Never alone: the corona culture of sport and fandom

If a wicket falls in an empty stadium and no-one hears it, has it really fallen? The virus vexed future of playing and watching sport.

TELFORD VICE | Cape Town

“WHEN you walk through a storm.” Even the most casual football person knows what’s coming. “Hold your head up high.” If, somehow, they don’t know, the internet will tell them. “And don’t be afraid of the dark.”

There aren’t quite enough recorded versions … “At the end of a storm …” to assign one to each of the 54 074 seats at Anfield. “ … There’s a golden sky …” But many have been made since 1945 … “And the sweet silver song of a lark …” when it featured in Carousel, a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical.

“Walk on through the wind …” These lines have been ringing out wherever Scousers, actual and aspirant, have gathered since Gerry and the Pacemakers went to No. 1 in the UK charts in 1963. “Walk on through the rain …” At this point even non-Liverpool supporters pause to pay their respects, because this isn’t any anthem.

“Though your dreams be tossed and blown …” It’s the sound of loyalty and belonging … “Walk on, walk on …” and of knowing you are among comrades … “With hope in your heart …” This, surely, is the sound of love.

“And you’ll never walk alone … You’ll never walk alone.”

But, late on the night of July 22, Liverpool’s players and staff were indeed alone. With each other. They had gathered on a specially constructed podium in the stands of their famous stadium’s even more famous Kop end, which was draped in banners and flags.

The dazzling football both teams had played that evening, unhinged in the best way from having to take things seriously, in Liverpool’s 5-3 win over Chelsea was irrelevant. Nothing had mattered in the English Premier League since June 25, when Chelsea beat Manchester City to ensure Liverpool would win the title for the first time in 30 years.

As Jordan Henderson, Liverpool’s captain, thrust the trophy into the night sky, his players boomed their triumph behind him and lights, fireworks, music and glittery confetti filled millions of screens around the world. But there was a hollowness at the heart of the scene that could only have been filled by occupants of those 54 074 empty, silent seats. The only witnesses, bar the functionaries, were Anfield’s ghosts of successes and failures past.

You’ll Never Walk Alone had, of course, swooned around the void before kick-off. Lacking human embrace, the music bounced back the unhearing hardness, cold in its rejection. But the first touch of the ball was accompanied, on television, by a warm cheer for the champions.

Fact’s petticoat slipped from under fiction’s ballgown at the start of the second half, when the canned noise kicked in a heartbeat too late to spare viewers the rippling echoes of the players’ shouting and clapping their encouragement to each other. For a moment, sad reality was all there was to hear.

It’s the job of Adam Peri, a Sky Sports sound supervisor, to spare us that terrifying sound. National Public Radio sought him out and found him twiddling knobs for West Ham’s match against Watford in a studio kilometres from London Stadium. “Making sure the West Ham chants are nice and loud,” Peri said. A West Ham player went down. “I’m just going to trickle in a bit of whistles; giving it a bit of a boo …” 

He sees his role as “trying to anticipate what a player might do next, and in a way I guess I’m reading their mind. When you really get into the zone you’re living and breathing the game, feeling confident enough to use any sound that is available to help tell the story.”

The sounds Peri edits into viewers’ consciousness have been recorded at earlier matches by Electronic Arts, or EA Sports (EA), the makers of the FIFA video game. EA sound designer Paul Boechler revealed some of the geekery at play: “There’s things like the ‘oooh’ reaction for a save, and the ‘ooooooh’ reaction to a miss.” 

In football matches broadcast from Spain, a mosaic overlay was applied to camera shots that included the stands to break up views of endless rows of unfilled seats. Another difference will confirm the suspicions of those from sunnier climes that England’s unrelenting winter greyness seeps into hearts and minds. “The Premier League is doing negative reactions, but La Liga is actually not,” Boechler said. “La Liga is going with a much more positive reaction focus overall.”

La Liga head of communications Joris Evers confirmed as much, and added: “But it’s not the same. We want to try and get real fans back in the stands as soon as possible.” 

And so says all of sport. If a wicket falls in an empty cricket ground and no-one hears it, has it really fallen? England and West Indies restarted cricket with three Tests played in Southampton and Manchester. Not a lot besides the low burble of a crowd, artificially added by Sky, could by heard.

Without spectators the sound of major sport is of one hand clapping. That may be no bad thing. Instead of Sky’s audio smoke and mirrors, we could hear managers chewing gum between barks at their players. In Germany, Bundesliga viewers had the option of tuning out the canned atmosphere so they could do exactly that.

But it’s complicated, as the television audience discovered during a baseball game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros in Houston played on the same day Liverpool raised the trophy. When Dodgers pitcher Joe Kelly lingered at first base after a confrontational play, Astros manager Dusty Baker, out of sight but not out of range of the microphones, was heard yelling, “Just get on the mound, motherfucker.”

