Ian Hamilton
Gazza Agonistes
Faber, 2011
192 pages
£12.00
ISBN 9780571280193

…

…

According to the well-worn commonplace, pop culture celebrities are the new aristocracy. But are they really? Idolatry does not necessarily equate to real authority. We pay ritual homage to our Beyoncés and our Biebers, our Gagas and our Goslings, investing them with the auratic appearance of power, but deep down we know that they are not really the ones running the show. While the anonymous powerbrokers of the 1% live behind solid walls of institutionalised market supremacy, our celebrity royalty builds its castles on sand. Fortunes accumulate and evaporate, public acclaim blossoms and wilts. Meanwhile, we observe this rhythm of ephemerality with reassurance. Pop singers, film stars, models, and sports idols are gods created in our own image; they must never forget that they are one of us, ultimately subject to the same inordinate suffering experienced by the 99%. If an ordinary person in the glare of media attention genuinely, visibly managed to surmount the vicissitudes of positive and negative celebrity, we would have to accept that another, better world was possible, that someone somewhere had managed to acquire a truer, more lasting kind of power than us. And this realisation would have profound political implications.

Few have illustrated this aspect of capitalist realist culture better or more tragically than the onetime darling of British football, Paul Gascoigne (“Gazza” to almost everyone). A prodigal footballing talent born into a working class family from Gateshead in the northeast of England, Gascoigne rose meteorically through the ranks of the game to become a superstar in the early 90s. The focal point of a national obsession in the wake of his performance in the England team’s unseasonably decent showing in World Cup Italia ‘90, the Gazza saga was initially a sort of uproarious media cartoon strip that seemed to announce a new phase of British celebrity culture. Gascoigne visited Downing Street and gave Margaret Thatcher a cheeky hug (Gazza: “She’s cuddly, like me”); Germaine Greer and Julie Burchill wrote florid comment pieces about him in the national press; before long, a waxwork dummy of the Geordie marvel had appeared in Madame Tussauds. For a short while, in the rather grey atmosphere of the very early 90s, Gazza was a genuine phenomenon.

Then came the predictable fall from grace. A knee injury in the 1991 FA Cup Final and an ill-advised move to Italian club Lazio initiated a premature decline accelerated by alcoholism and eating disorders. As of 2012, Gascoigne is a lonely, relatively impoverished figure, a scarcely recovered boozer with a ghoulishly haggard appearance. No longer really involved in football, he crops up at intervals in the tabloids as a subject of farce and condescension.

But the tragic heft of the Gazza narrative has also invited the interest of more sympathetic commentators from time to time. Perhaps chief among these was the late poet, critic, Robert Lowell biographer, and Tottenham Hotspur fan Ian Hamilton, who wrote a lengthy piece titled “Gazza Agonistes” for Granta in 1993. Published in book form as Gazza Italia in 1994, Hamilton’s monograph has now been reissued under its original title as part of the Faber Finds series, an underrated recent publishing initiative that revives idiosyncratic, out-of-print texts in an unassuming, minimally designed format.

We are fortunate to be able to revisit, in Gazza Agonistes, the demotic cultural moment of the early-to-mid 90s, and to be able to situate this nuanced text alongside more celebrated treatments of football from the period such as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (1992) and Harry Pearson’s The Far Corner (1995). Yet for the most part, Hamilton’s confident, driven study remains as pertinent today as it probably was nearly 20 years ago (circa 1993, the present reviewer was reading the somewhat less rarefied Gazza: My Life in Pictures, so this last remark is mere conjecture). The book’s continued relevance arises from the fact that, while Hamilton indicates that Gascoigne’s hamartia or fatal flaw was to some extent his penchant for excess and tomfoolery, the real villain of the piece is unmistakably the capitalist media machine, an enemy that has become even more ruthlessly destructive of individual lives over the last two decades. Though it would be patronising and wrong to view Gazza straightforwardly as an innocent corrupted by money and fame—many of his problems were clearly inherent and deep seated—at bottom Gazza Agonistes is the record of an essentially ordinary, optimistic young man being thrust into the bizarre and dehumanising world of postmodern celebrity at a ridiculously early age and being crushed by the resulting friction.

Hamilton’s intelligent narrative ensures that Gazza’s trajectory from person to product is imbued with pathos and tasteful humour. It is genuinely heartbreaking to observe descriptions of the young prodigy (“plump, twitchy, and pink-faced, and on the small side”) morphing quickly into accounts of his maltreatment at the hands of cynically self-interested tough men. We learn that as a teenager at Newcastle, he was ordered to lose a stone of weight in a fortnight. Paternalistic figures intervene to try to ameliorate the PR circus that develops into an orgy at the time of the 1990 World Cup (foremost among these is England manager and fellow northeasterner Bobby Robson, whose affectionate description of Gazza as “daft as a brush” provides perhaps the most sonorously poetic epithet in the narrative—one thinks of Seamus Heaney or Basil Bunting). But Gazza’s fate is basically sealed early on when he cedes control of his career to an accountant-solicitor duo from London just before his 1988 transfer to Tottenham. Acting as “advisors”, this off-stage pair compels their client to “court publicity…put his name to ghosted columns, to dress up for photo-shoots, to foster the lovable ‘clown prince of soccer’ image”. After this point, as Hamilton sadly acknowledges, “the script was already written”.

