"Fever Pitch", by Nick Hornby

Hola chicos,

Hago nueva entrada en este blog que desde la primera semana de enero tenía abandonado, pero ya sabéis que este año la rutina laboral me tiene tan ocupado que los días y semanas se pasan volando.

En esta ocasión quiero compartir con vosotros, especialmente con todos mis amigos y familiares futboleros, algunos extractos de un libro que he leído en inglés del escritor británico Nick Hornby, titulado Fever Pitch (traducido al español algo así como Fiebre en las gradas). Los que ya me conocéis un poco sabéis que desde hace muchos años ya, creo que desde el Bachillerato, no sé leer ningún libro si no es acompañado de un lápiz, con el que hago anotaciones en los márgenes, comentarios y subrayo aquellos pasajes que me llaman la atención. Es una manía que tengo, la cual me permite a posteriori repasar las “mejores jugadas” (y nunca mejor dicho) del libro.

Pues el libro es una especie de autobiografía del autor en la que explica su vida con un hilo conductor, y es su pasión por el fútbol, o más bien dicho, por el equipo de sus amores, el Arsenal de Londres. Os voy a ir mostrando pasajes del libro acompañados de comentarios que me vienen a la mente, pero sólo quiero adelantaros que me ha llamado la atención las similitudes entre el Arsenal y el Atlético de Madrid, en cuando a desastre. Yo pensaba que el Arsenal era un equipo más regular que mi Atleti, pero parece ser que eso ha sido así solamente en la última década.

En fin, vamos a ello. El libro está dividido en tres etapas, las etapas vitales del señor Hornby.

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Adolescencia

I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.

Ahí están las dos pasiones de todo adolescente español, fútbol y mujeres, o mujeres y fútbol, que ninguna se sienta ofendida.

The nature state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.

Y si encima eres aficionado del Atleti, la decepción todavía se vuelve más amarga y constante.

A critical faculty is a terrible thing […] And from that moment on, enjoyment has been a much more elusive quality.

Recuerdo cuando de muy jovencito iba al cine y me gustaban todas las películas. Ahora cuando voy al cine y me timan con algún guión tan mediocre como por ejemplo Avatar salgo indignado. Maldita facultad crítica que todo lo cuestiona…

Parenthood is a marathon, not a sprint.

Sin comentarios.

The club means more to us than it does to them.

El club significa más para los aficionados que para los jugadores, eso es indiscutible. Recuerdo cuando fui a ver la final de la Copa del Rey del año 2010 entre Atlético de Madrid y Sevilla (la cual perdimos en el Camp Nou, aunque una semana después de habernos proclamado campeones de la 1ª edición de la Europa League), ver a un niño del Atleti llorando al terminar el partido y desgarrándose animando a su equipo, y luego volví la mirada hacia el césped y vi a jugadores como Forlán y Agüero que reían comentando el partido con los rivales sevillistas. Este es un ejemplo, como muchos más que todos vosotros tenéis grabados en vuestra memoria, que corrobora la cita de arriba.

When our teams lose we think of the colleagues and classmates we have to face on Monday morning, and to the delirium that has been denied us.

Todavía recuerdo cuántas veces fui objeto de burla y mofa en el instituto cuando los culés comandados por Romario y compañía nos metían 5 o 6 goles. Eso sí, también recuerdo que el año del doblete ninguno de los compañeros de clases hablaba de fútbol los lunes.

I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages.

El fútbol te aporta conocimientos de Geografía, y eso es indiscutible. Cualquier hincha sabe mínimo de 40 ciudades españolas (los equipos de Primera y Segunda División), y tres de Inglaterra (Londres, Liverpool y Manchester), dos de Portugal (Porto y Lisboa), tres de Francia… Lo malo es que uno corría el riesgo de decir, cual viejo entrenador segurenc, ayer jugamos en Celtic, o en Bayern, o en CSK…

Obsession requires a commendable mental agility.