Baseball has had an interesting relationship with empty stadiums. Alternative plans have had to be made for the millions of peanuts grown and roasted to be sold at games in the US, what with each team’s regular season schedule hacked from 162 to only 60 games. In Taiwan, cheerleaders smiled and danced at desolate stands. Down the road in South Korea, teams were in trouble after dressing up sex dolls and putting them in the stands. Bookmakers in the US have adjusted their odds to account for the assumption that, without spectators, home advantage isn’t nearly as influential.

Something similar happened in the Bundesliga, where teams achieved demonstrably better results than previously when they played away. And diving disappeared. What’s the point of trying to fool the referee by rolling like a freshly felled log for metres on end if thousands of one-eyed home fans aren’t howling in sympathy?

Will the seeming silence of the scrum, beyond the hit and heave, be shattered by the sounds of one pack of forwards trying to monster the other? Some of those noises come from strange places and are better unheard. It seems SuperSport, the primary broadcasters of the game in South Africa, will spare us the gorier details once rugby resumes. A spokesperson said the network was “still tweaking the tech, but as a matter of principle, we will incorporate virtual sounds, crowds and fan interaction”.

Even so, as long as stadiums stay empty except for players, officials and camera operators, a human-shaped vacuum will gape at the heart of sport. Professor Heather Reid is the philosophy chair at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. She sits on the boards of publications like the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport and Sport, Ethics and Philosophy. Less extraordinarily, she’s also a fan, as she explained to the BBC: “I was in the bird’s nest stadium in Beijing the night that Usain Bolt broke the world record in the 100 metres [at the 2008 Olympics], and there’s this feeling that goes over the crowd that makes everyone feel like hugging each other. We transcend our partisan rooting for particular countries and a particular athlete, and we all start cheering just for what a human being is able to do.”

Unfortunately for all who know and cherish that feeling, another professor, bioethicist Andy Miah, the science communication and future media chair at the University of Salford in Manchester, is here to burst that bubble. “The big transition that people are coming to terms with is the idea that we are able to live within virtual worlds,” he said. “It’s really remarkable what’s happened over the last few months.”

Miah listed the Mutua Madrid Virtual Open Pro tennis tournament, which featured Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal squaring off not across a net but in front of a computer, holding controllers instead of racquets, as an example. And the Australia Virtual F1 Grand Prix, which replaced the cancelled real-world version: suddenly gamers were competing with drivers.

“Reality is going through a major upheaval,” Miah said. “Sport has always been a kind of unreality. We’re beginning to see a complete change of the relationship between the spectator and the player. People want to be part of the production of the sport, not just be spectators of it.”

Already, Formula E drivers’ electric cars go faster when they use a “fanboost” — a surge of bonus power available to the five drivers who win the most supporters’ votes. “We can imagine a future where you have crowds making decisions in the field of play in a much more direct way,” Miah said.        

The fans, it seems, are no longer content to watch alone.

First published by New Frame.

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Use it or lose it: we won’t have this moment again

Celebrate, the beloved country. You’ve earned the right to feel better than you have since Thabo Mbeki fell off the bus. But don’t waste this triumph.

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

ONLY once has the points margin in a rugby World Cup final loomed larger than it did in Yokohama on Saturday.

But never before have a team won the World Cup after losing a pool game.

Never have the Springboks scored more points in a final.

Never have they lost a final, a distinction only they enjoy among the five finalists.

Never had they scored a try in a final.

Never, still, has a try been scored against them in a final.

Never have a team won more World Cups.

Never have a side won the southern hemisphere championship and the World Cup in the same year.

Never have …

Bugger all that. 

Nevermind the objective facts of the matter.

Never have a team looked more determined to win than Siya Kolisi’s unstoppable band of blood brothers.

Never have their opponents looked more devastated at that determination than England.

Never did anyone, least of all England, imagine the previously dour, methodical, predictable, defensive South Africans would throw it all in the air like they just didn’t care and play the kind of joyous rugby they did when they were barefoot and 10 years old with no-one watching.

Never, from the opening confrontation until the final gong, was the result in even a smidgen of doubt.

Never have more happy, happy, happy tears been shed by South Africans in the cause of mere sport.

Never did South Africans expect to see so many of those tears flowing from the hard, unflinching, shard-shaped eyes of Daniel Johannes Vermeulen.

Duane Vermeulen, the Boks’ matchwinning No. 8, stood there — the sweat he had won from the contest shining like a medal on the vast slab of his forehead gleaming some 1.93 metres in the sky, his mighty arms attached to meaty hands now clasped behind a massive, hairy, bearded head — and sobbed. Openly and proudly and fok julle almal.

Vermeulen’s tears disappeared into his muddied, bloodied jersey. And into the hearts of all who shared his passion, where they will stay forever.

You could tell this story just as well in short, sharp exclamations as in long and winding sentences: 32-bloody-12! Two tries to none! A scrum that was an irrisistable force and an immovable object all in one! Makazole Mapimpi’s bulletproof confidence! Cheslin Kolbe’s otherworldly brilliance! Handré Pollard’s pulseless precision! Kolisi’s serene selflessness! Rassie Erasmus’ sangoma sensibilities! Jérôme Garcès hitherto unseen competence!

