I was lent a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow by a friend. She attempted to convey its profundity but I accepted it only out of politeness. It entered my library as one of those books I never intended to steal, but knew that I was probably never returning. These thefts chew away at my karma but are, somehow, less disgraceful than returning a book unread. But then I became ill and, faced with the prospect of an entire term stuck in a flat, I decided to assuage my conscience by reading and returning a few of the books that reproached me from the shelves.
Although Football in Sun and Shadow is the only book I have read on the beautiful game, I believe that, had I read hundreds, this one might still be the greatest. Structured as a series of vignettes, it presents a seemingly random series of individuals and events but, as it builds, its rhythms and themes snap into focus: footballers, like mayflies, enjoy their season in the sun but, having astonished the crowd with their skill, oblivion beckons. Here’s Galeano on Uruguay’s 1924 Olympic team:
‘The sky-blue shirt was proof of the existence of the nation: Uruguay was not a mistake. Soccer pulled this tiny country out of the shadows of universal anonymity.
‘The authors of those miracles of ’24 and ’28 were workers and wanderers who got nothing from soccer but the pleasure of playing. Pedro Arispe was a meat-packer. José Nasazzi cut marble. “Percho” Petrone worked for a grocer. Pedro Cea sold ice. José Leandro Andrade was a carnival musician and bootblack. They were all twenty years old, more or less, though in the pictures they look like senior citizens. They cured their wounds with salt water, vinegar plasters and a few glasses of wine.
‘In 1924 they arrived in Europe in third class steerage and then travelled on borrowed money in second-class carriages, sleeping on wooden benches and playing game after game in exchange for room and board. Before the Paris Olympics, they played nine games in Spain and won all of them.’
On the 9th June, 1924, Uruguay took gold, with The Times describing those bootblacks and grocers as ‘a sound, all-round side with a fast, clever forward line which combines beautifully. The half-backs are admirable both in attack and defence, and the backs are very reliable. There is not doubt they are a really fine amateur side.’
Matthew Stewart’s second collection, Whatever you do, just don’t, offers its own meditation on sun and shadow. Small observations on living between Spain and the UK, family life and, of course, the beautiful game, might seem unrelated but, as the collection unfolds, these elements pull together as a bitter-sweet meditation on love and loss.
A memorable sequence is ‘Starting Eleven’, a series of portraits of Aldershot FC footballers from the 1980s. Fate and fortune are writ large in these poems. The opener, ‘Tony Lange’, mines the irony of sporting euphemisms as the player is ‘Released by Charlton at twenty’ as if he were a big cat in captivity. This is picked up again a few lines later as Lange ‘prowls our goalmouth’… ‘waiting / to pounce’. It’s a reminder of the steepness of the pyramid. Lange’s no apex predator but, playing at Aldershot, he looks like one. In ‘Dale Banton’, the footballer’s career lasts 3 fleeting quintains” The first season I went, / he scored hat-tricks for fun’ but ‘Now—six long years later— / he’s back, signed by the Board / to silence our protests— / though the manager knows / full well his legs have gone’. Six years — a lifetime in football — it reminds me of a character like Stanhope in R.C. Sherrif’s Journey’s End, who’s lived a lifetime in the trenches in three years. The poem’s present tense serves as yet another frame between the reader and Banton, tinting him with sepia. Despite this, the fans’ blind loyalty and the Board’s sense of duty are a heart-breaking nod to a classier kind of sportsmanship.
‘Starting Eleven’ links smoothly to the wider collection. Take ‘Our Ball’, a poem in which the football itself stands as the metaphor for a father / son relationship:’ our ball’s lived for well over a decade / under a rug in the boot of my car. / Loading the stuff you’re taking to Uni, / I spot its faded yellow hexagons’. It’s relegated to the past but, for a fleeting moment, it exists once again in the present tense: ‘and now you crouch as if ready to dive, / your grin escaping, playful, complicit, / till you straighten, remind me of the time, / and stow our ball again’. It’s so carefully executed. The father becomes the child, as the son, freshly graduated to the world of common sense, is the one to put away childish things.
Stewart’s work as blender and exporter of Zaleo wines gives him a unique perspective on Brexit and the UK’s relationship with Europe. In ‘Carnet de Conducir’ (Driving Licence) he opens with a regular line of verse: ‘The time I handed my UK licence’ but then the poem is riven apart:
To Spanish civil servants
my balance
tilted and swayed—
I had to make a grab
for the counter.
‘Foreigner’, one of the collection’s final poems, uses its title to invite UK readers to fill the void with the ‘other’ of their choice before problematising such labels. Stewart opens: ‘My accent still reeks of Surrey, / so you’ll assume I’m British’ before contrasting this with the speaker’s Hispanic mannerisms in the second stanza’s ‘lift of my eyebrow, / rise in my tone at the end / of words’. ‘Warning’ offers the reader firm instructions: ‘Just don’t raise your voice if speaking / Spanish while on a bus or train’. Perhaps it’s too much to link this to one of the collection’s early poems exploring Stewart’s life in Spain, ‘Translator, Traitor’, but with the rise of The Right across the world, it’s something we cannot afford to forget: ‘La Guerra, 36 to 39, / was brother killing brother’.
There’s such humanity here. Stewart drinks it all in: the political, the familial — and there are no trite little answers. Like ‘Carnet de Conducir’, the collection exists in tension, but the tenderness with which Stewart observes life is always affirming. Like Galeano’s Uruguayan footballers, we’re all a motley crew of bookblacks and grocers, but that makes none of us less extraordinary.
RELATED LINKS
Buy Whatever you do, just don’t from HappenStance Press
Poor Rude Lines reviews Matthew Stewart’s The Knives of Villalejo
Poor Rude Lines 