Cuando a uno le proponen cualquier plan, rápidamente tiene que pensar en la hora de los partidos que ese fin de semana (o entre semana si es Copa o Champions) para rechazar, aceptar o retrasar o adelantar la cita… Y eso, bien requiere una veloz agilidad mental para que la otra persona no note que tú estás pensando en todo eso mientras aceptas o rechazas el plan.

Juventud

In the seats, standing up to acclaim a goal is an involuntary action, like sneezing.

Cuando tu equipo marca, aunque estés en el Camp Nou rodeado de culés, es imposible no levantarte de tu asiento, a riesgo de escuchar algún “aquest malparit dels collons…”. Eso es incontrolable. O si estás viendo el partido en el sofá de tu casa, y tu mujer está dormida a tu lado, el grito que la despierta de manera aterradora, ese grito, también es completamente involutario, sale de lo más fondo del alma…

I don´t want to look after anybody when I´m at a match; I am not capable of looking after anybody at a match.

Anna no deja de molestarse cuando me habla viendo un partido de fútbol y hago como si escuchara llover. Esto, como el levantarse del asiento, es involuntario, así que no me lo tengas en cuenta mujer…

I know that these worries are prompted by the little boy in me, who is allowed to run riot when it come to football.

Viendo fútbol sacamos el niño irracional que todos llevamos dentro.

Ticket distribution for Cup Finals is a farce. When Football Association´s distribute ticket to neutrals (not fans), they don´t think that these neutrals decide that their endeavours are best recompensed not by a trip to London to see the big game, but by a phone call to their local tout: a good 90 per cent of them just flog the tickets they are given, and these tickets eventually end up in the hands of the fans who were denied them in the first place. It is a ludicrous process, a typically scandalous slice of Football Association idiocy: everybody knows what is going to happen, and nobody does anything about it.

Por lo tanto, siempre existirá la reventa. Y bendita reventa que nos permitió a Juanma, Moncho y a mí ver la anteriormente citada Final de la Copa del Rey 2010 en mi añorada Barcelona.

I know that I am particularly stupid about rituals, and have been ever since I started going to football matches, and I know also that I am not alone […] I have tried “smoking” goals in (Arsenal once scored as three of us were lighting cigarettes), and eating cheese-and-onion crisps at a certain point in the first half; I have tried not setting the video for live games (the team seems to have suffered badly in the past when I have taped the matches in order to study the performance when I get home); I have tried lucky socks, and lucky shirts, and lucky hats, and lucky friends, and have attempted to exclude others who I feel bring with them nothing but trouble for the team.

La insoportable superstición cuando uno ve a su equipo de fútbol, tan variada como variadas son las personas y los aficionados en el mundo. Todos hemos pensado alguna vez, este amigo es gafe, no vuelvo a dejar que vea un partido de mi equipo conmigo en la vida. Lo peor es cuando uno llega a pensar que el gafe es uno mismo…

The terrible truth is that I was willing to accept a Conservative government if it guaranteed an anticipate that Mrs Thatcher would go on to become the longest serving Prime Minister this century. (Would I have made the same bargain if I had known? Eleven years of Thatcherism for the FA Cup? Of course not. I wouldn´t have settled for anything less than another Double).

El ganar un título perdona cualquier otro suceso desagradable que pueda ocurrir en tu país o en el mundo. Yo de hecho perdonaría la mayoría absoluta del PP si eso equivale que este año revalidamos el título de la Europa League y, ya que estamos, revalidamos también la Eurocopa en verano.