But why wouldn’t you want to linger on this triumph as long as you could, and then a little longer? Celebrate, the beloved country. You’ve earned the right to feel better than you have since Thabo Mbeki fell off the bus, and you’ve earned it the hard way.

You can’t eat the World Cup or live in it or wear it or have it pay you a living wage.

Winning it won’t bring back the people we murder every few years because they have come from somewhere else in Africa, nor resurrect the women we murder every day for daring to think how they live their lives shouldn’t be controlled by men, nor stop us from preying on children for reasons too sick to get into.

Rugby won’t rid us of the wilfully, brazenly useless government we elected — yes, that’s our fault — nor spare us a shamelessly illiberal opposition that stands for nothing except whatever it is the government is against — thanks, the middle class, for nothing — nor stop the only vaguelly left-wing party from becoming an ever unfunnier joke — it’s hard to laugh at seething hate.

The World Cup won’t make Eskom do their jobs, nor will it convince the people we need to convince of the bleeding obvious — that we need a better plan for making sure we have enough water than simply praying for rain.

The privileged will still be privileged. The poor will still be poor. The zombie that is apartheid, dead only for the time it takes people to bother to vote, the rest of the time rudely alive in every real sense, will still be out there. 

For all that, what happened in Yokohama on Saturday could change things. It kindles a small flame of hope that, just maybe, South Africa isn’t doomed to be remembered as the country that betrayed itself.

What chance this will make the homed see the homeless as the fellow human beings they are and not, as too many of them do currently, as filth to be swept into someone else’s streets?

Or that those who have too much will understand why they are despised, and do something about it?

Or that the powerful will become accountable to those who lend them — not give them — that power?

Like we said, that flame of hope is small. But, for now, it lives.

In 1995, when we lived in some kind of Disney movie, and in 2007, when we still thought everything would be OK, winning the World Cup wasn’t what it is now.

It’s already a cliché that the champions of 2019 are significantly more black than their predecessors, that they look a lot more like the nation the marketing people say they represent.

Fair enough. But we’re in real trouble if we still need to make the point that South Africa does not have a future if that future is not, mostly, black. Let’s hear all those arguments against affirmative action selection now. And let’s see if anyone has the balls to admit that quotas work, that without them what happened in Yokohama on Saturday would never have happened, that all Kolisi needed to be what he is was the genuine opportunity to be it.

Moments like this don’t come often. For some, they don’t come at all.

You must be blessed indeed, Mzansi, for this is your third chance to get this right.

Never, surely, will you have it again.

This time, don’t waste it.

First published by Times SELECT.

Soccer-punched: why Marx was wrong about religion

World Cups are state-sanctioned, capitalism-controlled drug-dealing that put people in the kind of funk the powerful can use to take the attention off their actions.

STRAIGHT RED – Karl Marx was right about almost everything. Almost …

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Lisbon

KARL Marx got it wrong. Not about the importance of the workers of the world uniting, nor recognising that they who control the means of production boss almost everything, nor on the inherent evil of capitalism.

Damn straight, comrade, on those counts and many more. So, what was Marx wrong about? God-bothering. Or, at least, about its place in modern society.

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

Those are 20 of the most beautifully arranged words yet translated into English.

It’s a pity we tend to remember not them but the next seven words: “It is the opium of the people.”

All 27 of those words are from “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, which Marx wrote in 1834: more than 200 years after cricket became professional and 23 years before the world’s first football club was founded, in Sheffield.

So he had no idea of the monster football would become. But he did take himself off to a cricket match, where, according to Ben Carrington’s “Marxism, cultural Studies and Sport” (2009), he decided that “if the masses could be so easily subdued by such a resolutely sedate game with its mores of bourgeois Englishness dripping from every rule and expression, then all was lost for the socialist cause”.

That explains, perhaps, why Marx didn’t see that the opium of the people wouldn’t be religion in future. Instead, it would be sport.

And that makes World Cups state-sanctioned, capitalism-controlled drug-dealing that put people in the kind of funk the powerful can use to take the attention off their actions. That’s a dark thought, but there are many more and much darker where that comes from. Here are but a few:

Russians were still celebrating their team’s 5-0 thumping of Saudi Arabia in the opening match of football’s 2018 World Cup when it emerged that the Kremlin had hiked VAT and planned to raise the retirement age.

During that match, Saudi forces launched a brutal offensive in their despicable proxy war on Yemen to isolate the main port and so sever deliveries of food and medicine to a nation already wrecked by famine and disease.

The day before a Moroccan own-goal earned victory for Iran, the latter’s authorities arrested Nasrin Sotoudeh, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, and told her she had been sentenced, in absentia, to five years in prison.

Hours ahead of scoring all three of Portugal’s goals against Spain, Cristiano Ronaldo agreed to pay a fine amounting to almost R300-million rather than face further prosecution on tax evasion charges.