An obvious weakness in Hamilton’s account is the relatively scant coverage given to the 1988-1991 years: the crux period of “Gazzamania”. Hamilton’s original project began with first-hand reportage of the abortive spell in Italy (1991-1995), and so well over half of the book is devoted to this dull, dissipated period, surely the most boring, least lyrical phase of the drama. A long postscript written in late 1998 goes some way to restoring balance, but as with the pre-Italy years, the crucial events of this later phase—the memorable Euro ’96 performance, the allegations of domestic abuse, the return to British football—are skipped over rather than closely examined as they deserve to be. Yet in spite of this Hamilton’s study is distinguished by the sophistication of its prose and the considerable generosity with which it handles its difficult subject. Unlike the highbrow writers who venture into football culture for an ironic frisson of pop-cultural bathos, Hamilton understands the vocabulary of the game, is never patronising, and always maintains an attitude of respect and seriousness toward his protagonist.

Indeed, it is Hamilton’s basic willingness to believe that Gazza might in other circumstances have stood for something truly affirmative that makes this a book of genuine resonance rather than a mere historical curiosity. Against the radical negativity of the media deconstructionists, Hamilton offers glimpses of another dimension in which Gazza’s supreme artistry might have pointed the way to a different, more hopeful kind of Englishness. Following England’s exit from the 1990 World Cup, The Independent described Gazza as “noble”. For Hamilton, this is no arbitrary term:

“Noble” is not a word that the back pages often have much use for, but on this day it did not seem out of place. And we too had been ennobled. From the split-second against Holland when an explosive pirouette took him through two startled Dutch defenders, Gascoigne had altered our expectations; he had even put a strain on our vocabulary. In that instant we, as fans, moved up a league. At last and maybe just for once we had a player of world class – or rather a player who was not afraid to be world class, who could treat the Gullits and Van Bastens, the Baggios and Viallis, as if they were just another mob of big lads in some Gateshead school-yard.

Like the man himself, Gazza Agonistes offers the suggestion that this singular example of a noble everyman beating the big lads and moving up the league might somehow be recoverable from the familiar tragedy of a pop idol brought low by world-crushing cynicism. Amid the hysterical hero-worship and vitriol, this valuable book argues, we can discern a Gazza who was one of us in the most subversively positive sense.

Alex Niven is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford. Alex is a senior editor at the Oxonian Review.

Amol Rajan
Twirlymen: The Unlikely History of Cricket’s Greatest Spin Bowlers
Yellow Jersey, May 2011
400 Pages
£16.99
ISBN 978-0224083232

…

…

Shehan Karunatilaka
Chinaman
Jonathan Cape, April 2011
416 Pages
£12.99
ISBN 978-0224091459

…

…

Bowlers in the game of cricket can be classified as either seamers or spinners. Seamers aim to deliver the ball with power so that it hits the pitch at high speed; they tend to be tall, strong men, enabling them to get greater pace and bounce. Spinners, however, aim to turn the ball in the hand as it is released, sending it travelling down the pitch with no great momentum, but making it subject to all kinds of menace when it lands, depending on the direction of the spin, how high into the air the ball is tossed, and how much the wind causes it to drift in the air. Spin bowlers come in all shapes and sizes. India’s Anil Kumble was tall and elegant; Shane Warne of Australia was of average height but above-average girth; while England’s lesser-known ‘Tich’ Freeman was a mere 5-foot-2 and remains the only man to take 300 wickets in a single season. Spin bowling is, as such, a mental process, dependent on outwitting and tricking the opponent. As batsmen have found out, the humiliation of being out-thought can be just as intimidating as being out-muscled.

Spin is a word that now has heavy political connotations, to the extent that it is a necessary weapon in the armoury of any contemporary candidate, carrying with it connotations of deceit and manipulation. A great spinner in cricket possesses the same ability: the ball can be hidden or obscured from view in any number of ways. The rotation of the arm in bowling the ball can appear identical to that of an entirely different type of delivery. Add in boasts about developing brand new variations in an attempt to intimidate batsman before a ball has even been bowled, and it is clear that spin bowling is a psychological art.

Amol Rajan, an editor at The Independent, focuses on the cerebral aspects of spinning in his new book Twirlymen, a well researched history of the discipline from the earliest underarm practitioners to the exploits of the modern record-breakers Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan. Rajan charts the development of spinning through the successes and failures of the personalities drawn to what can be an unforgiving and lonely pursuit. Inevitably, the most successful passages of the book are those in which he dissects complex personalities. He writes well on the torment of England’s Tony Lock, a gifted player who had the misfortune to bowl in tandem with fellow spinner Jim Laker when Laker took 19 wickets in a Test against Australia:

Lock said years later that he wished he hadn’t denied Laker all twenty, and perhaps from his point of view that would have lessened the focus on his comparative failure in that July Test. It might then have been all about Laker, and not just 95 per cent about him, which naturally draws attention to the conspicuous 5 per cent remaining.

This section (and several others) add grit to the wheels. The chronological format of Twirlymen is such that it has the tendency to read as a procession of one hugely successful player emulating and outdoing his forebears.

Rajan clearly wants spinners not only to return to prominence, but also to receive the credit that he believes that they deserve. Twirlymen is driven by a feeling of injustice against the developments in cricket that have made the spinner’s life as difficult as possible. Pitches have become flatter with shorter boundaries, and technology has been developed that enables batsmen to examine a spinner’s tricks and disguises in forensic detail. Certainly, Twirlymen ought to be good for the reputations of several spinners who have slipped into obscurity, such as Sonny Ramadhin of the West Indies, who retired to run a pub in the north of England, and Australia’s Arthur Mailey, whose previous career as a glass-blower toughened his fingers to the extent that he avoided the cuts and tears that plague other spinners.

