An enlightened commentary
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
A few weeks back I finished reading Eduardo Galeano’s seminal piece on football, “Football In Sun and Shadow”. Galeano, one of Uruguay’s finest writers and a football tragic to boot, has written a book that contains a series of vignettes about players, World Cups, goals and any aspect of the game that has captured his imagination over the years.
Originally written in Spanish in 1995, the edition that I read has been updated to include Galeano’s thoughts on both the 1998 and 2002 World Cups and the problems he sees with the current game. Obviously, I was reading the English version, but I do hope that one day my Spanish will be good enough so I can read the original. Also it appears that my version was published with an American (or maybe Australian) audience in mind as football has been replaced with soccer in the translation.
Overall, I thought the book was brilliant as Galeano’s choice of the vignette as a method of description allows him to cover a broad range of events and topics in what is not really a large volume. It also captures one man’s obsession with a game that he couldn’t quite master as a player and he writes in his introduction:
Like all Uruguayan children, I wanted to be a football player. I played quite well, in fact I was terrific, but only at night when I was asleep. During the day I was worst wooden leg ever to set foot on the little football fields of my country … Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good football. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: “A pretty move, for the love of God.”
As you would expect the book has a distinctive Latin American flavour, and being a big fan of football on the South American continent and a bit of latinophile I definitely lapped this up. One aspect I particularly enjoyed was when Galeano was writing about the World Cups, he would give a description of world events at that time to give the event its context. It also allows Galeano to provide us with some humour as in his description for every World Cup from 1962 onwards he writes:
Well-informed sources in Miami announced the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.
So it goes without saying that I highly recommend this book to all football tragics like Galeano and myself, you won’t be disappointed.