None of those stories garnered anything like the amount of coverage devoted to the comparatively insignificant on the field in Russia.  

The masses were high on football, leaving the bold and the bad to do whatever they wanted in sickening sobriety.

That’s as much a comment on what’s wrong with media concerned with little else but their numbers of viewers, listeners and readers as it is on those viewers, listeners and readers.

Sometimes players are dragged into the mess, like Mohamed Salah was in Grozny on Sunday. Chechnya’s boorish oaf of a leader, Ramzan Kadyrov — who insists there are no gay men in his country, which may soon be true considering he has them tortured and executed — turned up at the Egypt team’s hotel and apparently insisted the sleeping Salah be woken up.

Then he posed for photographs with the player that rocketed around the world, leaving Salah to explain the how and why of his seemingly willing fraternisation with a vicious tyrant.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocratic, anti-democratic president, and Donald Trump, the dangerous buffoon Americans somehow chose to lead them, must have looked on in impotent rage and envy at Kadyrov’s naked chutzpah. 

It’s not only countries governed by criminals who use the cover of sport to try and hide what they’re up to, or at least give it a respectable face.

At a fan park in Lisbon before the Portugal-Spain game, a former lawyer and journalist and the godson of Portugal’s last fascist dictator stopped traffic and gathered a crowd around him. 

Well he might have: he was Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s centre-left president who doesn’t need to be asked twice to pose for a selfie with his beloved compatriots, who could easily be mistaken for voters.

As a woman in Lisbon said the other day: “Ah yes. The World Cup. Our politicians always wait for it to come before they force through unpopular legislation.”

She was from Düsseldorf in Germany, which is led by the ostensibly sane, outwardly decent Angela Merkel, patron saint of refugees everywhere.

This as much a comment on what’s wrong with media concerned with little else but the numbers of the viewers, listeners and readers they attract as it is on what’s wrong with those viewers, listeners and readers.

Which would be worse, a website putting up a video of Ashwin Willemse’s pet scorpion stinging the bejaysus out of a photograph of Nick Mallett, or people clicking on that video?

And how many more hits do you think this article would earn if the names of Willemse and Mallett were in the headline, nevermind that they have bugger nothing to do with this story? 

What the hell are we thinking? How can we allow something as comparatively unimportant as the World Cup to hijack our critical attention when we need it most?

Aside from the damage the tournament aids and abets in our society, the tournament doesn’t even do what it says on the tin.

The idea that we will, after the final in Moscow on July 15, know which is the best team in international football is outdated and laughably naive.

What we will know is which squad of players, arbitrarily chosen more often than not, who represent nothing except themselves and their teammates, have been more successful than 31 other but similar squads over the course of a particular month. Nothing more, nothing less.

How do we keep our eye on the real ball while the World Cup is here to distract us with fakery? By turning to Marx.

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.”

Yes, that’s Marx. Groucho Marx.

La dolce vita sours in Italy

In a country that has won it four times, the World Cup doesn’t exist. Not this year …

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Florence

EIGHT of the first nine tabloid pages of the May 10 edition of La Gazzetta dello Sport were used to cover the previous evening’s Coppa Italia final between Juventus and Milan in Rome. The odd page out carried an ad.

There were plenty of weighty articles, striking photographs and pithy graphics in the famously pink pages analysing every which angle, and then some, of Juve’s 4-0 demolition job to claim the cup for the 13th time.

La Gazzetta is the heavyweight among of the three Italian newspapers devoted entirely to the games people play.

It’s 122 years old and the country’s biggest paper of any flavour with a daily circulation of more than 400 000 and a readership upwards of three million.

So far, so Italian. Bar taking tennis and cycling seriously — the Giro d’Italia ended a few weeks ago — and segueing into European basketball and bits and bobs of volleyball and golf, sport equals football in the press in these parts. Bellissimo, if you’re a fan. 

But there was not a word on the biggest football story of all in La Gazzetta on May 10, and few have since been printed.

The paper weighed in at 64 pages a Friday or so ago. Only two featured the biggest football tournament of them all.

To read those pages you first had to get through 36 crammed with news and views on Serie A — which ended on May 20 — Serie B, and other, even lesser stuff.

It’s as if the World Cup doesn’t exist in Italy, which is bizarre considering they have won it four times: tied with Germany and one fewer than Brazil for the most triumphs.

And it’s true: the World Cup doesn’t exist in Italy. Not this year at least.

For the first time since 1958 — 60 years ago, when the nation was trying to recover from World War II — Italy are not part of football’s global showpiece.

Along with all their World Cup successes they have suffered strange exits. In 1974 they crashed out in the first round at the hands of Poland. That wasn’t as bad as the catastrophe in South Africa in 2010 when New Zealand sent them home, which was marginally more galling than what happened four years later, when Costa Rica decided their fate. 