Twirlymen has a happy ending, though, owing to the resurgence in spin bowling in the past decade. Although, in Warne and Murali, Test cricket had two bowlers of both skill and longevity (and who took more wickets than any brawny seamer has ever managed) the most interesting development is actually how spinners have responded to the development of Twenty20 cricket, which has led to more aggressive batting and faster scoring than ever before. One would expect spinners to suffer at the hands of less risk-averse batting, or at least, to lose their attacking edge. However, in the frenetic setting of T20, the mental agility of a good spin bowler has seen the practice thrive. It is a shame that this development is passed over in only two pages.

Chinaman, the debut novel by a Sri Lankan author, Shehan Karunatilaka, shrouds spin bowling in a page-turning account of mystery and deception. The narrative thrust of the novel concerns shambling, alcoholic journalist WG (or Wije) Karunasena’s search for a spin bowler named Pradeep Mathew, about whom he wishes to write a book. Statistically, Mathew was an ordinary player who managed only four Test match appearances for Sri Lanka before disappearing into obscurity. However, Wije is convinced that Mathew was a bowling genius, and that his career was cut short by the political manoeuvring that parasitically feeds off cricket in Sri Lanka. Having witnessed Mathew’s extraordinary range of deliveries, which include zooters, floaters, and an unprecedented double-bounce ball, Wije is determined to restore his reputation, a task that brings him into contact with the seamier side of Sri Lankan society.

Mathew, one senses, would not have gained Rajan’s approval. He is not a great thinker who bamboozles batsmen with carefully laid plans. Rather, he is impulsive, short-tempered, and lazy, a man who happens to play some exceptional cricket in the interim periods between upsetting the authorities. His miraculous bowling is therefore even more mysterious. He can make the ball spin and drift in extraordinary ways, and on the basis of raw talent alone. There is no one in Twirlymen capable of this because of Rajan’s emphasis on the earnest hard work that comes with the constant search for more rip, flight, or turn.

The legend of Pradeep Mathew succeeds because of Karunatilaka’s skill in setting his fictional spinner in context. He is a teammate of real players, some of whom are named (Muttiah Muralitharan, Arjuna Ranatunga), some of whom are alluded to (The GLOB, i.e., Great Lankan Opening Batsman). Many a curious reader will be confused as to whether Mathew is a real player, such is the slipperiness of Chinaman. His fictionality is a shame, simply for a scene in which he engages in a hilarious discussion with a thinly disguised Geoffrey Boycott (described only as “The Yorkshireman”), in which he makes one of the most pompous figures in the game look ridiculous thanks to the speed and venom of his tongue:

Mathew dispensed with the smile… “New Zealand took twenty years to win first test. Sri Lanka only took three years.”
The Yorkshireman smirks. “That may be the case, but…”
Mathew’s voice rose a key. “England has played for hundred years…”
“But we’re not talking history, are we son?”
“…and they’re still crap.”
“Is that right? You think you’re better than England, do ya?”
“I’m better than you ever were.”
The Yorkshireman raised his eyebrows and gave his lopsided smile… “You think you’ll play the next game, son? Or will you be carrying drinks again?” There was silence. Reggie watched Mathew look up at his bully.
“You think you’ll ever do commentary? Or will you be doing CatchoftheMatch again?”

Wije’s tongue is rather less dextrous and rather more furry thanks to his conspicuous consumption of arrack. He is phenomenally disorganised—attempting to assemble a book on Mathew based on the scraps of information that he is able to glean from a shady cast of characters, each of whom operates with their own (often unspecified) agendas. This disorganisation is reflected in the form of Chinaman, which is assembled from short paragraphs on the basic rules of cricket; transcripts of interviews; notes that Wije has made, lost, and found again; recollections of broken promises made to his long-suffering wife, Sheila; and debates he has held with his best friend, Ari. This technique makes it easy for the truth to slip between the cracks. As readers, we are reliant on Wije’s interpretation of Mathew and the evidence that he chooses to show us, just as a batsman is reliant on a spinner’s clues about what sort of ball he is about to face.

There is enough to suggest that we should trust Karunatilaka’s wobbly protagonist: he sees beauty and takes joy in the game of cricket, and spinning in particular. This is a joy that we must share in. By eliminating physical attributes, spin bowling is a great leveller, and there is little that is more satisfying on a field than defeating a batsman with a wily and well-executed plan. Geniuses like Mathew, Murali, and Tich Freeman may possess uncommon control and dexterity, but for the rest of us, good spinning remains a dark art of subterfuge.

Mike Jakeman graduated in 2006 with a BA in English from Keble College, Oxford. He now works for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

As I shuffled through the hordes of screaming Dutch fans and delirious Spaniards on 11 July 2010, I couldn’t help but feel like I was a part of history. It was a chilly winter night in Johannesburg and the sky was lit by an impressive array of stars. Despite having never attended a football game of any kind before, I was now about to enter Soccer City—the vaunted venue for the 2010 World Cup Final. This monolithic stadium, looming high over Nobel laureate and liberator President Nelson Mandela’s former township of Soweto, is designed to resemble an African pot streaked by flames. On this particular night, it was conveying its designer’s intent admirably: a glowing beacon of hope and celebration.

