The Fighter

by Tim Parks

  Innocuous or otherwise, the scenario of opposing fans insulting each other is definitely not welcome at the World Cup. Nothing terrifies the organisers of the sport’s biggest event more than the sentiments most ordinarily expressed at weekly league matches in the major participating countries. For alongside the nostalgia that developed for the tight-knit local community springs the contrary ideal of the universal brotherhood of man, of a world where no one will ever express hatred for anyone. In the early 1890s, having read Tom Brown’s Schooldays and decided that English notions of gentlemanly sportsmanship were among the highest expressions of the human spirit, Pierre Coubertin concluded that mankind could best be served by a festival of sport where national identity would be expressed in pageantry, folklore and athletic prowess, all political antagonisms forgotten. In 1896 the first Olympic Games of the modern era was held. Football was included unofficially in 1900, officially from 1908. For many years it has been the Olympic sport that draws the largest number of spectators.

  Coubertin had his enemies, chief among them the nationalist and monarchist Charles Maurras, who was hostile to the Games, fearing the degeneration, as he saw it, of cosmopolitanism. But on attending the Olympics in Athens and watching the behaviour of crowds and athletes, it came to Maurras that in fact such international festivals might work the other way: ‘When different races are thrown together and made to interact,’ he wrote, ‘they repel one another, estranging themselves even as they believe they are mixing.’7 In short, the internationalist theatre might become the stage for expressing not universal brotherhood but the fiercest nationalism.

  Maurras’s reflection raises the question: what happens when a team sport, particularly an intensely engaging, fiercely physical sport like football, a game capable of arousing the most intense collective passions, is transferred from local to national level? What happens when very large crowds, many of whom are not regular fans and thus not familiar with the game and the emotions it generates, find themselves involved in the business of winning and losing as nation against nation? For the football team comes to represent the nation, indeed the nation at war, in a way the individual athlete cannot. Before England’s decisive game in the 2002 competition with old enemies Argentina, the Samaritans announced that their staff would be at full strength to deal with the misery if England lost. After Japan beat Russia – another old quarrel – the people of Tokyo danced on the streets, while in central Moscow, where giant screens had been set up to show the event, there was serious rioting and one death. Sensibly, the government banned all further public screenings. The TV in the home is safe enough; in the stadium there are fences and police. But a crowd in a public square watching their nation lose against an old enemy with nothing between themselves and, for example, a restaurant run by their opponents is a dangerous thing indeed. These events serve to remind us that globalisation has done nothing to diminish nationalist passions. Perhaps the reverse.

  The tension between the different visions of international sport – the embattled community on the one hand, the brotherhood of man on the other – reached its height at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. At the opening ceremony the crowd sang ‘Deutschland über alles’, after which a recorded message from the now ageing Coubertin reminded everybody that ‘the most important thing in life is not to conquer’.8 Two years later at the World Cup in Rome General Bacaro in his inaugural speech announced that the ultimate purpose of the tournament was ‘to show that Fascist sport partakes of a great quality of the ideal stemming from one unique inspiration: il Duce.’ Whatever that might or might not have meant, the next competition would not be staged until 1950 and was held in Brazil, far away from a still war-ravaged Europe.

  The World Cup developed as an offshoot of the Olympic Games and deploys the same idealistic, internationalist rhetoric. But the decision to set up a competition separate from the Olympics came largely as a result of cheating. Olympic football teams were supposed to be amateur, but many players were clearly professional. England, who had deigned to participate and won in 1908 and 1912, withdrew over the issue in 1920. In 1924 and 1928 Uruguay won with virtually professional teams, at which point the only possible response for the offended pride of the other competitors was to acknowledge a fait accompli and get FIFA to set up a competition for professionals. The circumstances in which it was born thus belied the principles the competition claims to uphold.

