Soccer Men (37 page)

I quote another retired player, who said that the moments that you’re all sitting broken in the locker room together, heads down, are also special
moments. The solidarity of the shared pain is something to treasure. You just don’t realize it at the time.

Hoddle is talking quietly now. His high has passed. “They are. Unfortunately, they’re not the one you think it’s going to be. What I always wonder, if we’d have beaten them with ten men, as we’d come close to doing, what would have happened? You know, you can have a ‘media momentum’ sometimes, which is a bit false, but I think maybe the momentum of that match would have took us—well, I don’t know where it could have took us.”

Back in 1998 Hoddle had known for certain: If it hadn’t been for Beckham’s red card, he would have won the World Cup. In his extremely badly written
Glenn Hoddle: My 1998 World Cup Story
he says, “I couldn’t get away from my belief that we’d have won the world cup if we’d have beaten Argentina, and no-one on this earth will ever change my opinion that if we’d had eleven men on the pitch we’d have won that game.” That England would then have still needed to beat Holland, Brazil, and France was a detail. In the final words of his book: “I’ll always believe it should have been me. It should have been England.”

I put it to him that he still isn’t finished with that World Cup. He replied, “You know what: I’ve never looked at the game. Sorry, I looked at the game after, when we went back in the summer, but I never studied the game. It would be interesting to look at that game now, really look it as a bit of a performance, rather than be involved in it as we were.”

Eight months after St. Etienne his career at the highest level ended. In an interview with the
Times
, Hoddle was quoted as saying that handicapped people were paying for sins in former lives. This was widely felt to be (1) a nutty idea and (2), in Tony Blair’s new PC Britain, unkind to handicapped people.

Now Hoddle reflects, “My emotion would be just purely frustration. Because it was a story that wasn’t true, not my beliefs—not how it was put anyway. And I had people that weren’t strong enough to stay with me, under such a stupid thing.” He means the FA officials who seized the opportunity to get rid of an unpopular manager. “My record stands up against anyone, really, in international soccer, so, errrm—”

That’s an interesting view. After all, some people in international soccer have won the World Cup. Hoddle reached only the round of sixteen. “Stands up against anyone in international soccer?” I repeat.

“Well, no, just if you look at the stats, the record is one of the better England manager’s records, if you like. And it wasn’t for soccer reasons that they sacked me.”

He’s right on both counts. Hoddle’s England won 61 percent of its twenty-eight matches outright. On the day we speak, in February 2008, that is better than any other England manager in history. The next best performers—Alf Ramsey, Ron Greenwood, Sven-Göran Eriksson, and all the prewar selection committees combined—are grouped a fraction behind him at about 60 percent.

Hoddle’s also right to say that his career finished strictly because of his stupid opinions about something outside soccer. And now he’s drinking cappuccino in the Polo Bar.

Was it a trauma?

“What? The ahm . . .”

The sacking.

While Hoddle thinks about that, Sky Television and an Elvis-like singer fill the background. “I’ve got to say it was a massive disappointment, because I knew what perhaps we could have done on the pitch.” And he talks about his fantastic players, “your Shearers, your Inces, your Sheringhams, your—Owen, he was just a puppy. Your Tony Adamses, your Campbells, your Nevilles. Young Beckham. Scholes—‘the jewel in my crown,’ I called him. Stuart Pearce. Players that had real, real pride in their work.”

While he was still managing them, Hoddle sometimes seemed to look down on his players, viewing them as less intelligent and less skillful than he had been himself. He once told Beckham, when they were practicing volleys in practice, that he didn’t have “the skill” for it. Now, though, he remembers the players as partners in his greatest adventure.

Hoddle never got a top job again. In English soccer, an alcoholic wife beater can be “one of the lads,” whereas a somewhat arrogant man who finds God on a visit to Bethlehem is a dangerous lunatic. Hoddle didn’t swear, didn’t drink much, and didn’t have many friends. For most of his career he had never needed any. But after England, he could only get work at Southampton and Tottenham, and later a division lower at Wolves. He resigned in Wolverhampton in July 2006 and hasn’t worked at a club since. The day we meet, he still is only fifty years old.

