These initial snippets are followed by others which offer a potted history of the origins of football, its early development in Britain and subsequent arrival on the shores of South America via the sailors, diplomats and traders of the UK. While the goalkeeper is ‘the first to pay – it is always the keeper’s fault’, somewhat unsurprisingly, the idol is the star – ‘t he ball seeks him out, knows him, needs him.’ The book begins with short sketches of the key ‘players’ and elements of the sport, from ‘ The Goalkeeper’, ‘The Idol’ and ‘The Fan’ through to ‘The Referee’, ‘The Manager’ and ‘The Theatre’. In addition to providing an array of facts, this book is a wonderful paean to the artistry of football, capturing as it does the sheer grace, poetry and magic of the beautiful game. By adopting this approach, Galeano charts the development of the contest, touching briefly on the multitude of stars and the numerous dramas that have emerged both on and off the field over the years. This is the glory of football in all its vivid international hues, with its multilingual cries of despair, victory and sheer passion.If you’re experiencing withdrawal symptoms from the thrills and spills of the 2018 World Cup, this could be the ideal book for you: Football in Sun and Shadow by the eminent Uruguayan journalist, novelist and writer Eduardo Galeano.įirst published in 1995 and subsequently updated to 2010, Football in Sun and Shadow is a marvellous collection of short essays/vignettes focusing primarily on each World Cup from the first in 1930 to the nineteenth in 2010.
It is a story of muses and spells: of the Argentinian manager who wouldn’t feed his team chicken because it would bring bad luck, of the Russian goalkeeper who prepared his mind and his nerves with a cigarette and a dash of spirits before each game. It is a story of love and death: of the suicide of Abdon Porte who shot himself in the centre circle of the Nacional Stadium, of the phoenix-like Charlton spared from the Munich disaster to glory on the world stage.
Galeano searches out the mystical and the bewitched, the romance and the emotional destitution of the greatest game in the 20th-century world. Eduardo Galeano has written a series of football epiphanies from the global history of football when the rays of light have glittered from the passion of the game.Īs world music is to two-dimensional Stock, Aitken and Waterman pop so Eduardo Galeano’s football writing is to Motty’s commentary. Football is, in Pele’s words, ‘the beautiful game’.
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