Philip Kerr - Hand of God

‘Bloody hell,’ I said.

Antonis grinned and popped some seeds in his mouth that he chewed like gum and which sweetened his breath. He was a handsome man with an Alan Hansen-sized scar on his forehead that travelled across his left eyebrow like tiny tramlines, lending him a vaguely Cyclopean aspect.

‘Exactly. It’s hell for everyone right now. At least it is in Greece, my friend. Nothing that happens in this country is like anywhere else. Remember that. Your boys get paid at the end of the month, just like other people in England, yes? But in Greece, the end of the month and payday might be several more weeks in coming — perhaps longer — if you know what I mean. Our university teachers haven’t been paid in months.’

‘I can’t see our lot going without their wages for very long,’ I said as Simon and some of the City players returned to the team coach. ‘They’re coin-operated; like everyone else in the English game right now.’

‘You got that right,’ Simon grumbled.

‘Sometimes,’ said Antonis, ‘the people in this country work for months without pay only to find out at the end of it that their employer has gone out of business and doesn’t have the money to pay them. In Greece getting paid what you’re supposed to be paid is like winning the lottery.’

‘But why do you call Olympiacos American bastards?’ I asked.

Antonis sneered. ‘Because American navy warships used to dock in the port of Piraeus. You see, when their sailors came ashore they used to sleep with the whores of Piraeus. Which is why we call them the sons of whores or American bastards, although quite frankly all of the women of Piraeus are whores. It’s not just us. Everybody in Greece hates Olympiacos. They’re a bunch of cheats and liars.’ He shrugged. ‘Believe me, my friends, they say much worse things about us.’

‘That’s a little hard to believe,’ said Simon. ‘But what do they say?’

Antonis shook his head as if what anyone from Olympiacos thought could be of no real account. ‘They think that because we’re Athenians we think we’re better than them. That we’re snobs. Which of course we are when it comes to Olympiacos. They call us lagoi — rabbits, because they think we run away from a fight. Which is just wishful thinking on their part. That is no surprise. They’re just a bunch of gavroi .’ He smiled. ‘This a kind of very small fish you find in the harbour that eats the shit from all the ships docked there.’

Simon and I exchanged a look of surprise at the level of enmity from a man who otherwise seemed perfectly civilised and urbane. I knew what the big, xenophobic Yorkshireman was thinking just by looking at his face. Since we’d arrived in Athens, he’d said it often enough: ‘Bloody Greeks. They’re their own worst enemies. I might feel sorry for the bastards if they weren’t so fucking bolshie.’

‘Good footballers, though,’ was what Simon actually said now. ‘How many times have they won the Greek League? Thirty-six times, is it? And the Greek Cup twenty-three times? And they’d have won the league this year again, if they hadn’t been docked all those points by the Hellenic Football Federation. Which is how we come to be playing them now, in the play-offs.’

Antonis pulled a face and looked away. ‘You can teach anyone to play football,’ he said simply. ‘Even a malakas from Piraeus. That is why they have to cheat. You might be the favourites for this match but don’t underestimate the capacity of the gavroi for low tricks. Tonight, it won’t just be eleven men you are playing. It will be sixteen, if you include the five match officials. And the crowd, of course; don’t forget the so-called Legend. They’re like another player, and a vicious one. There will be nothing friendly about the place you’re going tonight. And you can forget all your English ideas of the beautiful game. There’s no beautiful game in Greece. There’s no beautiful anything. There’s just — anger.’ He nodded. ‘In Greece it’s the one thing of which we have an unlimited supply.’

Whenever you see a football manager pacing up and down his technical area shouting encouragement and making signs at his team like a demented on-course bookmaker it makes for compelling television — the cameras love to see ‘the pressure written on the manager’s face’. In truth, the players shouldn’t even be looking at the manager but at the ball and, above the noise of the crowd, they seldom hear anything but the ref’s whistle, unless you’re Sam Allardyce. Most of the time you patrol your lonely ten yards of space only for the sake of appearances; your suffering shows that you care. Plus, it’s harder to sack a manager who is soaked to the skin, with mud on the knees of his Armani suit, not to mention some gob on his back.

Occupying a technical area in Piraeus is even more intimidating with thirty thousand baying Greeks at your back, and frankly it could be something more lethal than a bit of gob that’s coming your way. Just ask the Greek assistant referee who got hit with a flying chair during the Greek Cup in 2011. Venturing from the dugout at the Karaiskakis on a swelteringly hot night in August, it felt like I was leaving the safety of the walls of Troy to duel with Achilles; not recommended. But at Olympiacos it isn’t just crazy fans you have to watch out for: in 2010, despite winning the game 2–1 following some questionable refereeing decisions, the Olympiacos owner, Evangelos Marinakis, attacked Panathinaikos players Djibril Cissé and Georgios Karagounis at the end of the game.

So after just five minutes of the first half, when Bekim Develi scored from twenty-five yards with a shot that looked like a diagram from an artillery officer’s trajectory chart, I wasn’t that surprised that I should be hit on the shoulder with a banana as I threw off my linen jacket which was already damp with sweat and ran to the edge of my technical area to interrupt his thumb-sucking tribute to his new baby son, with a simple handshake.

It had all started so nicely, too, with both teams trooping calmly to the centre of the field, hand in hand with twenty-two local mascot children to the tune of Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’. What could be more calculated to create an inspiring image of UEFA’s family values and the honourable pursuit of victory in competitive sport? Even so, I sometimes wonder if any of these European football sides are aware that Handel’s music was composed especially for the anointing of an English king. This was followed by a minute’s near silence for the death of some Greek sportsman of whom I confess I’d never heard. But what the hell? A minute’s silence before a football game for anything strikes me as a good idea, especially in Greece — anything to stop those fucking drums and the warlike chants of the Gate 7 ultras. To listen that awful, masculine sound, brimful of aggression and testosterone, you would think yourself back at Rorke’s Drift in 1879, facing ten thousand Zulus.

I ignored the banana which — a later replay showed — must have come from the VIP seats. I guess VIPs are just as racist as anyone else. It didn’t hurt; not as much as a chair might have done. You can ignore almost anything when you’re a goal up after five minutes in the Champions League; the way I felt at that particular moment I could probably have ignored a spear between the shoulder blades. I turned back to the dugout and bicep-curled both arms, triumphantly.

The banana was almost immediately forgotten in the disaster that swiftly followed. Because no sooner had the game restarted than Bekim Develi missed a simple pass from Jimmy Ribbans, fell to his knees as if in penance for his mistake, and then collapsed face down in the centre circle, to the loud disdain of the Greeks. Seconds later, both Zénobe Schuermans and Daryl Hemingway began waving frantically towards our dugout. The club physio, Gareth Haverfield, didn’t need prompting from me; he snatched up his bag of tricks and sprinted onto the pitch.