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Behind the Curtain
Travels in Eastern Europe Football
door Jonathan
Wilson
“I
went to Tbilisi partly to visit Zaza and his wife Natya, who translated for him,
and partly to cover WIT Georgia Tbilisi's InterToto Cup-tie against SV Ried of
Austria; the idea being to discover whether there was anywhere in the world that
the competition had a purpose. WIT were forced to switch the game to the vast
Boris Paichadze Stadium in central Tbilisi, after UEFA decided their usual home,
the Armazi Stadium, was unsuitable. This kind of things usually irritates me:
clubs, I think, have a right to play at home, and if that means millionaire fancy-dans
for once having to change in a concrete outhouse with only two showers and a cracked
urinal for comfort, well, so be it. So, when, after a visit to the cathedral at
Mtskheta with Zaza and Natya the day before the game, I discovered that the Armazi
lay just off the road back to Tbilisi, I insisted on going to have a look. I hold
my hands up: UEFA were absolutely right.
There was a set of goalposts
at each end, and there were white lines wobbling through the grass, but, that
aside, the only thing to mark it out as a stadium was a sliver of cracked concrete
terracing, no more than six or seven steps deep, that staggered along the bank
by one touchline. Empty football grounds, haunted by voices that echo back through
the generations, can be profoundly melancholic places, but the Armazi didn't even
feel empty. There was nothing to contain the nothingness: no stands, no terraces,
not even a fence to act as a line of demarcation. It was just one field among
many, devoid of cows, admittedly, and with slightly shorter and less patchy grass
than the fields surrounding it, but essentially just another block of green in
a rough swathe stretching all the way to the hill on which the church of Jvari
perches. It was an undeniable beautiful spot, but it wasn't a football ground.
We hadn't been there long when the groundsman, clad incongruously
in a shiny white Liverpool away shirt, scuttled up to see what we were doing.
Natya explained I was a journalist, at which he stretched his arm towards the
rutted, puddled pitch, and grumbled about a lack of resources. If the surface
at the Armazi is typical, it is hardly surprising Georgians have a reputation
for being superb dribblers who never pass the ball. I felt a little embarassed
for the groundsman, and would have left, but he insisted on showing us inside
the concrete shack that served as dressing rooms. There were the odd trappings
of professionalism - training bibs and cones strewn on the floor, a magnetic tactics
board propped against the wall - but it's hard to imagine many British schools
still put up with such spartan conditions. The groundsman led us into the showers,
and, with a mighty yank, turned a lever on the wall. From two of the six shower-heads
thin streams of water dribbled on to the concrete floor. I held my hand out, and
wasn't all surprised to find the water was cold.
The Paichadze, if anything,
is an even sadder place than the Armazi ...”
(p.
231-232)
(Orion Publ.)
isbn:
0752869078
prijs: € 29,95
gebonden; 352 pagina's
verschenen februari
2006
paperback
verschenen november 2006
isbn paperback: 0752879456 €:
12,95
levertijd
5-7 werkdagen
Engelstalig
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