But this time it’s worse, much worse. In September, Italian football’s head suit, Carlo Tavecchio, said: “Us? Out of the World Cup? That would be the Apocalypse.”

In November, after Sweden beat Italy 1-0 on aggregate in a two-leg play-off, the Apocalypse was now.

Gianluigi Buffon, Italy’s captain, failed to fight off the tears as he announced his international retirement on live television. Not for him the copout of a cheesy video on social media, a-la AB de Villiers. 

“FINE”, ran the massive headline on La Gazzetta’s front page the next day under a photograph of Buffon flinging his hands into the air in despair. In English “FINE” would be, well, fine. In Italian it means “THE END”.

And here many Italians are, seven months later, still pretending there isn’t an elephant in Rome’s Colosseum, swimming through Venice’s canals, and perched atop Florence’s duomo.

For others, what happened in November wasn’t about elephants but about chickens — as in those that alighted in the 2006 “Calciopoli” matchfixing scandal that earned Juventus relegation while four other clubs were docked points — coming home to roost.

That Italy went on to win the World Cup that year fooled some of the people some of the time that the problem had been solved.

But the exposure of more matchfixing in 2011 led to the arrests of former Italy striker Giuseppe Signori and Lazio vice-captain Stefano Mauri.

That prompted foreign stars who would previously have put playing in Italy up there with a place on the staff of an English, German or Spanish club to pass on the pasta.

Serie A, lest we forget, is the league that provided both Champions League finalists in 2003, when Juventus and Milan clashed in front of a crowd 62 315 at Old Trafford. It was one of only six times in the 64 European finals played so far that both teams have been from the same country, and the only occasion the teams have been Italian.

Those days are gone. Whether they will return depends on several factors.

Will Italians ever again believe their football to be clean? Will foreigners, particularly quality foreign players, do the same?

Will Italians think it worth the bother to try to regain their lofty heights on the world stage, or content themselves with indulging in their still rich and enriching club culture?

For someone from a country like South Africa, where winning the cricket World Cup means far more than it should, winning the football World Cup is out of the question, and winning the rugby World Cup has been done, twice, Italy will be in a twilight zone all the way through the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

What’s real and what isn’t is difficult to fathom. At least, it is for Italians.

What it means to be Portuguese in Ronaldo’s country

“Football is an opera injected straight into the vein.” – Carlos do Carmo, fado singer

Lisboetas saddle up to get a better view of the big screen.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Lisbon

THE airport in his hometown has been named after him. The president himself has dubbed him a “Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry”. Astronomers use his initials and shirt number to refer to a galaxy some 12.9-billion light years from earth.

And yet, the locals aren’t so sure about Cristiano Ronaldo.

A friend from Porto, who know lives in Lisbon, tells the story of watching a game in a bar in Madeira when Ronaldo — a son of Funchal, the capital of Madeira — scored for Portugal.

My friend catapulted upright in joy, which erupted from him in whoops and applause. But after a second or three he got the feeling that all was not as it should be, and it wasn’t: around him his fellow Portuguese, to a man and woman from the same Funchal where Ronaldo was born and raised before going to bigger, brighter places, sat almost as stoic as if CR7 had put the ball into his own net.

“They’re unhappy with him for not helping them more after the 2008 financial crisis,” my friend explained. “He did help them, but they say it wasn’t enough; he didn’t give every person on Madeira a lot of money.”

Ronaldo, who grew up poor as the fourth child of a gardener and a cook, is among the richest sport stars in the world with an estimated net worth of R5.24-billion.

He has made something of a second career out of giving away significant chunks of his fortune, and in August 2015 he was named “the most charitable athlete in the world” by the website athletesgonegood.com. 

Ronaldo can, of course, afford it and more. But his sense of duty extends further than throwing money at problems: in 2016 his video message to children in Syria was that they were “the true heroes” and “don’t lose hope”.

That, it seems, isn’t good enough for some people in Madeira, where — according to me friend — “they say, ‘Does he think he’s better than us just because he’s rich and famous?’”.

That view isn’t overtly noticeable in Lisbon, where Ronald’s likeness and jersey are ubiquitous. In one tiny shop, not a lot bigger than a phone booth, Superman looms large: for sale are his Portugal shirt and his home as well as his away Real Madrid jerseys along with two versions of Ronaldo pennants.

The Portuguese see themselves as a small nation peering out at a world of giants, and Ronaldo as their prime ambassador to that world. So they are resigned to him going off to make his fortune and build his legend with clubs like Real Madrid. But that doesn’t mean they have to like him.   

Portugal’s complicated relationship with their best ever player — Eusébio doesn’t count since he was Mozambican and didn’t move to Lisbon to play for Benfica until he was 18 — is among the most intriguing aspects for a South African who is in the capital during the World Cup.

You might think that relationship was uncomplicated forever on Friday, when Ronaldo delivered a shimmering performance to score all his team’s goals in a 3-3 thriller against Spain, the ancient enemy itself, in the teams’ World Cup opener in Sochi.