For the next 150 minutes, I enjoyed up-close and personal interactions with some of the finest footballers in the world, culminating in a hotly contested 1-0 decision for Spain. The final whistle marked not only the end of an international sporting match, but a historic, triumphant moment in Africa’s troubled history. On a continent known more for its failed states than for its miracle moments, the first World Cup/Olympics on African soil meant a great deal to South Africa. For a month, a starkly divided nation coalesced and put on an incredible show for the world. South Africans of all walks of life—rich and poor, young and old—came together to celebrate their shared dreams of a better life.

There is no single sporting event that captures the global imagination in quite the same way as the World Cup. Its heroes, its venues, its advertisers—countless hours are spent debating and dissecting even the most ostensibly mundane topics. We collectively marvel at the beautiful stadiums built for a few matches and gasp at the vast expenditures assumed by the host country. Regardless of their sporting affiliations or country of origin, it seems like everyone has an opinion on at least one aspect of the games.

This year, the bulk of the commentary was reserved for discussions surrounding the choice of South Africa as host nation. Football fans fretted and feared the worst. Could South Africa, still recovering from the scourge of apartheid, overcome its sometimes chaotic governance structures and successfully pull off enormous logistical and construction challenges in time? Was it possible for this long-suffering nation, with one of the world’s highest per-capita murder and rape rates, to protect massive influxes of tourists, players, and its own citizens? How could a country justify spending billions on sport when so many of its citizens lived in dire poverty?

Of course, we now know that South Africa performed admirably and exceeded even the rosiest of expectations. The games went off virtually mistake-free, tourists marvelled at the natural beauty of the countryside, and South Africans were congratulated for their stunning hospitality. Crime plunged significantly and foreign visitors were able to travel safely and efficiently. Nearly everyone left impressed by the progress and hopeful for the future of Africa’s biggest economy and only G20 member.

Yet such positive results partially mask the tremendous work that still needs to be done. For example, South Africa has the dubious distinction of being one of the most unequal and dangerous places on Earth, even though its robust constitution has provided admirable rights on a normative level for all of its citizens. A sizable gap remains between discussion and implementation as the country is marred in a vicious cycle of inequality. According to the Gini coefficient index (a well-respected metric for measuring the levels of inequality in a society), South Africa is ranked 129th in human development (12th overall in Africa), and is beset by sprawling crime-ridden areas in urban centres like Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Racial tensions are another potentially explosive issue that came to the forefront in the multi-ethnic glow of the World Cup. The legacy of apartheid, with its dictates on the supremacy of whites and the systemic oppression of non-white South Africans, is still palpable. Julius Malema, the controversial populist head of the dominant African National Congress’s youth movement and an important political figurehead, has grown increasingly antagonistic. He recently led chants of “shoot the boer” (an anti-apartheid song about murdering white Afrikaans people) and openly calls for the nationalisation of mines to free South Africa from its white oppressors. The hatred festers both ways, with many white people openly spreading thinly veiled racist views. Eugene Terre’Blanche, an unrepentant white supremacist and a key political opposition leader, was murdered in his home last spring, bringing the racial issue to the fore again right before the cup.

The country is a struggling democracy, with a seemingly endless array of issues to resolve. HIV/AIDS, rampant xenophobic attacks against desperate foreigners from countries like Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and stunningly high levels of unemployment hovering around 40% threaten to derail the progress that has been made in other areas. The Republic of South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma has called 2010 “the most important year in our history since 1994”, the year in which South Africa held its first fully democratic elections. The World Cup, with its emphasis on inclusion and its multi-ethnic feel, certainly made a wonderful contribution to this new democratic spirit; however, even the most ardent optimist can see that South Africa still has a long way to go before it can fully realize its promise. The light from Soccer City will only continue to burn bright if it doesn’t blind the world to the country’s existing problems first.

Joel Krupa is reading for an MSc in Environmental Policy at Mansfield College, Oxford.

…

…

…

…

…

…

Cheating in sport is a sure-fire headline grabber. Nothing has demonstrated this better than a few high-profile cases during the summer of 2009. As holidaymakers prostrated themselves on sun-kissed beaches, the murkier sides of professional sporting competition burst into the spotlight.

Most recently, Rugby Union—the gentleman’s game par excellence—came under the microscope after a particularly salacious story, popularly known as the Bloodgate scandal, rocked the foundations of the sport. During a quarterfinal match in European Rugby’s premier cup competition, Harlequin Football Club made a substitution, bringing off winger Tom Williams, who appeared to be bleeding from a mouth wound. It was later revealed, however, that Williams had used a capsule of fake blood—hidden inside his sock—to facilitate a tactical change for his team (the rules governing which, incidentally, would fox the average Oxford graduate).

Williams betrayed himself when he was caught on camera leaving the field, apparently bloodied and bruised, but winking at a member of the Harlequins coaching staff. The subsequent furore led to the suspension of the rugby club’s managerial team, as well as the player himself, and much soul-searching amongst devotees of the game. Apparently if a rugby player flaps his eyelids in West London, a whirlwind does indeed gather in Fleet Street.

Yet for all the epileptic handwringing in the media, one suspects that the general public—albeit secretly or begrudgingly—finds these stories of cheating appealing. It may be, as ESPN’s Pat Forde wrote in 2007, that we are simply too emotionally involved in sports, and that as a result we are relieved of our moral scruples.

