Football in Sun and Shadow: An Emotional History of World Cup Football - Hardcover

Galeano, Eduardo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857027884 ISBN 13: 9781857027884

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 1997

Synopsis

Football is, in Pele’s words, ‘the beautiful game’ . 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.

As world music is to two-dimensional Stock, Aitken and Waterman pop so Eduardo Galeano’s football writing is to Motty’s commentary. Galeano searches out the mystical and the bewitched, the romance and the emotional destitution of the greatest game in the 20th-century world. 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. 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. This is the glory of football in all its vivid international hues, with its multilingual cries of despair, victory and sheer passion. This is Viva Pitch!

About this title

Review:

Galeano can run rings round our glamorous football intelligentsia. (When Saturday Comes)

Stands out like Pele on a field of second-stringers. (New Yorker)

Galeano has a style of a great left half. He constantly switches the direction of play. His observations are acute. He delivers with an air of insouciance which cannot mask his mastery (Herald)

Uplifting, reckless, ironic, impassioned... sparkles with supple imagery and a fine dry wit. (Independent)

Deeply humane . . . he has produced literature that will endure, monuments to the imagination (Toby Green Independent)

From the Back Cover:

'An emotional history of world cup football'

'Uplifting, reckless, ironic, impassioned – his book sparkles with supple imagery and a fine dry wit.'
Pete Davies, 'Independent'

To the true football fan even winning and losing comes second to those moments of pure footballing perfection: an acrobatic bicycle kick; an audacious piece of ball juggling; a dummy; a back heel; a flying header. Here is a parade of the world's greatest footballers from Beckenbauer to Yashin, Charlton to Zico, Cruyff to Pele with their inspired, almost baletic skill.

Here too is the tragic Escobar, guilty of an own goal for Columbia and gunned down in the streets of Medellin as a consequence; the English captain Neville who led a First World War charge on a trench by kicking a football across no-man's land; and the 1942 Dynamo Kiev team who couldn't resist beating their oppressors, the Nazis, and were then shot in their shirts after the 'game'.

'This is the world's greatest game in all its colour'

'Galeano can run rings round our glamorous football intelligentsia.'
'When Saturday Comes'

'Galeano has a style of a great left half. He constantly switches the direction of play. His observations are acute. He delivers with an air of insouciance which cannot mask his mastery'
'Herald'

'Sport's answer to 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. A journey through a universe populated by the fantastic and the eccentric, reality turned magical.'
'Financial Times'

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1857027884
• ISBN 13: 9781857027884
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240