Hand of God Read online

  ‘You really think it was deliberate?’ I asked, choosing now to ignore the omelette that the hotel waiter had brought to our table.

  Bastian, who was feeling unwell himself, shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but we seem to be the only ones in the hotel who’ve gone down with whatever this thing is. There’s a party of local car salesman having a conference here that seems to be quite all right.’

  ‘That certainly clinches it, I’d have thought.’

  ‘If this is a friendly,’ he said, ‘I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like when you play these guys in the Champions League. You’d better make sure you bring your own chef and nutritionist, not to mention your own doctor.’

  ‘Our present team doctor is just about to take up a new position in Qatar.’

  ‘Then you’d better find a new one. And quick.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put anything past these guys,’ said Bastian. ‘The newspapers seem to be treating this whole competition like Greece versus Germany. The Olympiacos manager, Hristos Trikoupis, referred to us as Hitler’s boys.’

  ‘That surprises me,’ I said. ‘Hristos was at Southampton with me. He’s a decent guy.’

  ‘Nothing surprises me,’ said Bastian. ‘Not after Thessaloniki: the bastards threw rocks and bottles at our goalkeeper. We had to warm up in a corner of the pitch well away from the crowd. I couldn’t feel less popular in this country if my name was Himmler not Hoehling. So much for the home of democracy.’

  ‘You’re Germans, Bastian. You must be used to that kind of thing by now. The first thing you learn in the professional game: there’s no such thing as a friendly, especially when there are Germans involved. There’s just war and total war.’

  Because I was speaking German I used the phrase totaler Krieg famously coined by Josef Goebbels during the Second World War, and some of the Hertha team glanced nervously my way when they heard it, the way Berliners do when they hear that kind of Nazi shit.

  ‘If I were you, Bastian,’ I added, ‘I would play tonight’s game the same way. It’s the only language these Greek guys understand and respect. You remember the rest of what was written on Goebbels’s banner? Totaler Krieg – kürzester Krieg. Total war – shortest war.’

  ‘I think maybe you’re right, Scott. We should fucking run over them. Kick the bastards off the pitch.’

  I nodded. ‘Before they do the same to you.’

  After breakfast I went back to the Grande Bretagne Hotel, in the centre of Athens. At exactly eleven o’clock I was sitting on a large, biscuit-coloured ottoman in the hotel lobby, texting Simon Page about our first game of the new Premier League season, an away match against newly promoted Leicester City, on 16 August. Simon was just about to take an eight o’clock training session at Hangman’s Wood and I was telling him not to make it a hard one as I was concerned that some of our players were still tired after their World Cup duties, not to mention our disastrous and entirely unnecessary tour of Russia.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’

  I glanced up to find Valentina standing in front of me. She was wearing a plain white shirt, tight blue J-Brand jeans, comfortable snakeskin sandals and black acetate Wayfarers. I stood up and we shook hands.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘Ready?’ she said.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To see someone you know.’

  We took a taxi to the National Archaeological Museum, a five-minute drive north from the hotel. The museum was designed like a Greek temple, a little less run-down than the one on top of the Acropolis, but not far off being a ruin; and like many public buildings in Greece – and quite a few private ones – it was covered in graffiti. Beggars drifted around the unkempt park that was laid out in front of the entrance like so many stray cats and dogs and I handed one old man all of the coins that were in my trouser pocket.

  ‘It’s something I always do back home,’ I said, seeing Valentina’s sceptical look. ‘For luck. You can’t get any if you don’t give any. Football’s cruel, sometimes very cruel. You have to make sure the capricious gods of football are properly appeased. You shouldn’t even be in the game unless you’re an optimist and to be an optimist means you cannot be a cynic. You have to believe in people.’

  ‘You don’t strike me as the superstitious sort, Scott.’

  ‘It’s not superstition,’ I said. ‘It’s just pragmatic to take a balanced approach to good luck and to careful preparation. It’s actually the clever thing to do. Luck has a way of favouring the clever.’

  ‘We’ll see, won’t we?’

