Football, politics and the Euros: for me, it’s personal 

I am not particularly into football, not like a proper footie devotee who understands all the intricate rules of the game and follows it avidly. That off-side thing and those other little ball-handling misdemeanours that occur so fast I never even notice them – well, they don’t mean all that much to me. I just care about who wins and who loses – and that’s only when I am rooting for one side over the other. So I only get involved – but then rather feverishly – during the European Championship and the World Cup. 

Club football, even in the Premier League, leaves me cold…except that I would always prefer Arsenal to win over any other team, for family reasons. It was the team my son Adam always supported while growing up in north London and its environs. He and his mates were big Gunners fans, they had the shirts, the scarves and the posters, they knew all the chants (Oh to, oh to be, oh to be a Gunner!) and of course they watched the games at Highbury Stadium. (This was back in the 1990s, when you could buy a ticket for three or four quid.) 

We all know that football is tribal and that football fans can be thugs. When Adam was 15 or 16 he was on his way home from a friend’s house one evening, walking alone down a quiet London street, when he was accosted by a group of youths. They wanted his money, but he didn’t have much, so they started shoving him around and threatening him. Then they demanded that he give them his rather nice jacket, and began pulling it off him. But in so doing they noticed he was wearing an Arsenal shirt underneath. All at once the mood changed completely. “Hey,” said one of the boys, “he’s a Gunner!” And another boy exclaimed: “Yeah man, he’s one of us!” So they straightened his jacket, patted him affably on the shoulder and sent him cheerily on his way. Had the muggers been Spurs fans, the outcome of that encounter doesn’t bear thinking about…

But anyway, on to the current Euros. It isn’t just about kicking a ball around for me. It’s about justice. I want countries with which, to put it mildly, I do not sympathise, to lose, because they deserve to lose. Primarily these are Russia and Turkey. And I want the two countries to which I’m devoted, to win: my country of origin, Hungary, because I remain connected to it, and England, where I have chosen to spend my life. As an underdog in the international football stakes, it was an unalloyed joy to see Hungary performing so well against mighty France. The 1-1 result shocked that smug, grossly overpaid pundit Gary Lineker, who called it all wrong when he predicted Hungary would be trounced. They think they know everything, don’t they?

And then there was the England-Scotland game. The only thing the two teams are united about is indulging in the dreary theatrics of taking the knee, too cowed by the baying BLM mob, I suppose, to resist this blatant politicisation of a sport. You only have to look at those racially mixed teams to know that they don’t practice discrimination. They needn’t defer to a radical Marxist organisation imported from the USA to prove it. In any case it was a most disappointing game, at nil-nil. I was hoping the Scots would be comprehensively hammered. Firstly, because if we can’t beat that perennially losing team, who can we beat? And secondly, because the Scots are arrogant super-nationalists who think they can break away from the Union and go it alone, despite their reliance on the largesse of English taxpayers. Just think how much more insufferable they would be if they ever beat us at football!

I enjoy watching Turkey get hammered because everything about that brutal authoritarian regime, which imprisons more journalists than almost any other country in the world, is hateful. When their recent 3-1 defeat by Switzerland sent them packing from the Euros without a point to their name, I poured a celebratory drink. 

For me, the most nail-biting and nerve-racking football game would be one between Hungary and Russia. The sheer, ghastly injustice if Russia should win! The country which, under the guise of the Soviet Union (and is Putin’s Russia any better?) crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and enslaved the Hungarian people for nearly half a century. It would be agonizing to watch, even between trembling fingers. 

Russia is vast and ruthless and notorious for cheating at sports, and Hungary is a small country with a lot of spirit but more limited resources. Still, there was more than one lesson to be learnt from that fateful year of 1956. At the same time as the Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary and the nation’s dream of freedom ended in a bloodbath on the streets, another battle was fought between the USSR and Hungary, at the 1956 Olympics in Australia. Hungary has traditionally excelled at two sports: fencing and water polo. And in the famous water polo match between these two sworn adversaries in Melbourne, Hungary was the resolute David that beat the Soviet Goliath 4-0. It became known as the “Blood in the Water” match because Hungarian player Ervin Zador emerged from the pool at the end with blood pouring from his face, having been punched by Soviet player Valentin Prokopov. Oh yes, it was political all right.

As in water polo, so in football. As far as I’m concerned, it’s about a desire for justice.  

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