When he launches into a critique of England’s current 4–4–2—too rigid, too few overlapping players who move forward one line, very different from when he was in charge—I ask whether it’s frustrating still to be thinking like a top-level coach but not to be working as one. “Yeah,” says Hoddle, “that’s a good question, and I’m thinking that myself now, as I’m talking to you. But, but—strange that, because you must have read my mind.” He chuckles, trying to turn it into a joke.

Hoddle has kept thinking all those years. He quotes Pele: “The wonderful thing about soccer is that we’re all learning, and there’s something else to find out about the game.” Back when he wrote his
World Cup Story
, he still thought that he made only one mistake at his World Cup. He should have taken Eileen Drewery to France to heal England’s injuries.

By now, though, Hoddle has had a decade to stew on that tournament, and he doesn’t say anything to me about either Eileen or reincarnation. If you’re an intelligent person with half-baked ideas, and a whole country makes fun of them, then you learn from the experience even if you never get a chance to repeat it.

In the Polo Bar Hoddle says he should have taken a sports psychologist to the World Cup. He used one at his clubs. “At first players hated it,” he admits. “It’s all so difficult.” But just imagine, he goes on, if Scholes, who was too shy ever to speak, had said of a teammate during a group discussion, “To be honest, I’ve always thought he’s one of the best center-halves I’ve ever played against.” Then the player would think, “
Oh bloody hell
, didn’t realize—hang on a minute.” It would have given the man a charge of confidence. But Hoddle’s England didn’t have psychologists or group discussions.

Would visualization and sports psychology have helped get rid of England’s historic penalty trauma? “I think it definitely would. There’s certain techniques that you can do.”

That’s new, too. After England was eliminated, Hoddle said that you couldn’t practice penalties. Now he tells me, “Nine times out of ten if you miss a penalty in shoot-outs, it’s between the walk between the halfway line and the placing of the ball. So it’s in your mind where you’ve missed it. I can tell, I think nine times out of ten, if a player’s gonna miss it. With how he reacts, what his eyes are doing, when he gets the ball on the spot. But it does help
if you’re like Brazil and you can get a left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, and hit the top corner.” He laughs curtly. “You don’t see a goalkeeper dive in the top corner. So whether you work on that visualization, it’s quite handy to have those abilities. We had one left-footed player in the whole squad: Graeme Le Saux.”

When he starts his academy, Hoddle wants to teach the teenagers to visualize:

I say, “I can see that the academy makes sense. But you were the most successful young manager in England. Then you got the big job. In terms of soccer, you did it quite well. Now you’d normally be at your managerial peak, but you’re no longer a manager. Isn’t that strange?” He answers, “Yes. If I’m honest, I thought I’d be doing it [the academy] when I’m about sixty-five.” And he laughs at himself again.

Suddenly, it turns out that we have been sitting here for nearly two hours. The short English winter’s afternoon is nearly over. Hoddle has to go. He’s taking his son to a sports psychologist. “We’ve done visualization with him. That’s worked really well.”

But it could all have been so different.

*
Two years after we spoke, the Glenn Hoddle Academy in Montecastillo is up and running and has returned one or two players to the lower reaches of professional soccer. The Spanish property crash cannot have helped funding.

September 2008

O
f course Argentina shouldn’t have let Diego Maradona coach its soccer team. He won’t last long in the post. He has enough trouble getting out of bed, let alone showing up in Glasgow for Scotland-Argentina on November 19. The fat cigar smoker and former cocaine addict with the geriatric’s heart may not even be around for the next World Cup. But all this misses the point. A national team doesn’t exist only to win. It also represents the nation. And nobody in soccer incarnates his country and its fans like Maradona does. That is part of his genius. Here are some scenes from his life, and from two recent films about him, which explain why Argentina had to give him the job.