  ‘Oh, I think Hertha will win. In fact, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Is that because you’re half German?’

  ‘No. It’s because I’m clever. And because I believe in totaler Krieg. Football that takes no prisoners.’

  Inside the museum were the treasures of ancient Greece, including the famous gold mask of Agamemnon that Bastian Hoehling had mentioned, back in Berlin. It looked like something made by a child out of gold foil from a chocolate bar. But it was another treasure that Valentina had brought me to see. As soon as I saw it I gasped out loud. This was a life-size bronze statue of Zeus that many years before had been recovered from the sea. What struck me most was not the rendering of motion and human anatomy but the head of Zeus, with its shovel beard and cornrow haircut.

  ‘My God,’ I exclaimed, ‘it’s Bekim.’

  ‘Yes.’ Valentina laughed delightedly. ‘He could have modelled for this bronze,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t he?’

  ‘Even the way he stands,’ I said, ‘mid-stride, in the act of throwing a spear or hurling a thunderbolt, that’s exactly the way Bekim always celebrates scoring a goal. Or nearly always.’

  ‘I thought it would appeal to you.’

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘Does he know?’ Valentina laughed again. ‘Of course he does. It’s his secret. He grew his beard so he would look like this statue; and when he scores he always thinks of Zeus.’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not sure he actually thinks he’s a god, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.’

  I walked around the statue several times, grinning like an idiot as I pictured Bekim adopting this same pose.

  And yet, perfect as the statue was, there was something wrong with it, too. The more I looked at it the more it seemed that the outstretched left hand was wrong, that it was attached to an arm several inches too long; later on, I bought a postcard and measured the approximate length of the arm, and realized that the hand would actually have reached down as far as the god’s knee. Had the sculptor got it wrong? Or had the original display angle of the figure required an extended arm to avoid a foreshortened look? It was hard to be sure but to my critical eye, the hand of God appeared to be reaching just a little too far.

  She nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier, about being lucky.’

  ‘Yes? What about it?’

  ‘I think you’re going to be lucky,’ she said, and taking my hand she squeezed it, meaningfully.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tonight.’

  I lifted her hand to my mouth and kissed it. The nails were short, but immaculately varnished, while the skin on the palm of her hand was like soft leather, which struck me as strange. ‘And I thought you were talking about the football.’

  ‘Who says I’m not?’

  I smiled. ‘I suppose that means you’re coming to the game.’

  11

  The Karaiskakis Stadium, in the old port of Piraeus, looked like a half-sized version of the Emirates, in London, with a capacity of just 33,000. The impression was bolstered by the fact that Emirates Air was an Olympiacos team sponsor and because of their red and white strip, although the shirt was more like Sunderland’s than Arsenal’s. The match was not well attended, but it was enthusiastically supported. The Gate 7 boys, or Legend as they liked to call themselves, made their calculatedly intimidating presence very loudly felt behind the German goal. They had bare chests an
d big drums and a sort of director of operations who kept his back to the pitch for almost the whole game so that he might properly orchestrate the obscene songs and low, Neanderthal chants. From time to time bright red flares were let off in the stadium but these were ignored by the police and security, who kept a low profile to the point of near invisibility. I was surprised at how unwilling the local police were to interfere in what took place inside the ground; they were forbidden to use the security cameras inside the stadium to identify potential troublemakers, a result of some obscure privacy law.

  Valentina and I were seated in a VIP area immediately behind the German dugout. At eighty euros a ticket in a country where the average monthly income was just six hundred and fifty euros you might have expected these mostly middle-aged and elderly supporters to be better behaved. Not a bit of it. I don’t speak any Greek but thanks to Valentina I was soon able to distinguish and understand words that would certainly have had the users of their Anglo-Saxon equivalents quickly removed from almost any ground in England. Words like arápis (nigger), afrikanós migás (coon), maïmoú (monkey), melitzána (eggplant), píthikos (ape).

  The man in the seat beside me must have been in his late sixties but every so often he would leave off smoking his Cohiba cigar or eating his cardamom seeds, leap onto the top of wall, bend over the edge of the German dugout and bellow, ‘Germaniká malakas,’ at the unfortunate Bastian Hoehling.