But the fascination seems to go further. It isn’t so much that we tolerate cheating amidst the emotions of the game. Academics Ian Preston and Stefan Szymansi were overcautious when they argued that “there certainly does not seem to be any clear evidence that scandals related to cheating have reduced interest” in sports. The public interest is piqued—and an important aspect of fandom is satiated—by cheating. We are inordinately fascinated by it. We want more of it.

Part of this collective idée fixe is surely bound up in the human love of theater, the inclination to divide public figures into good and bad character types and to revel in the moments when sportsmen adhere to these roles. But sporting cheats, unlike, say, criminals, have a special type of attraction (the glorification of violence and crime notwithstanding). For though their rule breaking is taboo, sport stars’ willingness to sacrifice morality for victory can be seen as heroic, an all-consuming longing for glory. In short, we may not approve of a cheat’s methods—though hats off to something as ingenious as a blood capsule—but we often admire his motivation.

This is not, as some might argue, merely gross titillation for Joe Public. Even sensible and erudite commentators get swept up in a quasi-romantic reaction toward a sporting cheat. To coincide with the 2008 Beijing Games, Simon Barnes, widely regarded as one of the Times’s best sportswriters, was asked to name his favourite Olympic moment of all time.

“The same image fills my mind”, Barnes mused. “It is burnt into my retina: that blazing day in Seoul, the light hurting your eyes and the yellow-eyed, shaven-head human bullet taking the stage to turn the world upside down.”

That’s right, Barnes chose the greatest cheat of them all, Ben Johnson, who ran a world-record 9.79 seconds in the final of the 100-meter in 1988 only to test positive for anabolic steroids days later. Add Barnes’s case to a growing list that includes the “Hand of God”, the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, Tonya Harding—all have gone down in history as infamous, and yet somehow fetishised, exponents of the art of cheating.

The question—which, for obvious reasons, nobody in sport wants to ask—is whether cheating is in fact good for sport.

There is no doubt that tales of intrigue and deceit help to keep sport top of the public agenda. Juicy stories of how far sportsmen are willing to go for victory turn heads and get tongues wagging, drawing in viewers picky about what they watch, read, and discuss. Particularly now, in an age of professionalism where money and audience share rule, sport benefits from the added exposure generated by cheating controversies, even if that means sacrificing some of the integrity of sporting competition.

It’s a tough moral maze to navigate: the desire to punish those who refuse to play by the rules pitted against the natural human tendency to marvel, however reluctantly, at acts of daring villainy. This paradox has led some in the debate to propose an amnesty on certain types of cheating. Ellis Cashmore, a professor of culture, media, and sport at Staffordshire University and a regular contributor to British sporting discussion, argues in favour of legalising performance-enhancing drugs in sporting competition: “There are no moral absolutes in sport”, Cashmore declared in a 2003 editorial for the Observer, for purity and fairness are anachronistic “amateur ideals”.

But as much as cheating constitutes a notable part of modern sport’s rich tapestry, there are good reasons for fighting this rather revisionist approach.

Never mind Tom Williams’s faked injury; in some cases, cheats actively put themselves in the way of physical harm. Take another episode from this summer, when Brazilian Formula One driver Nelson Piquet Jr purposely crashed his racing car to allow Renault teammate Fernando Alonso to win the Singapore Grand Prix. Executing highly dubious team instructions, Piquet Jr put himself—and the other drivers—at enormous risk.

Moreover, there are grounds for arguing that the sportsman vilified as a cheat is more justly understood as a victim. Both Williams and Piquet Jr can legitimately argue that they were following instructions. No matter how distasteful that particular excuse has become, it can be a persuasive one, confer Stanley Milgram’s research.

Demonstrating this point in horrific fashion, former communist East Germany fed its unwitting athletes potent cocktails of hormones and steroids. Shot-putter Heidi Krieger was so affected by the drugs she was forced to imbibe that she opted to undergo a sex change and is now known as Andreas. Swimmer Rica Reinisch, who won three gold medals at the 1980 Olympics, depicted the real sadness of the East German case when she told her story to the Guardian in 2005. “The worst thing was that I didn’t know I was being doped”, she said. “I was lied to and deceived. Whenever I asked my coach what the tablets were I was told they were vitamins and preparations.”

And then there is the point that, for all the hype generated by a cheat, there is nothing more glorious than a great winner. The sports story of the summer was undoubtedly Usain Bolt’s achievements on the track: smashing two sprint world records in times that seem, frankly, ludicrous. It is when these historic moments occur—sporting genius, and not of the evil variety—that people really sit up and take notice of sport, and the public profile of sport truly benefits.

Let’s all hope, therefore, that Bolt’s performances have been absolutely spotless. If not, cheating will have been proven, yet again, to be professional sport’s biggest crowd-pleaser.

James Appell graduated from St Antony’s College, Oxford in 2009 with an MPhil in Russian and Eastern European Studies. He is a travel journalist and freelance sportswriter living in London.

Anastassia Tsoukala
Football Hooliganism in Europe:
Security and Civil Liberties in the Balance
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
192 pages
£50.00
ISBN 978-0230201149

…

…

…

To the horror of Western Europe’s liberal intelligentsia, the ancient alliance between popular attitudes and muscular executive force has excluded asylum seekers and radical Muslims from “normal” society. Yet the same intelligentsia that has campaigned against the unlawful treatment of these groups has turned a blind eye to the de-humanisation and denial of civil liberties affecting the young, male football supporter. Away from the headlines of asylum prisons and 42-day detention, suspected football hooligans have been demonised in a pan-European spiral of social construction, which implicates governments, the EU, police forces, and the media.