Mexico City, 1986
: After his two legendary goals have knocked England out of the World Cup, Maradona and his teammates sit joking in the locker room. The striker Jorge Valdano teases him: While Maradona was dribbling past six Englishmen, Valdano was running alongside him calling for the ball. Why didn’t Maradona pass? Yes, replies Maradona, I was watching you, and kept meaning to pass, but the English kept getting in the way, and suddenly I’d beaten them all, so I just scored.

Valdano is awed: “While you scored this goal you were also watching me? Old man, you insult me. It isn’t possible.” And the midfielder Hector Enrique calls from the showers: “Lots of praise for the goal. But after that pass I gave him, if he hadn’t scored, he should have been killed!” Everyone laughs. As Maradona notes, Enrique had shoved the ball into his feet in their own half.

It is a characteristic Maradona scene: Though he towered over his teammates, he always felt one with the team. When I asked Valdano if he liked Maradona, he replied, “I
love
Maradona. I’m from the country of Maradona.”

Buenos Aires, 2004
: Maradona lies in intensive care, his heart failing. Argentines gather outside the hospital doors. They expect him to die young. That is what Argentine heroes do: Eva Perón, Che Guevara, Carlos Gardel, the singer Rodrigo. In the Catholic tradition, the heroes die to redeem the country’s sins.

Like Evita, Maradona is a sort of Argentine folk saint. In Carlos Sorín’s 2006 movie
The Road to San Diego
, an illiterate woodcutter decides that a fallen tree in the forest resembles a cheering Maradona. He crafts the thing into a statue of Maradona and carries it across Argentina. Some people he meets laugh at him, noting that the statue looks nothing like Maradona, but many grasp its religious status. “Santa Maradona,” as a Brazilian truck driver remarks.

In Emir Kusturica’s new documentary
Maradona by Kusturica
, crowds form around Maradona wherever he goes, as if he were an icon in a Catholic procession. It looks exhausting, but Maradona understands the iconography. In his interviews with Kusturica, he wears an outsize silver cross and explains how God saved him in intensive care.

Qatar, 2005
: Maradona and Pele appear at the launch of something or other. Afterward, writes James Montague in his book
When Friday Comes
, the Qatari crowd rushes the stage. Everybody ignores Pele. Montague says, “All I can see in the melee is the top of Diego’s unkempt Afro, buried in a sea of adoring fans.” Agustín Pichot, Argentina’s former rugby captain and Maradona’s friend, explains that people love Maradona because he is “authentic.” We feel we know him. He is flawed like us.

That’s partly because Maradona
looks
like an ordinary person. Never has a great athlete looked less like a great athlete. In Sorín’s film, set in poor, provincial Argentina, we see rural people with withered faces on rickety buses—a cheap prostitute, a blind lottery-ticket seller—who recognize themselves in the tubby, little former slum dweller. Maradona is their link to greatness.

Germany, World Cup, 2006
: Maradona is here as a fan. He sits in the stands wearing an Argentine replica shirt, jumping rhythmically with the other Argentine supporters. Pele or Franz Beckenbauer couldn’t have done it. But Maradona embodies Argentina.

Cinemas, 2008
: Kusturica’s film is agitprop for Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, and Emir Kusturica. Yet it also captures a truth about Maradona and Argentina: The player avenges the country’s frustrations about its place in the world. The film includes a cartoon version of Maradona’s goal versus England, in which he dribbles past Margaret Thatcher (who gets herself decapitated), a handbag-wielding Queen Elizabeth, a horned Tony Blair who bites
Maradona’s ankle before dropping into the underworld, and a pistol-toting George W. Bush.

Kusturica calls the goal “one of those rare moments that a country heavily in debt to the IMF triumphed over one of the rulers of the world.” That, surely, is too much honor for England. However, Maradona and many Argentines experienced the goal as just that. If you want to understand why Latin America is going left-wing, look at Maradona. He incarnates Chávezian resentment.