At a fan park in the Praça do Comércio, just metres from the Rio Tejo, the crowd swelled to several thousand in the hours before the game.

Scores of them improved their chances of a good view of the giant screen by clambering onto the statue of King José I on his horse, crushing snakes in his path, that towers over the square.

A public address announcer introducing Portugal’s team as the minutes to kick-off dwindled to single figures had three words when it came to Ronaldo: “Cristiano! Cristiano! Cristiano!” 

A fourth-minute penalty, banged hard, a weak 44-minute shot that somehow eluded David de Gea in Spain’s goal, and a vicious, hooking free kick from what would have been too close to goal for mere mortal players to level matters with two minutes on the clock fulfilled the announcer’s oblique prophesy. And more.

Every goal was cheered as if Ronaldo had singlehandedly won the 11th war between the countries. That’s right: they’ve fought 10 in the past.

But, if anything, Portugal’s relationship with their golden child is suddenly more complex than ever. Now they have to like the preening, rich, famous, charitable, brilliant bastard, whether they really like him or not.

And that in the throes of a World Cup in which Portugal hope to go at least as far as the third place they earned in 1966, when Eusébio scored nine goals in six games. Not that that hope is expressed above a whisper, if at all.

Nobody brags in this country (about anything, much less beating the world’s best at the world’s own game), nobody seems nervous (why would you be when you’re expecting your dream to be dashed), and nobody is under any illusion that the World Cup isn’t a trophy too far (“Yes, we won Euro in 2016, but this is much bigger,” is a commonly heard view).

In a film at a museum in the most Lisboa of Lisbon’s neighbourhoods, Alfama, that seeks to preserves the legacy of fado, the peculiarly Portuguese bluesy folk music, a maestro of the art, singer Carlos do Carmo, says: “Football? Football is an opera injected straight into the vein.”

That sounds like a compliment to the game, but Do Carmo smirks as he says it and motions like a heroin addict shooting up.

It’s gloomy but it’s real. It’s what the people here call saudade, a quality that Portuguese intellectual Aubrey Bell described in his 1912 book “In Portugal” as “a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present”. Saudade, he wrote, is “not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness”.

The closest this reporter has come to understanding it hangs in a shop window in downtown Lisbon, where a Portugal jersey will set you back €84.90. A Spain version? €89.50. That’s €4.6 in degrees of separation, or about R71.

It doesn’t sound like much if you don’t consider the who, what and where of it all. That, in prosaic terms, is what it means to be Portuguese: proud but not smug; hopeful but not expectant; in love with Ronaldo but also a little in hate with him.

Saudade. Feel it; it is here.

Time to face the painful truth: sport is bad for you

We think sport stars have the best bodies. But they are rarely free of pain and they age faster because they wear out exponentially more quickly.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Florence

HOW many 20-year-olds do you know who have to put their lives on hold for six weeks because of a knee injury? Or 23-year-olds who live for months with a spinal stress problem? Or 25-year-olds who have a shoulder wrenched out of shape?

The subjects of these calamities are not soldiers, bar brawlers or victims of domestic abuse. They are instead Damian Willemse, Kagiso Rabada and Mohamed Salah — stars of rugby, cricket and football, and apparently fine physical specimens of the human race.

Except that they’re not. They’re crocked. And they are far from the only people impaired, often permanently, by what they do for a living.

We think sport stars have the best bodies out there. Closer to the truth is that they are rarely free of pain, and that they age faster than we do because they wear themselves out exponentially more quickly.

Dale Steyn’s painful relationship with his right shoulder and left heel for more than two years now proves what doesn’t need proving: sport is bad for you, particularly if you play at the top level.

Stories about injuries are the bane of a sportswriter’s life; right up there with reporting on positive drug tests and trying to make players sound interesting when they say utterly forgettable things, which for almost all of them is almost all of the time.

But they’re paid to play. Not talk. Thing is, it can seem as if they are paid to learn the Latin names of those parts of their bodies that have been wrecked in the cause of trying to win.

The exceptionally articulate Steyn is a case in point, what with words like infraspinatus and coracoid tripping off his tongue as readily as bouncer and yorker.

You probably know your yorkers from your bouncers, but did you know the infraspinatus is, according to the medical books, “a thick triangular muscle”, “one of the four muscles of the rotator cuff” and that its major function is to “externally rotate the humerus [the bone that connects shoulder to elbow] and stabilise the shoulder joint”?

Or that the coracoid is “a small hook-like structure on the lateral edge of the superior anterior portion of the scapula [shoulder blade]” so-named because its name translates into “like a raven’s beak” in Greek, and that fracturing it is impressively difficult and unusual?

Steyn knows all that, and much more. Too much for a man of 34. In fast bowler’s years that’s about 68.

Unlike most players Steyn has spoken candidly of his frustration at the healing and rehabilitation process, and of his worry about hurting something else while he works to resolve the original problem.

“I go for a run up the mountain and I could get a hamstring injury,” he said in October, when he was emerging from his second major shoulder injury.

