Philip Kerr: Hand of God

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 finish 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 Anthony. 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, 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-betting, compression shirts 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 St 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 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 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.