  ‘I keep on hearing that phrase, Germaniká malakas,’ I said to Valentina. ‘I get the Germaniká part. But what does malakas mean?’

  ‘It means wanker,’ she said. ‘That’s a very popular word in Greece. You can’t get by without it.’

  I found it hard to condemn the man for his choice of language. As I’d discovered, there are worse things to be called at a Greek football match. It’s a passionate game and stupid people watch it just as often as clever ones; you can encourage respect in football, and I was all in favour of that, but you can’t stop people from being ignorant.

  The match was keenly contested but the Greeks seemed genuinely surprised that the Berliners should have come at them so aggressively. Although Olympiacos competed strongly for every ball, they were quickly behind thanks to a superb header from Hertha’s talented Adrian Ramos that made me understand why Borussia Dortmund were so keen to secure the Colombian’s services after their own top striker, Robert Lewandowski, had left to join Bayern Munich in the early summer. But oddly the Gate 7 boys didn’t even pause; indeed, they carried on shouting as if the German goal had not happened.

  Meanwhile, trying my best to ignore the crowd, I made tactical notes in an ancient Filofax I always used for this kind of thing:

  Greeks weak at defending set-pieces. Muscular and fit-looking, but small of stature which makes them less equipped to compete in the air when good crosses swing in. Bekim Develi or Prometheus can give anyone problems if they get the right service. Develi tends to drift naturally to the right and this should probably be encouraged as Miguel Torres, likely Olympiacos’s right left-back, plays more like a right-winger than a defender – especially if Hernán Pérez isn’t playing, which he wasn’t today. If Develi does find space, or drags out Sambou Yatabaré (most likely centre half), he is more than capable of putting Jimmy Ribbans through. I hope our referee will be better than the one here today. I wouldn’t be surprised if the penalty earned him a small bonus.

  ‘It’s ages since I went to a football match,’ said Valentina as the Gate 7 hooligans, with arms extended in Nazi salutes, started another nasty song: ‘Pósoi Evraíoi ékanes aério símera?’ – How many Jews did you gas today?

  ‘I can quite understand why.’ I glanced around. ‘You’re about the only woman here, as far as I can see.’

  With Hertha’s number one keeper, Thomas Kraft, feeling too ill to play, I had a good chance to assess their second string keeper, Willie Nixon, an American. I’ve always admired American goalkeepers: they’re usually great athletes and Nixon was no exception, pulling off a couple of saves that kept his team in the game. He was young, too.

  A few minutes later, I thought I would have a chance to see what Nixon was really made of when Olympiacos won a penalty so unbelievable it looked as if the referee had pulled it out of a top hat. The German defender, Peter Pekarik, brought down one of the Greek players just outside the box – except that the big-screen replay showed he was at least a foot away when Kyriakos dropped to the ground, apparently suffering from a fractured tibia. That was bad enough but the improbably named Pelé, who took the Greek penalty kick, put the ball so high over the crossbar he must have thought he was Jonny Wilkinson; his effort was greeted with a loud and derisive chorus of boos and whistles and, around me, several shouts of įlíthia maïmoú (stupid monkey).

  I used to wonder exactly why Socrates had felt obliged to drink hemlock; I guess he must have missed a penalty for Olympiacos, too.

  By half time the Berliners were two goals up; they scored again immediately after the break, and that was how the game finished: 3–0. Hertha had won all three games of its Greek peninsular tour and the Schliemann Cup, put up by Hertha’s sponsors, was won by the Germans themselves, which seemed a very German outcome. But it wasn’t Willie Nixon the goalkeeper who had impressed me most, but Hertha’s charismatic team captain, Hörst Daxenberger. Strong as a racehorse and 193 centimetres tall, he looked like a blond Patrick Vieira.

