January Window (47 page)
Authors: Philip Kerr
‘I guess.’
‘And you’ll have been confirmed as the new City manager.’
‘That already happened,’ I told her. ‘I spoke to Viktor Sokolnikov after I left you last night and told him about the Cruikshanks. I’m signing a new contract on Friday. So he was as good as his word.’
‘Did you tell him that for a while you were convinced it was him who had killed Zarco?’
‘Er, no. But I did ask him to explain exactly what he meant by that remark he made, to the effect that all objections to the arrival of Bekim Develi had been thrown out of the window. He said that he was referring to the Home Office. Apparently they had originally objected to him because Develi had planned to open a nightclub as well, which is against the rules for what they call a Tier 2 sports migrant. Anyway, he’s given up that idea and he’s just going to play football. Which is how it should be. Football comes first. Football always comes first. Without football, life would be meaningless.’
‘That’s not exactly Aristotle, Scott.’
‘Actually, you’re wrong there. It is.’
Louise frowned.
‘Aristotle really did think that football contained the meaning of life.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘No, he did. Listen. This is what he says in his book,
Nicomachean Ethics
.’ I paused for a moment to remember the quote exactly.
‘This is going to be a joke, isn’t it?’
‘On the contrary. I think he knew exactly what he was saying, and as usual he was right. Aristotle says this: “Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly, every action and choice of action, is thought to have some good as its object. This is why the good has rightly been defined as the object of all endeavour. Everything is done with a goal, and that goal is good.”’ I shrugged. ‘Well, don’t you see? A goal changes everything.’
Now that’s a philosophical truth.
W
e hope you enjoyed this book.
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The Hand of God
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Never mind the Special One; according to the sports press I’m the Lucky One.
After the death of João Zarco (unlucky) I was lucky to land the job as the caretaker manager of London City, and even luckier to keep it at the end of the 2013–14 season. City were judged lucky to have finished fourth in the BPL; we were also judged to have been lucky to reach the Capital One Cup Final and the FA Cup Semi-final, both of which we lost.
Personally, I thought we were unlucky not to win something, but
The Times
thought different:
‘Considering all that has happened at Silvertown Dock in the last six months – a charismatic manager murdered, a talented goalkeeper’s career cut tragically short, an ongoing HMRC investigation into the so-called 4F scandal (free fuel for footballers) – City were surely very fortunate to achieve as much as they did. Much of the club’s good fortune can be attributed to the hard work and tenacity of their manager, Scott Manson, whose fulsome and eloquent eulogy for his predecessor quickly went viral on the internet and prompted the
Spectator
magazine to compare him to none other than Mark Antony. If José Mourinho is the Special One, then Scott Manson is certainly the Clever One; he may also be the Lucky One.’
I’ve never thought of myself as being lucky, least of all when I was doing eighteen months in Wandsworth nick for a crime I didn’t commit.
And I had only one superstition when I was a professional footballer: I used to kick the ball as hard as I could whenever I took a penalty.
As a general rule I don’t know if today’s generation of players are any more credulous than my lot were, but if their tweets and Facebook posts from the World Cup in Brazil are anything to go by, the lads who are playing the game today are as devoted to the idea of luck as a witch doctors’ convention in Las Vegas. Since few of them ever go to church, mosque or shul, perhaps it’s not that surprising that they should have so many superstitions; indeed, superstition may be the only religion that these often ignorant souls can cope with. As a manager I’ve done my best to gently discourage superstitions in my players, but it’s a battle you can’t ever hope to win. Whether it’s a meticulous and always inconvenient pre-match ritual, a propitious shirt number, a lucky beard, a pair of charmed socks, or a providential T-shirt with an image of the Duke of Edinburgh – I kid you not – superstitions in football are still as much a part of the modern game as in-play betting, compression shorts and Kinesio tape.
While a lot of football is about belief, there’s a limit; and some leaps of faith extend far beyond a simple knock on wood and enter the realms of the deluded and the plain crazy. Sometimes it seems to me that the only really grounded people in football are the poor bastards watching it; unfortunately I think the poor bastards watching the game are starting to feel much the same way.
Take Iñárritu, our extravagantly gifted young midfielder, who’s currently playing for Mexico in Group A: according to what he’s been tweeting to his one hundred thousand followers it’s God who tells him how to score goals; but when all else fails he buys some fucking marigolds and a few sugar lumps, and lights a candle in front of a little skeleton doll wearing a woman’s green dress. Oh yes, I can see how that might work.
Then there’s Ayrton Taylor, who’s currently with the England squad in Belo Horizonte; apparently the real reason he broke a metatarsal bone in the match against Uruguay was that he forgot to pack his lucky silver bulldog and didn’t pray to Saint Luigi Scrosoppi – the patron saint of footballers – with his Nike Hypervenoms in his hands like he normally does. Really, it had very little to do with the dirty bastard who blatantly stamped on Taylor’s foot.
