18 August, 2000

Sometimes, serendipity yields awesome results. Like the other day, I was browsing in a bookshop, and by sheer chance I found -- tucked away under a heap of fiction titles -- a book titled Soccer In Sun and Shadow, by Eduardo Galeano (translated by Mark Fried).

Galeano is an Uruguayan. And a football fanatic. And those are his only qualifications for writing this book.

And yet, this must be, by a mile and a half, the best soccer book -- in fact, one of the best sports books -- I've ever read.

When you go through the table of contents, you find almost a hundred chapter headings. Which doesn't square with the 230 pages the book comprises of. But then you begin reading, and you realise that sometimes, a 'chapter' is just a paragraph or two. What Galeano does is pick a player, or a moment, in time, and in a few deft strokes, paint a stunning word picture that is evocative of the sport at its very best.

I wanted to quote something, to give you a feel for what this book is like. So I opened it at random just now, and landed on pages 124-125. Which contain short chapters titled 'Goal by Beckenbauer' and 'Eusebio'.

Since the latter is even briefer than the former, I'll quote that here:

"He was born to shine shoes, sell peanuts or pick pockets. As a child they called him 'Niguem' -- no one, nobody. Son of a widowed mother, he played soccer from dawn to dusk with his many brothers in the empty lots of the shantytowns.

"He set foot on the field, running as only someone with police or poverty nipping at his heels can run. That is how he became champion of Europe at the age of twenty; sprinting in zig zags. They called him 'The Panther'.

"In the 1966 World Cup, his attacks left adversaries scattered on the ground, and his goals from impossible angles set off never-ending ovations.

"Portugal's best player ever was an African from Mozambique. Eusebio: long legs, dangling arms, sad eyes."

See what I mean? Just a few lines -- but those few lines bring before our eyes vivid mental images of a soccer magician. Seasoned journalists pride themselves (and here I include myself) on their writing skills -- but no veteran journalist would have been capable of the elegance and evocative power of that descriptive line: "He ran as only someone with poverty or the police nipping at his heels could run".

It takes a fan -- and a fan's combination of innocence, childlike wonder, warm heart and unjaded palate -- to produce such masterworks.

It was late into the night -- more accurately, early in the morning -- when I finally got through this one. Mainly because time and again, it was necessary to stop, and absorb a particularly stunning bit of imagery, savour a supremely crafted line, a stylish simile....

And at the end, there was a sense of awe. And a corresponding sense of sadness. The awe is easily explained. The sadness comes from the realisation that in the five years of being a 'professional' sports writer, the fan in me had slowly slipped into a coma, surviving purely on life support.

With that sadness, there is also a realisation of sorts. We guys will continue to produce clinical match reports, quick news updates, the entire journalistic ball of wax. But the really good writing has to come from out there. From you.

And to my mind, it is sad that not enough of you put pen to paper, to share the magic of sport with us. To take us by the hand and lead us into that childlike state of wide-eyed wonder, that we have lost through becoming 'professionals'.

Come to think of it, maybe that is the difference between the weekend cricketer having a hit in the gulley behind his home, and our pampered darlings of the Indian XI, too?

Meanwhile, there's lots of good stuff on both the Cricket, and Sports, sites -- including Rohit Brijnath's latest column, in the latter. Check them out.

And hey, you guys, keep smiling, stay safe...

Prem

Mail Cricket Editor