“Or I finally get over all of this and I go and roll my ankle getting out of the car.”

Close but not quite: less than three months later a freshly repaired Steyn tore a ligament off his left heel by stepping awkwardly into a foothole while bowling against India in the Newlands Test.   

Square one, here we go again …

More often heard than Steyn’s honesty is the kind of view expressed by boxer Ronda Rousey: “I’ve separated my shoulder and my collarbone; I’ve messed up my knee a million times. I’ve broken my foot in several places. I’ve broken my toe a bunch, broken my nose a couple of times, and had a bunch of other annoying little injuries, like turf toe [spraining the ligaments of the big toe] and arthritis and tendonitis. It’s part of the game.”

If self-harm was a crime you’d have a hard time getting that argument past a judge, and if you think that’s a reach consider that in December 2016 the US Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from former National Football League (NFL) players against a total settlement amount of US$1-billion the NFL offered previously concussed players to shut up and go away and take their brain damage with them.

A billion dollars sounds decent, but in March the players and the families of those who have died — some of diseases and conditions doctors have blamed on playing gridiron football — went back to court to file charges of fraud against the NFL for allegedly trying to delay payments, sometimes aggressively.

A month later the NFL lawyered up to argue that a special investigator be appointed to stop “widespread fraud from infecting” the settlement plan.

“Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble,” Benjamin Franklin said, and that’s happens almost without fail.

We record and remember players’ performances at length and in detail. But their injuries, the effects of which may linger long after they have graced the arena and entertained us royally, are invariably footnotes in their biographies.

It’s time we saw players for what they are: human before anything else, injuries and all, and deserving of more consideration on that score.

The other score? By comparison it matters nought.

All hail Buffon, the Michelangelo of goalkeepers

“You need to be a little masochistic to be a goalkeeper; a masochist and an egocentric as well.” – Gianluigi Buffon

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Florence

“I’MMA so sorry,” she said. “But izza the closing, how you say, stanzas of the season. And then the players they are leaving. So izza not posseebleh.”

I was buoyed by even that response, a reply to an emailed interview request, from Juventus’ press office. It brightened, briefly, a grim afternoon in a hospital in Florence with a wife doubled over by a kidney stone.

“What the hell,” I said to her a few, mercifully pain-free, days later as we sat laptop to laptop in Libreria Café La Cité, a leftie literary hipster hangout a street away from the green Arno and its gently arching bridges, “I’m writing my Buffon story anyway.”

At the mention of the magic word, a bearded man in a hoodie, a Renaissance monk give or take a few centuries, jerked his face upward.

He had been intently focused on his laptop. Now he looked at me with burning blue eyes and smiled long and hard.

Gianluigi Buffon can do that; unite people who speak different languages, come from opposite hemispheres, and may not even be football people.

Apart from the talent, skill and presence that have made him the finest goalkeeper of the age — any age? — he is a fine example of what it means to be man in an age of uncertainty for those of us fortunate and unfortunate enough to have been born with balls. Here’s a smattering of reasons why:

“You need to be a little masochistic to be a goalkeeper; a masochist and an egocentric as well.”

“I was 12 when I turned my back on the goal. And I will keep doing it as long as my legs, my head and my heart will allow.”

“The day I quit I want people to be sad about it.”

Buffon and Juventus, where his 17 years ended this season in the triumphs of a seventh consecutive Scudetto and a 13th overall Coppa Italia, are inseparable in the imagination. But he will always be a son of Tuscany: from Carrara, a place of not quite 63 000 souls squeezed between mountain and river 100 kilometres northwest of Florence.

It is famed for the white marble that has been quarried there since the Romans thought they owned the planet. Michelangelo himself walked Carrara’s cliffs.

“By sculpture,” Michelangelo said, “I understand an art that takes away superfluous material; by painting, one that attains the result by layering on.” 

How can that not be a metaphor for the creations of those who sculpt away layer on layer of superfluous attempts at art by dime-a-dozen strikers to reveal the tangible beauty of what remains?

I had wanted to ask Buffon a different question — why is passion so important to the human condition? — and then sit back and listen to the 90 minutes and more of his answer.

Denied that chance, I ask the thoroughly Florentine owner of a fiaschetteria — a no-frills wine bar — near the Duomo that’s practically purple with Viola memorabilia why Buffon never played for Fiorentina,. He looks nonplussed, shrugs, and rubs his thumb and forefinger together.

On Piazza Santo Spirito, at a joint that serves superb lampredotto — the fourth stomach of the cow, chopped, boiled and spiced — I get a less polite answer from a man who spits a glare of disgust and thrusts out his right wrist.

There, where if he sliced deep enough he could kill himself, was tattooed: “Juve Merde”.

“They hate Juventus,” a Florentine friend explains. “Not Buffon.”

No-one could.

Leo and Mo: What the Renaissance means for the World Cup

“Ramos! Bastardo!” – a Florence gelato seller on Sergio Ramos after his tackle on Mohamed Salah.