Bekim Develi, our Russian midfielder, also in Brazil, says on Facebook that he has a lucky pen that travels with him everywhere; interviewed by Jim White for the
Daily Telegraph
, he also talked about his recently born baby boy, Peter, and confessed that he had forbidden his girlfriend, Alex, to show Peter to any strangers for forty days because they were ‘waiting for the infant’s soul to arrive’ and were anxious for him not to take on another’s soul or energy during that crucial time.
If all of this wasn’t quite ludicrous enough, one of City’s Africans, the Ghanaian John Ayensu, told a Brazilian radio reporter that he could only play well if he wore a piece of lucky leopard fur in his underpants, an unwise admission that drew a flurry of complaints from the conservation-minded WWF and animal rights activists.
In the same interview Ayensu announced his intention to leave City in the summer, which was unwelcome news to me back home in London. As was what happened to our German striker, Christoph Bündchen, who was Instagrammed in a gay sauna and bar in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza. Christoph is still officially in the closet and said he’d gone to the Dragon Health Club by mistake, but Twitter says different, of course. With the newspapers – especially the fucking
Guardian
– desperate for at least one player to come out as gay while he’s still playing professional football (wisely, I think, Thomas Hitzlsperger waited until his career was over), the pressure on poor Christoph already looks unbearable.
Meanwhile, one of London City’s two Spanish players in Brazil, Juan Luis Dominguin, just emailed me a photograph of Xavier Pepe, our number one centre back, having dinner at a restaurant in Rio with some of the sheikhs who own Manchester City, following Spain’s game against Chile. Given the fact that these people are richer than God – and certainly richer than our own proprietor, Viktor Sokolnikov – this is also cause for some concern. With so much money in the game today players’ heads are easily turned; with the right number on a contract, there’s not one of them that can’t be made to look like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist
.
Like I said, I’m not a superstitious man, but when, back in January, I saw those pictures in the papers of a lightning bolt striking the hand of the famous statue of Christ the Redeemer that stands over Rio de Janeiro, I ought to have known we were in for a few disasters in Brazil. Soon after that lightning bolt, of course, there were riots in the streets of São Paulo as demonstrations against the country’s spending on the World Cup got violently out of hand; cars were set on fire, shops vandalised, bank windows smashed and several people shot. I can’t say I blame the Brazilians. Spending fourteen billion dollars hosting the World Cup (as estimated by Bloomberg) when there’s no basic sanitation in Rio de Janeiro is just unbelievable. But like my predecessor, João Zarco, I was never a fan of the World Cup, and not just because of the bribery and corruption and the secret politics and Sepp bloody Blatter – not to mention the hand of God in ’86. I can’t help feeling that the little man who was named the player of the tournament in Argentina’s World Cup was a cheat, and the fact that he was even nominated says everything about FIFA’s showcase tournament.
As far as I can see about the only reason to
like
the World Cup is because the United States is so bad at football and because it’s about the one time when you’ll ever see Ghana or Portugal beat the crap out of the USA at
something
. Otherwise the plain fact of the matter is that I hate everything about the World Cup.
I hate it because the actual football played is nearly always shit, because the referees are always crap and the songs are even worse, because of the fucking mascots (Fuleco the Armadillo, the official mascot of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, is a portmanteau of the words
futebol
and
ecologia
– fuck me!), because of all the expert divers from Argentina and Paraguay and, yes, you, Brazil, because of all the England ‘we can do it this time’ hype, and because of all the cunts who know nothing about football who suddenly have a drivelling opinion about the game that you have to listen to. I especially hate the way politicians climb on the team coach and start waving a scarf for England when they’re talking their usual bullshit.
But mainly, like most Premier League managers, I hate the World Cup because of the sheer bloody inconvenience of it all.
Almost as soon as the domestic season was over on 17 May, and after less than a fortnight’s holiday, those of our players who had been picked for international duties joined their respective squads in Brazil. With the first World Cup match played on 12 June, FIFA’s money-spinning competition gives no time at all for players to recover from the stresses and strains of a full Premier League season and affords plenty of opportunities for them to pick up some serious injuries.
Ayrton Taylor looked as though he was out of the game for two months and seemed certain to miss City’s first match of the new season against Everton on 16 August; worse than that, he was likely to miss City’s Group B play-offs against Olympiacos in Athens the following week. Which – with our other striker now the subject of intense speculation as to the nature of his sexuality – is just what we don’t need.
It’s at times like these I wish I had a few more Scots and Swedes in the team as, of course, neither Scotland nor Sweden qualified for the World Cup in 2014.
And I can’t decide what’s worse: worrying about the ‘light adductor strain’ that stopped Bekim Develi playing for Russia in their Group H match against South Korea; or worrying that the Russian manager Fabio Capello was playing him against Belgium before he’d given Develi a chance to properly recover. You see what I mean? You worry when they don’t play and you worry when they do.