Miracle of Berne was a crucial psychological moment in the history of the country, the moment when West Germans collectively began to look forward rather than back. But how did Hungary lose? Several theories were posited. For one, Puskás had suffered a fracture on his ankle early in the tournament. He still played in the final, and scored the first goal, but was hampered throughout. That final, though, has since been dogged by accusations that the West Germans had relied on a little extra help. After the defeat Puskás was fuming, accusing the West Germans of injecting drugs that fuelled their incredible second-half comeback. The Germans insisted they had merely been injected with Vitamin C and that Puskás was a sore loser.