  More than anything else, it has been the growth of television that has shifted the balance of power in favour of Coubertin’s internationalist, pageantry-rich vision of the sport. In the space of a few years football’s main paymasters became the TV companies, not the ticket-paying fans. Experienced away from the stadium, the game loses its local, community-building functions. The possibility of collective catharsis is lost. At this distance the antics of hard-core fans in transport are merely disquieting. Often they look disturbingly like the choreographed extremist crowds of the 1930s. Now every gesture that threatens the sort of positive vision of the world that can be delivered into households where children and grandmothers sit around the TV must be rooted out. The Asian World Cup was perhaps the first absolutely hooligan-free event. Tokyo and Seoul are at a safe and expensive distance from Manchester, Berlin and Buenos Aires. Opposing fans could not come into contact in any numbers. How Coubertin would have rejoiced over that extravagant opening ceremony, with all its colourful Asian pageantry, the charming faces of elegant Korean dancers.

  And yet … With the ugly crowds tamed, at least in and around the stadium, the TV cameras free to concentrate entirely on the game, what do we see on the field of play? I know of no other sport where cheating is so endemic, condoned and ritualised as football, where lying and bad faith are more ordinarily the rule. Every single decision is contested, even when what has happened is clear as day. A player insists he didn’t kick the ball off the pitch when everybody has seen that he has. Another protests that the ball has gone over the line when everybody has seen that it hasn’t. Passed by an attacker in full flight, a defender grabs the man’s shirt, stops him, then denies that he has done so. Unable to pass a defender, the striker runs into him and promptly falls over, claiming that he has been pushed. Only a few minutes into the Denmark– Senegal match the players were exchanging blows. During the Turkey–Brazil game, with play temporarily stopped, an angry Turkish player kicked the ball at the Brazilian Rivaldo, who had recently been voted the best player in the world. Hit on the knee (by the ball!), Rivaldo collapsed on the ground pretending he had been violently struck in the face. The referee sent the Turkish player off. In an interview afterwards Rivaldo claimed this was a normal part of football. The organisers, who had said they would be tough on such dishonest behaviour, fined Rivaldo $7,000, barely a day’s pay for a star at his level, but they wouldn’t suspend him for even one game. It is crucial for TV revenues that Brazil make progress in the competition.

  One of football’s curiosities is that while among the fans it arouses the kinds of passions that once attached themselves more readily to religious fundamentalism and political idealism, for the organisers it is above all a business. There are few who believe that refereeing decisions are not sometimes made to favour rich teams; FIFA itself and its president Sepp Blatter in particular have been accused of large-scale corruption. When two apparently legitimate Italian goals were disallowed in their game against Croatia, many Italians immediately began to wonder if there wasn’t a conspiracy against them.

  After the pomp and idealism of opening ceremonies, then, what could be less edifying than the spectacle itself and the suspicions that surround it? Or more exciting, more likely to inflame the passions? Infallibly, it seems, the overall frame of the brotherhood of man contains a festival of bad behaviour, resentment and Schadenfreude. Far from diminishing people’s interest in the sport, it is precisely the unpleasant incidents and negative sentiments that fuel its vigorous growth. The genius of FIFA in the 2002 competition was to stage an apparently violence-free positive event in Asia while shi
fting, via television, the riot of emotions, and the occasional riot on the street, thousands and thousands of miles away. We are having our cake and eating it.

  That said, football definitely makes more sense and is more fun when experienced at the stadium in the delirium of the local crowd, when it is our community fielding our team, here and now, ready to rejoice or suffer. After Italy’s inevitable victory over Ecuador, experienced by almost everybody who cared about it through the medium of television, a fan writes to his club’s website:

  Italy won convincingly … but the elation I feel when I watch Verona play from the terraces is something the national team can never give me, not even if they win the World Cup. It’s a competition where hypocrisy and piety reign supreme. Come on Hellas!9

  The name of this local team of course, suggested by a schoolteacher of the boys who founded it a hundred years ago, is the ancient Greek word for homeland.