Football Hooliganism in Europe is Anastassia Tsoukala’s effort to expose this trend. Turning to the histories of European lawmaking and law enforcement, Tsoukala, a professor of criminology at Paris XI, traces the process by which the football hooligan became a modern folk devil. Despite its flaws, her book admirably attempts to redirect academic focus toward the less recognised—but no less oppressive—manifestations of the contemporary obsession with security.

As Tsoukala makes clear, the demonisation of football hooliganism is an outgrowth of a new security paradigm in which “non-traditional threats” justify disproportionate executive power. Within this frame, sub-groups like the asylum seeker, the radical Muslim, and the hooligan are violated due to pre-emptive assessments of “risk”. This process occurs independently of violence itself, facilitating the erosion of human rights across Europe.

For instance, in Britain, the Football (Disorder) Act 2000 allows authorities to ban suspected hooligans from stadiums and restrict them from traveling abroad to games through passport confiscation. Authorities can take these measures on the basis of police complaint alone. Violating the principle of proportionality and illustrating the punitive bite of civil orders, the law has allowed restriction of movement—and even detention—during “control periods” of suspected hooliganism. By the time of the 2006 World Cup, 3,286 of these banning orders were in force in England and Wales.

In February of that year, one case, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester v. Davies, deliberated on a man who received a football banning order based on a complaint, despite the failure of either policemen or CCTV footage to identify him. In another case, a man received a banning order after a bottle was thrown in a pub, even though authorities could not positively identify the man as the perpetrator. Such “guilt by membership in a disorderly group” is a common, if patchy, pattern that feeds on the arbitrary predilections of local constabularies and magistrates.

This pattern persists across Europe. In France, Law (2006)-64, ostensibly an anti-terrorism measure, bans people from stadiums who have been found guilty of certain offences. Germany, Belgium, and Italy have similar measures in place. Moreover, even after these bans have expired, offender backgrounders remain on shared databases across Europe, contrary to the stipulations of the European Convention on Human Rights. Apart from infringing on the right to freedom of movement, these civil laws circumvent the procedural guarantees of the criminal justice system, most notably the crucial tenet of “innocent until proven guilty”. In this way, bans on football hooliganism constitute a noteworthy shift from traditional criminal justice toward what criminologist David Garland has called “the culture of control”.

But do football hooligans really matter? After decades of critical work by academics, the problems and implications of persecuting asylum seekers and radical Muslims are relatively clear. But aren’t football hooligans simply a case of deviant—or, as New Labour would have it, “anti-social”—people getting the punishment they deserve? Aren’t the control orders simply a way to prevent destruction of life, property, and public order?

For Tsoukala, the answer is a resounding no. While she does not deny the realities of football violence, Tsoukala asserts that football bans reveal latent ideologies—and key contradictions—in contemporary crime-control practices. In a skillful historical survey, she explains how a concrete, continent-wide legal framework specific to sports-related violence first emerged after 39 Juventus supporters were killed during a fight at Belgium’s Heysel Stadium in 1985. She then explores how this framework exhibits overlaps with approaches to similarly imagined non-state threats, such as recent legislation designed to combat terrorism, drug networks, and riots. The genealogy provides a timely corrective to the praise heaped on the policing of the 2006 World Cup: Tsoukala demonstrates that the measures the media has lauded—police co-operation, database sharing, and cross-European passport revocation—are a triumph of self-reinforcing logic and pernicious social construction.

While her analysis of legal history is compelling, Tsoukala’s survey of academic research on the phenomenon of hooliganism displays a myopic commitment to her own arguments about the problem at hand. She hastily dismisses decades of economic, social, and psychological research on sports-related violence, most notably the work of sociologists Peter Marsh and Eric Dunning. A more thorough acknowledgment of this research would add depth and empirical force to Tsoukala’s analysis, and perhaps more importantly, would endear her to—rather than alienate her from—the academics she aims to convince.

In the end, the problem with Football Hooliganism in Europe is that Tsoukala only hints at what she might state more explicitly: that the construction of the anti-hooligan hyperbole is as much about economics as it is about a social construct. Who wins in this economic exchange? All involved: newspapers whip up a storm to sell more newspapers; police forces point to the newspaper reports and get more resources; and European institutions such as Interpol emphasise (or perhaps invent) the transnational aspect of the problem to justify their coercive measures. In this system of internal logic, actual events bear little relation to outcomes: either violence occurs, necessitating more punitive measures, or it does not, in which case the preventive apparatus is praised, extended, and replicated. To some extent, the War on Terror works the same way.

Tsoukala gives too little time to these sorts of motivations, which underlie the very social construction she indicts. But she does succeed in convincing the reader that football hooliganism matters. This contribution should not be overlooked, for the patterns Tsoukala highlights suggest the need for more critical assessment of European laws and institutions. They also speak to the continued presence of impetuous punitive measures in Europe, which discriminate against particular persons based on prejudices and assumptions.

The precedent set by banning and restricting alleged hooligans, a precedent of “punishment on the basis of suspicion”, is dangerous, and the prevalence of such bans illustrates the need to keep a sharp eye on European institutions—the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and increasingly the European Parliament—that have undermined their own “rights and freedoms” rhetoric in the treatment of sports-related violence. In short, the continued failure to critique football-hooligan bans permits an erosion of the very values Europeans claim to uphold. By highlighting this paradoxical process, Tsoukala has not merely provided a new slant on a single phenomenon; she has shown that the seemingly banal control machinery of European integration can and does infringe on hard-won rights.