TELFORD VICE in Florence

ONE fine day in 1505 a genius and his assistant climbed Monte Ceceri, then an unwooded hill in Fiesole, a town outside Florence as beautiful as it is ancient, and tried to fly.

In fact only the assistant tried to fly. He was, according to some, Zoroastro da Peretola, the illegitimate son of Bernardo Rucellai, part of a rich and powerful family of Florentine wool merchants.

According to others Zoroastro’s real name was Tommaso di Giovanni Masini, and he was a common gardener’s son who cooked up his story of more exciting origins to ease access to the great and the good of Renaissance Florence.  

That seems closer to the truth: Rucellai was 13 when Zoroastro was born. What is not in dispute is that Rucellai was among the genius’ pupils.

The genius was Leonardo da Vinci, at the time of that day at Monte Ceceri in his 50s and with 20 years of interest and research into the mystery of flight smouldering in his mind.

The assistant, then, was expendable; a minion in the march towards the magnificence of a man whose ideas continue to capture the world’s imagination some 499 years after his death.

To Zoroastro was strapped a frame of lightweight wood covered in feathers, and of Leonardo’s design. Then the human-fuelled experiment stepped off the side of the hill. The spot he did so is marked today by a puzzlingly shaped cement bench: is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a feather? Is it even a bench? 

Remarkably, Zoroastro did not perish. He even flew — towards Florence for a kilometre, which was more than twice as far as the Wright brothers in a total of four attempts adding up to 411 metres 398 years later in what has come to be known as the first powered flight.

A happy ending? Not quite. Zoroastro broke both legs when he hit the ground.

That brings us to another, more modern genius. This one does his own flying. But he was also injured when he crashed to earth.

His name is Mohamed Salah, and he is in a race against time and the rapidly beating hearts of all 99-million Egyptians in Egypt — and the millions more around the world — to play in the World Cup in Russia. Salah’s team’s first game is against Uruguay in Yekaterinburg on June 15.

Egypt are in the tournament for only the third time and not since 1990. They are there not least because of Salah, who scored five of their eight goals in their six qualifiers.

Salah’s 32 goals for Liverpool led the English Premier League this season, and he was in those colours in the 30th minute of the Champions League final against Real Madrid in Kiev on Saturday when Sergio Ramos cut him down with a cynical challenge that resulted in a shoulder injury.

“Sometimes football shows you its good side and other times the bad,” Ramos tweeted on Sunday. “Above all, we are fellow pros. #GetWellSoon #MoSalah.”

That didn’t wash with an Egyptian-born gelato seller in Florence on Wednesday. At the empathetic mention of Salah’s injury he roared, “Ramos! Bastardo!”

He is not alone. A petition demanding Uefa take action against Ramos has garnered more than 500 000 signatures, and now the bloody lawyers are trying to make an offer that can’t be refused.

“Ramos intentionally injured Mo Salah and should be punished about his actions,” the suit behind the suit, Bassem Wahba, said on Egyptian television.

“I’ve filed a lawsuit and a complaint to Fifa. I’ll ask for compensation, which could exceed €1-billion (R14.6-billion), for the physical and psychological harm that Ramos gave Salah and the Egyptian people.”

Good luck, Mr Wahba. The world, including the non-Egyptian part of it — Spain and their fans excepted — no doubt wish you success.

If Wahba or indeed Salah need inspiration they could find it in other aspects of Zoroastro’s remarkable life.

He knew Leonardo since at least the 1490s, and besides grinding colours for some of his paintings he left a lasting impression in bizarre ways.

Nicknamed “Indovino”, or fortune teller, Zoroastro was considered by some an alchemist and a magician, and by others a mere blacksmith.

Leonardo wasn’t Zoroastro’s only fan. Dom Miguel da Silva, the Bishop of Viseo, wrote in a letter dated February 21, 1520, of a laboratory he had set up with “Indovino”:

“We make spheres which shine brilliantly and in which appear strange human figures with horns on their heads and crabs’ legs and a nose like a prawn.

“In an old fireplace we have made a furnace, built up with bricks, and here we distill and separate the elements of everything; and with these we extract the fire from a marine monster which forever burns and shines.

“In the middle of the room there is a large table cluttered with pots and flasks of all sorts, and paste and clay and Greek pitch and cinnabar, and the teeth of hanged men, and roots.

“There is a plinth made of sulphur polished up on a lathe, and on this stands a vessel of yellow amber, empty except for a serpent with four legs, which we take for a miracle.

“Zoroastro believes that some gryphon [a mythical dragon-like creature] carried it through the air from Libya and dropped it at the Mamolo bridge, where it was found and tamed by him.

“The walls of this room are all daubed with weird faces and drawings on paper, among which is one of a monkey who is telling stories to a crowd of rats who are attentively listening, and a thousand other things full of mystery.”

Good drugs? Maybe. Salah could use some to make it to Russia.