  Hero Betrayed

  * * *

  [Giuseppe Garibaldi]

  SUDDENLY YOU ARE looking in his eyes. Officially they’re brown, but for you they’ll always be blue. He is speaking in a soft, seductive voice. Glory if you follow, eternal shame if you don’t. Rome or Death. In a moment your destiny shifts. Incredibly, you have volunteered. You are given a red shirt, an obsolete rifle, a bayonet. You are taught to sing a hymn full of antique rhetoric recalling a magnificent past, foreseeing a triumphant future. You learn to march at night under all weathers over the most rugged terrain, to sleep on the bare ground, to forget regular meals, to charge under fire at disciplined men in uniform. You learn to kill with your bayonet. You see your friends killed. You grow familiar with the shrieks of the wounded, the stench of corpses. If you turn tail in battle, you will be shot. Those are his orders. If you loot you will be shot. You write enthusiastic letters home. You have discovered patriotism and comradeship. You have been welcomed by cheering crowds, kissed by admiring young women. Italy will be restored to greatness. From Sicily to the Alps your country will be free. Then, with no warning, it’s over. A politician has not kept faith. An armistice has been signed. Your leader is furious. You hardly understand. Rome is still a dream. Disbanded, you receive nothing: no money, no respect, no help to find work. But years later when he calls again, you go. You will follow him to your death.

  Such was the experience of many thousands of Italians who volunteered to fight with the insurgent, adventurer and patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi in the series of uprisings, battles and full-scale wars that finally brought about a unified and independent Italy in 1861. The long and mountainous peninsula had been broken up into a dozen and more states after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century. Through the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance these had at least been run by Italians, but around 1500 French, Spanish and later Austrian armies moved in to place client monarchs on Italian thrones and in some cases to annex territory directly.

  Briefly united under Napoleon, the peninsula was divided again after his defeat, so that in 1816 there were actually eight separate ‘Italian’ states. By far the largest and most depressingly backward of these was the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, which stretched from the furthest toe of the Italian boot north, almost as far as Rome, and was ruled by Bourbon kings originally imposed by Spain. In the north-east, the area from Venice to Milan was held by the Austrians, while to the west, the only powerful, Italian-run state, Piedmont, had its capital in Turin. In the centre were four small and puny duchies.

  But what really made the prospect of Italian unification problematic was that a large area of land, from Rome on the Tyrrhenian Sea across to the port of Ancona on the Adriatic and north as far as Bologna – the so-called Papal States – was held and governed by the Pope, who was thus both a spiritual and political ruler. Nationalist movements, of course, gain great impetus when allied to the religion of the people and able to insist on the divine right of their struggle. That could not happen in Italy. Any attempt to unite this most Catholic of countries would have to be achieved in opposition to Catholicism and to a papacy whose territorial integrity was traditionally guaranteed by the great nations of France, Austria and Spain. This conflict between the interests of church and country was something that would dog Italian public life right through to the Mussolini era and the Second World War. Even today the Vatican is frequently accused of interference in the sovereignty of the Italian parliament.

  By the 1830s two very different forces had begun working to disturb the status quo and bring Italy together. On the one hand were the revolutionaries led by the tireless propagandist Giuseppe Mazzini, a man who spent most of his life in exile in London. Fanatically republican and democratic, Mazzini set up a secret society, Young Italy, whose aim was to start popular insurrections all over the country, throw out existing political leaders, and establish a single, liberal progressive state. To join Young Italy meant accepting life as an outlaw and quite possibly finding yourself excommunicated to boot. It was the movement of a small intellectual elite.

  The Piedmontese monarchy, meanwhile, had begun to see the possibility of exploiting nascent Italian nationalism to unite the peninsula, or at least the area north of the Papal States, under the Piedmontese crown. This was self-aggrandisement in convenient and ambiguous alliance with patriotism.

  Unfortunately, both projects were impractical. Every time Mazzini’s idealists started an uprising they were promptly rounded up and executed, more often than not by the Piedmontese authorities. The great majority of Italians were not interested in revolution. But while always capable of taking on a few republican hotheads, the Piedmontese army was no match for the huge and disciplined forces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Milan, Venice and the fertile north-eastern plain remained unattainable.