Mark Baker is reading for an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies at St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

An exchange with sports writer Martin Samuel

Google “Martin Samuel” and, with some minor exceptions, you will find two types of result. The first is examples of his prize-winning journalism, spanning a career that his taken him from the Sun and the Daily Express to the Times and now the Daily Mail, and from the sports pages all the way to the op-ed columns. With the reams of column inches has come a raft of awards. He picked up the 2008 Sports Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards, and was Sports Journalist Association Sports Writer of the Year three years running from 2005 to 2007.

The second type is rather less flattering. Take these examples from an online forum for fans of Manchester United: “Samuel is a fat slug”; “a talentless scribe in a toss newspaper”; ”I cannot stand Martin Samuel”—and those are only the ones appropriate for publication. Some of the comments are positively eye-watering.

“That sort of thing can become a little trite,” Samuel said during an interview in his living room in a leafy London suburb. “The people who think you’ve got it in for their club, that gets very wearing. It’s like: Mate, I don’t hate Arsenal. They just didn’t play very well. You must know that, there were 60,000 people in the stadium and they were all slagging them off! I can’t have been the only one to notice.”

Though Samuel is as affable in person as he can be in print, he is at his best when he directs his acerbic wit at the things (in both the sporting and political worlds) that annoy him. It is, as such, unsurprising that in cyberspace he is showered with praise and vitriol in equal measure. The two-hour interview he gave was punctuated by nuggets of opinion, expressed in a way that might have his audience either doubled up with laughter or on the phone to their lawyer.

On his profession: “There are a lot of journalists out there who you wouldn’t trust to write a note to the milkman.” On the perks of watching professional sport for a living: “I could not care less about what the cup of tea is like or whether you can get a decent sandwich at half time.” On secondary education in Britain: “I’m not saying 10 GCSEs is anything special. I wouldn’t trust some people who’ve got 10 GCSEs to find their back pocket with both hands.”

And yet Samuel combines these hammer-blows to propriety with a razor-sharp ability to observe and assess—one which has earned him a lucrative move from the Times to the Daily Mail. Why had he moved from Britain’s oldest and most esteemed newspaper to one that has the reputation for being rather politically reactionary?

“It was for all sorts of things,” Samuel begins cautiously. “I’m not going to pretend it was just ‘for the challenge’. There were all sorts of reasons. It was a better job. It was a better job financially, a better job in terms of what I was being asked to do. I never thought I would leave the Times, but the Daily Mail is a newspaper where when they want you, they make it clear in no uncertain terms that they want you.” In fairness to Samuel, he was so honest about his economic motive—rumours of a £400,000 per year salary abound—that you could hardly hold it against him.

But one wonders whether a move from the serious pages of the Times would necessitate a change in style.

“I haven’t changed a single word going from the Times to the Daily Mail,” he maintains. “I used to write for both the Times and the News of the World, and people used to say it must be strange to go from one to the other.

“All I found was that you had to get to the point quicker… you had to make the point a little bit sharper. But in terms of people thinking you change your vocabulary or things like that, I never found that. I think it would be patronising in the extreme to talk down to readers, and it would be very fake to talk up, to try and pretend you were something you weren’t. I once started a column with a Proust quote in the French but that was just a little joke because Simon Barnes [a former colleague at the Times] always quotes Proust and so I did it as a laugh, and not only that, but I did it in French.”

On leaving school at 18, Samuel gave himself a year to establish himself as a journalist, taking a job at Hayters agency. The job bore fruit, and he never made it to university. He admits that missing out on student life—he had planned to read English—was a difficult sacrifice to make.

“I always look back and think that [university] looked great, it looked like a lot of fun. But I spent my years 18 to 21 at Crystal Palace on a Tuesday night, stuff like that. Obviously not every Tuesday—some Tuesdays I’d go to Brentford.”

Clearly Samuel is passionate about journalism, and he retains great optimism for the future of his industry.

“The best value in Britain today is a good newspaper,” he says animatedly, before launching into a polemic about the price of coffee.

In addition, it is clear from the way he talks about sport that he adores his job, even despite some occupational hazards. A football stadium is not always the most comfortable office environment.

“I used to turn up to cover every event in collar and tie, but that went out the window long ago,” he says. “You used to ruin too many good suits—catch it on a nail, get covered in dust, stuff like that.”

So he has seen plenty of grim places? “They’ve got their own charm you see, even the small places. Sometimes it’s not the place, it’s the sport that’s awful, because you can be in the grimmest place, but if you’re watching Yeovil holding Liverpool to a 0-0 draw, it’s fantastic. You’re looking at it thinking ‘this is magnificent, and I know the roof hasn’t stopped leaking onto my table for two hours, but this is magnificent’. So it’s the sport that makes a place grim.”

A relatively uncontroversial conclusion maybe, but even the most opinionated people have to have some time off.

James Appell, the Sport editor at the Oxonian Review, is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford.

“Football isn’t a matter of life and death,” former Liverpool Football Club manager Bill Shankly once said. “It’s much more important than that.”

Truthfully, though, we rarely attribute the kind of importance to sport that we do to, say, politics, history, the arts or any of the other themes that traditionally appear in the pages of intellectual reviews.

