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Articles by Bye-bye BebéLuke Alfred
The Inevitable Conclusion
“Prick! You incredible prick!” Frank de Boer was yelling at himself in his car. He thumped the wheel. It was July 2000, weeks after the Netherlands had lost the Euro 2000 semi-final to Italy. It was the third straight European Championship that Holland had lost in a shoot-out and, including a loss to Brazil in the 1998 World Cup, a third elimination on penalties in four years. The circumstances of this one were particularly tough to bear.
Football’s First Millionaire
The fate of professional players after their playing careers has ended has always proved fascinating to football fans. Perhaps it’s simple curiosity, a desire to see how an old favourite is faring. Or perhaps it’s something else, a voyeuristic trip into the abyss? Rags-to-riches-to-rags-again stories have always held a grim satisfaction and where footballers are concerned, there seems to have been no shortage of fallen idols: once proud stars found making tea on building sites.
Notes from a Tournament
The stands of the vast bowl were mostly empty. A week before the World Cup began, only 3500 people had turned up for Hungary’s friendly against Albania, leaving tens of thousands of empty seats in red, white and green, so redundant they seemed like some experiment in the effects of the sun on fading plastic. There is surely is no sadder sporting venue in the world than the Ferenc Puskás Stadium in Budapest.
La Renaissance
Even in times of victory, there always was an air of world-weariness about Michel Hidalgo. Not that the kind, gentle, unassuming Hidalgo appeared to suffer the existential torments of a Sartrean anti-hero. He looked more like a puppy whose favourite toy had been taken away for reasons it could not comprehend.
Best in Show
Banned from international competition and unable to watch the 1974 World Cup on television, South African club owners devised a cunning plan. In a bid to boost home attendances and indulge in some slightly amateurish marketing hype, they would induce fading British stars to Johannesburg with tales of year-round sunshine and a standard of living that was positively Californian.
Bye-bye Bebé
If Sir Alex Ferguson’s 2013 autobiography constituted his attempt to write the definitive version of his history, there was an unexpected inclusion. One last act of bloody-minded defiance concerned the player most assumed Ferguson would be happy to forget: Bebé. In the days before Manchester United began to airbrush him out of the picture, the club website described his £7.4 million move from Vitória Guimarães as “one of the most astonishing transfers of last summer [2010]”.
$10 Per Day
My translator Qais and I sat up in the cement bleachers, trying to follow a football match despite the two-storey dust devils swirling across the pitch. Plastic bags soared high into the air on updrafts before slowly tumbling back down to the rough pitch. The only greenery in Herat’s Olympic Stadium was the weeds growing unchecked behind the goals. There gnats swarmed and trash blown in from the stands collected, never to decompose because it was mostly styrofoam.
Orbán Planning
Secretaries and bank clerks trot down the Budapest side street, their commute brightened up by a gigantic mural that uses 1950s posters, photographs and football programmes to depict the “match of the century”. The goalkeeper Gyula Grosics leaps heroically, Billy Wright looks on haplessly, Ferenc Puskás celebrates and then comes the bold claim of centurial supremacy and that scoreline: Hungary 6 England 3.
The Mirror Crack’d
About an hour after the Brazilian football national team suffered its greatest ever humiliation, a number of photographers captured the sombre image of the emptying Mineirão stadium with its lights dimming. It is already an iconic image. In the middle of the shadowy background, the imposing electronic score showed what may possibly be the most unlikely result in sports history – let alone in World Cups: Brazil 1 - 7 Germany.
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