  The Schliemann trophy ceremony, like the earlier warm-up, took place in a corner of the field far removed from Greek insults and missiles and Valentina and I joined Hertha for the muted champagne celebration in the players’ tunnel. In spite of the futility of the competition in which they had taken part I was glad for the German lads; they’d had a pretty tough time of it one way or another and were glad to be going back to Berlin. I almost envied Bastian Hoehling returning to a football club that was owned and managed in such an egalitarian way. You might say that Germans have had quite enough of autocrats and dictators. But they couldn’t get enough of Valentina who, it turned out, spoke quite good German; glasses of champagne in their hands, they were round her like wasps at a picnic. She had that effect on men. Perhaps she wasn’t the most beautiful woman in Greece but she was certainly one of the most attractive.

  An hour later we returned to the hotel in a limo kindly provided by Hertha FC.

  A little to my surprise no money was ever asked for and none offered; and it was only after I arrived back in London that I learned how my night with Valentina owed nothing to good luck and everything to Bekim Develi, when the red-haired Russian let slip that he had paid five thousand euros for me to have Valentina, in advance of me going to Athens.

  12

  It was a warm Saturday afternoon in August when we arrived at the King Power Stadium in Leicester for our first match of the new season. Just to the west of the main entrance single sculls were going up and down the River Soar like hi-tech swans. Full of misplaced optimism at being in the Premiership once again, Leicester’s supporters were noisy but hospitable and a far cry from the kind of hostile welcome we could expect when we travelled to Greece the following week. I wondered just how good-humoured these fans would remain when they were faced with the cost of supporting their club at away matches in London and Manchester. It was high time that TV companies like Sky and BT started to insist on ring-fencing a proportion of the money paid to the Premiership to subsidise ticket prices: there’s nothing worse for your armchair fan than seeing empty terraces.

  I still hadn’t resolved our goalkeeping crisis – we still needed to replace Didier Cassell – and if there was one player of Pearson’s I really envied it was Leicester goalie Kasper Schmeichel, son of the more famous Peter. Kasper had played for Manchester City and for Leeds United before joining the Foxes in 2011; he’d also played for his country, Denmark, on several occasions, and I had the feeling that, like his father, who had played for Man U until the age of thirty-nine, Kasper’s best years as a keeper still lay ahead of him. With fourteen days left before the summer
transfer window closed I was seriously considering asking Viktor Sokolnikov if we could make an offer for the twenty-seven-year-old Dane.

  Any doubts about Schmeichel’s ability were swiftly squashed when, just five minutes into the game, we were awarded a penalty. Prometheus powered the ball straight for the bottom right corner of the net, and how Schmeichel got a hand to it seemed nothing short of miraculous. That would have been impressive enough but, having batted the ball straight back at Prometheus, Schmeichel then launched himself across the whole width of the goalmouth, to the very opposite corner, where he just managed to prevent the Nigerian scoring on the rebound. Almost as important as the Dane’s agility was the way he cleverly managed to psych out our man even before he took the penalty kick. After Prometheus had placed the ball on the spot, Schmeichel had calmly walked out of his goal, picked the ball up, dried it on his shirt, and then cheekily tossed it back at the African, who angrily waved Schmeichel back into his goal. Some referees might have given a keeper a yellow card for doing that, but on the first day of the season? It looked like mind games and if it was, it worked.

  A team’s overall psychology is never helped when you miss a penalty; and this was dealt a further knock when our captain, Gary Ferguson, scored an own goal which left the home side one-up at half time. Shit like that happens; you learn to shrug it off. What worried me more was seeing Prometheus berate his own team captain. I’m no lip-reader but I think Gary gave the kid a few choice words back, although how he restrained himself from smacking the boy in the mouth is beyond me. Generally speaking, when you’re the captain a smack and a curse tends to work better than just a curse.

  ‘Forget it, Gary,’ I told him, loudly, in the dressing room. ‘This is football not fucking Quidditch. If you’re a defender and you’re doing your job properly there are always going to be occasions when you’re going to score an own goal. It’s just statistics. A ball you’d clear from your box, nine times out of ten, will go the wrong way because this isn’t snooker and there are no perfect angles. You got your knee to it; and it came off your knee, that’s all. Nobody with a brain in his head could blame you for a goal like that.’