Sport gets a rough ride in the heady world of intelligent and well-crafted journalism. In 2008 there was only one article specifically about sport in the London Review of Books, while the New York Review of Books carried an editorial about China and the Olympics and a review of Kasia Boddy’s Boxing: A Cultural History, but little else of overt sporting content. Meanwhile, the New York Times’ two-year foray into the world of sport with its quarterly title Play crashed and burned in November 2007, with falling sales and advertising revenues plunging the publication into the red. The New Yorker, barring a few exceptions, rarely prints feature articles dealing with sport.

Jumping to immediate conclusions, one might argue that this is purely intellectual snobbery—that the written world’s foremost thinkers, at home in the prestigious arenas of high politics, literature, theatre and the like, refuse to lower themselves to the less rarefied, more earthy atmosphere of the sports field.

But such a conclusion is probably unfair. Indeed, a number of studies indicate that academics and cultural commentators often neglect sport because they do not know how to treat it. In 2003 Lincoln Allison and Terry Monnington, lecturers at the University of Warwick, wrote a paper entitled “Sport, Prestige and International Relations”, which detailed the extensive reach of sport in the field of politics, national identity and world power relations. They found that international relations experts were too often guilty of neglecting sport as a discourse, simply because it did not fall into a failsafe explanatory category. “The most obvious hypothesis,” they conclude, “is that it does not fit into the traditional paradigms and debates of the discipline.”

Largely absent from the academy and intellectual periodicals, coverage of sport thus lacks the sort of depth and analytical rigour that commentators apply to other cultural phenomena. The majority of sports magazines on sale in the UK continue to target either adolescents or the kind of adult who thinks a football shirt is a fashion accessory. Reporters for these magazines write in a foreign language that includes impenetrable references to players’ nicknames, a labyrinth of statistics and complex game vocabulary (a particular favourite is “pinging it in with his left peg”, which I believe translates roughly as “playing a left-footed pass”.)

Anything that does not have direct bearing on the men chasing the ball does not appear on their pages. This inevitably leads to the lamentable proliferation of journalism in a vacuum, with writers treating sport as an inert entity unaffected by developments in the wider world. It is an approach that only reinforces the belief among the wider cultural intelligentsia that sport belongs in a category away from the “serious business” of current affairs, the social sciences and the arts—sequestered in a special place for the brutish writer and brutish fan alike. What a pity, because sport so often reflects and refracts the world around us just as art or politics does.

A handful of intellectual writers have tried, and continue to try, to integrate sport into complex political and sociological discourses. Cricket, which in the UK remains the natural home of intellectual sports writing, continues to inspire journalism of the highest calibre, particularly in the monthly Wisden Cricketer magazine. Football also has an equivalent publication, When Saturday Comes, which in recent months has addressed issues ranging from French national identity among young North African football enthusiasts to the controversial relationship between two footballers—one North Korean and one South Korean—in the Russian club Krylya Sovetov Samara. Across the pond, Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine are industry leaders, with ESPN winning an American National Magazine General Excellence Award in 2006, edging out the mighty New Yorker in the process. But these publications, aimed at the dedicated sports fan, are in many ways preaching to the converted. Mainstream intellectual journals continue to neglect these themes by and large.

It goes without saying that there are many eyebrow-raising examples of places where sport and society powerfully intersect. Books such as Simon Kuper’s seminal Football Against the Enemy, or Franklin Foer’s How Football Explains the World, show not only how sport reflects politics, but also how sport affects politics. For example, a handful of historians of the Balkans are now taking their lead from the world of sports in citing the rivalry between the football teams Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb as in part the root of the 1990s conflict in Yugoslavia. Historians of Weimar Germany long have suggested that the 1936 Olympics contributed, among many other factors, to the rise of the Nazi regime.

But sport not only serves as a telling historical lens; it has something to say about contemporary politics as well. Mark Bennett’s Russian Dynamo explores Russia’s resurgence under Vladimir Putin through the lens of her domestic football competition. The book’s message is clear: if you want to understand the oligarchs, you cannot neglect Roman Abramovich’s purchase of Chelsea FC or the control of football clubs Spartak Moscow and CSKA Moscow by oil and gas money. If you want to understand the intricacies of Russia’s regional politics, then try examining the meteoric rise of the Chechen team Terek Grozny, which, in the aftermath of a war that devastated the separatist republic, rather suspiciously constructed a football team that won the 2004 Russian Cup. If you are analysing corruption and the Mafia, the murky case of a young Russian striker, Dmitri Sychev, who allegedly asked for a transfer to Europe in 2004 after being leaned upon by a criminal gang, is a captivating one. In short, sport tells a story of Russia that is not always accessible to those who focus their research solely on the country’s tightly-managed political circles.

That is not to say that we should take our cues about politics and society wholly from sport. In the end, sportsmen and the people around them are focused solely on winning on the field, not on the more profound questions of human life, as demonstrated magnificently by former Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann when he said: “Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.”

To the astute observer, sport does have a relationship to matters of life and death, just as Bill Shankly suggested. Those involved in playing and watching sport shape and are shaped by the discourses within our society—local, religious or ethnic allegiances, as well as economics, crime and social unrest. Taking sport into account offers the potential for an alternative, often innovative perspective on these issues. With a combination of greater sympathy from the academic world, and a more rigorous approach from sports journalists and writers, we could well see this potential realised.

James Appell is reading for an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is the sport editor of the Oxonian Review.