It is hard for me, and for many of us, to think of years as being self-contained, with a beginning on 1^st January and an ending 365 days later. I was going to say that 1980 was a torpid, blank, directionless year for me but that would be wrong; it was 79/80 that was these things. Football fans talk like that: our years, our units of time, run from August to May (June and July don´t really happen, especially in years which end with an odd number and which therefore contain no World Cup or European Championship). Ask us for the best or the worst period in our lives and we will often answer with four figures – 66/67 for Manchester United fans, 67/68 for Manchester City fans, 69/70 for Everton fans, and so on – a silent slash in the middle of them the only concession to the calendar used elsewhere in the western world. We get drunk on New Year´s Eve, just as everyone else does, but really it is after the Cup Final in May that our mental clock is wound back, and we indulge in all the vows and regrets and renewals that ordinary people allow themselves at the end of the conventional year.

Los años, para un aficionado de fútbol, empiezan en septiembre y acaban a finales de mayo o principios de junio, y si encima de futbolero tu profesión es profesor, pues todavía más.

I’m not a good radio listener, but then very few fans are. The crowd are much quicker than the commentators – the roars and groans precede the descriptions of the action by several seconds- and my inability to see the pitch makes me much more nervous that I would be if I were at the game, or watching on TV. On the radio, every shot at your goal is heading for the top corner, every cross creates panic, every opposition free kick is right on the edge of the area; in those days before televised live games, when Radio 2 was my only link with Arsenal’s distant cup exploits, I used to sit playing with the dial, switching between one station and another, desperate to know what was going on, but equally desperate not to have to hear. Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game’s aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear. The bleak, ghostly howl that used to afflict Radio 2 in the evenings was entirely apposite.

Escuchar un partido en la radio, sin el apoyo de las imágenes, es un ejercicio de tortura que muchos dictadores deberían aplicar. Y es que un saque de puerta del equipo contrario parece una falta al borde del área lanzada por el odioso Cristiano Ronaldo.

It is the classical midfielder whose cerebral attributes receive the most attention, particularly from the sports writers on the quality papers and from the middle-class football fans. This is because it is analogous to the sort of intelligence that is prized in middle-class culture. Look at the adjectives used to describe playmakers: elegant, aware, subtle, sophisticated, cunning, visionary… these are words that could equally well describe a poet, or a film-maker, or a painter.

Los jugadores mejor valorados son los medios organizadores con clase y cerebrales, eso fue, es y será así. Algunos grandes nombres vienen a mi mente, Zidane, Schuster, Xabi Alonso, Cesc, y como no, el mejor jugador español de la historia según mi humilde opinión, el gran Xavi Hernández.

Football teams are extraordinarily inventive in the ways they find to cause their supporters sorrow. They lead at Wembley and then throw it away; they go to the top of the First Division and then stop dead; they draw the difficult away game and lose the home replay; they beat Liverpool one week and lose to Scunthorpe the next; they seduce you, half-way through the season, into believing that they are promotion candidates and then go the other way… always, when you think you have anticipated the worst that can happen, they come up with something new.

Este pasaje complementa otro anterior en el que hemos comentado que tu equipo de fútbol tiene una gran capacidad para hacerte sufrir y hacerte sentir desgraciado.

Fans and journalists see games in a profoundly different way […] I had been praying that Gascoigne would not be playing, which emphasizes the separateness of football: who would buy an expensive ticket for the theatre and hope that the star of the show was indisposed?

Y es que es verdad, ¿os imagináis pagar una entrada para ir a ver una obra de teatro en la que aparece Luis Tosar y desear que ese día esté enfermo para que no salga en la función? Pues yo he deseado muchas veces que cuando el Atleti jugaba contra el Barça no jugaran Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Romario, Messi…

Few of us have “chosen” our clubs, they have simply been presented to us; and so as they slip from the Second Division to the Third, or sell their best players, or buy players who you know can´t play, or bash the ball for the seven hundredth time towards a nine foot centre-forward, we simply curse, go home, worry for a fortnight and then come back to suffer all over again.