  More than anybody else it was Giuseppe Garibaldi who eventually managed to get these two apparently irreconcilable forces of Piedmontese expansionism and progressive republicanism to work, however uneasily, together. And it was his capacity to inspire a quasi-religious fervour in his volunteers that allowed the unification movement, or Risorgimento as it became known, to overcome Catholic piety and loyalty to the Pope.

  One of the most colourful figures in modern European history, Garibaldi is the subject of any number of biographies. For those who know little about his life and times, Lucy Riall’s new book Garibaldi: the Invention of a Hero is not the place to start. She takes an iconoclastic line and assumes that the reader is already entirely familiar with the icon she is destroying and the world that worshipped him. Those who would like to have the traditional picture before the dubious pleasures of seeing it deconstructed should check out Denis Mack Smith’s bland but efficient Garibaldi: a Great Life in Brief (1956) or, assuming they have time on their hands, George Macaulay Trevelyan’s wonderful Garibaldi trilogy. Written in the first decade of the twentieth century, Trevelyan’s work is still in print a hundred years on because, for all its obvious pro-Garibaldi bias, it is still the best.

  By any accounts this was an extraordinary life. Born in Nice (then part of Piedmont) in 1807, the second of five children, Garibaldi was already a sailor at fifteen and a sea captain at twenty-five. Thus far he was simply following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps: trading, fighting off pirates in the eastern Mediterranean, developing a cosmopolitan outlook. But in 1833, now very much under the influence of Henri Saint-Simon’s pre-socialist vision of universal brotherhood, Garibaldi met Mazzini in Marseille and joined Young Italy. All too soon he became involved in a failed insurrection, was condemned to death in absentia by the Piedmontese judiciary and fled to South America. Here he discovered a talent for guerrilla warfare, fighting first against the Brazilians for the breakaway republic of Rio Grande, then against the bullying Argentinians for tiny Uruguay. He was wounded, saw the inside of a gaol, ran off with another man’s eighteen-year-old wife (Anita), formed a brigade of Italian exiles and in 1846 fought a remarkable defensive battle against far superior forces at San Antonio del Salto on the river Uruguay. Refusin
g all payment, he claimed to fight only for justice and freedom.

  Meanwhile, back in Europe, Mazzini had taken note of Garibaldi’s achievements and begun to promote his image, setting him up as the epitome of Italian patriotism and inviting him and his so-called ‘red-shirts’ to come home and fight for a united and democratic Italian republic.

  After thirteen years of exile Garibaldi hardly needed persuading and in 1848 returned to Italy exactly as Europe was set alight by a series of liberal revolutions that began in Palermo and spread rapidly to Paris, Vienna, Naples, Turin, Milan, Florence and Rome. At last the people, or some people, seemed ready to fight. Sporting a gaucho’s poncho, flowing hair and gorgeous beard, Garibaldi joined Milanese revolutionaries, who, in alliance with the Piedmontese army, were attempting to push the Austrians out of Lombardy. With a hastily collected group of volunteers he won a skirmish or two around Lake Como before the Piedmontese army collapsed and he was forced to flee over the mountains to Switzerland.

  Italy was in chaos. As Jonathan Keates recounts in his fine book The Siege of Venice (2005), the great wave of liberal and nationalist feeling that had prompted so many Italians to take up arms was everywhere undermined by a confusion of competing agendas. Many of the rebel cities were spending more time arguing about an eventual form of government – federal or centralised, republican or monarchist – than preparing for the inevitable enemy counter-attack. Nobody seemed able to agree on what sort of Italy they wanted or what was actually possible.

  Frantic to get involved, Garibaldi headed for Tuscany where he gathered together a ragged brigade of irregulars and marched them aimlessly back and forth across the snowy heights of the Apennines before finally heading south to join Mazzini and other revolutionaries who had seized control of Rome. It was here that he first made his mark on European history. On 30 April 1849 his men turned back a far superior French army sent to recover the city for the Pope. From that moment on, as Mack Smith remarks, Europe was prepared for the idea that Rome might one day be an Italian rather than a Papal city.