¡Qué gran verdad! Por mucho que tu equipo de haga sufrir, te decepcione y te humille, a la semana siguiente ahí estás, enfrente del televisor, deseando que vuelvan a ganar. Siempre me gusta recordar esa frase del gran escritor uruguayo Eduardo Galeano que dice: “En esta vida un hombre cambia de coche, casa, ciudad, e incluso mujer; pero jamás cambia de equipo de fútbol”.

But football had taken on yet another meaning now, connected with my new career. It had occurred to me –as I think it occurs to many young teachers of a similar milk – that my interests (football and pop music in particular) would be an advantage in the classroom, that I would be able to “identify” with “the kids” because I understood the value of the Jam and Laurie Cunningham. It had occurred to me that I was as childish as my interests; and that although, yes, I knew what my pupils were talking about most of the time, and that this gave me an entrée of sorts, it didn´t help me to teach them any better. In fact the chief problem I had –namely, that on a bad day there was uproarious mayhem in my classroom – was actually exacerbated by my partisanship. “I’m an Arsenal fan”, I said in my best groovy teacher voice, as a way of introducing myself to some difficult second years. “Boo!” they replied, noisily and at great length.

Ser futbolero y profesor tiene sus ventajas, porque tu afición te acerca mucho a los alumnos adolescentes. De alguna manera tienes algo que te une a ellos, y de lo que puedes hablar, discutir y rebatir fuera del ámbito académico.

In the end I learned, from this period more than any other in my footballing history, that it simply doesn’t matter to me how bad things get, that results have nothing to do with anything. As I have implied before, I would like to be one of those people who treat their local team like their local restaurant, and thus withdraw their patronage if they are being served up noxious rubbish. But unfortunately (and this is one reason why football has got itself into so many messes without having to clear any of them up) there are many fans like me. For us, the consumption is all; the quality of the product is immaterial.

Véase comentario de Eduardo Galeano ya comentado.

Adulto

This Wembley win belonged to me every bit as much as it belonged to Charlie Nicholas or George Graham (does Nicholas, who was dropped by Graham right at the start of the following season, and then sold, remember the afternoon as fondly?), and I worked every bit as hard for it as they did. The only difference between me and them is that I have put in more hours, more years, more decades than them, and so had a better understanding of the afternoon, a sweeter appreciation of why the sun still shines when I remember it.

El triunfo de tu equipo, especialmente si tu equipo no pertenece a la dualidad imperialista Barça-Madrid, es decir, los triunfos se consiguen raras veces, es saboreado y recordado y sentido durante muchos años. Yo jamás voy a olvidar el doblete del año 1995-96, o el del año 2010 (Europa League y Supercopa de Europa); y seguro que lo viví tanto o más como aquellos protagonistas como Penev, Kiko, Simeone (¡grandísimo!), Pantic, Vizcaíno, Molina…

And I love that, the fact that old girlfriends and other people you have lost touch with and will probably never see again are sitting in front of their TV sets and thinking, momentarily but “all at the same time”, Nick, just that, and are happy or sad for me. Nobody else gets that, only us.

Yo sé que muchos de vosotr@s cuando escucháis o leéis alguna noticia sobre el Atleti, de alguna manera pensáis en mí, os paso por la mente, ya sea para decir, me alegro por él (en las pocas veces que el Atleti lo hace bien) o para decir, en la mayoría, pobre desgraciado…

Absurdly, I haven’t yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three of four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men in a way that they can’t in other contact sports, and the way that best team does not necessarily win.

El mejor deporte del mundo, así lo veo yo. Os imagináis a alquien como Messi derrotando a Pepe en otro deporte (baloncesto, boxeo, tenis…).

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; the understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organize anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a winter Saturday afternoon?

Sé que es una molestia para la gente de mi alrededor, y una sonrisa aparece en mi rostro cada vez que Anna quiere organizar algo para el fin de semana y primero me pregunta, ¿cuándo juega el Atleti?

Like all fans, the overwhelming majority of the games I have seen have been League games. And as most of the time Arsenal have had no real interest in the First Division title after Christmas, nor ever really come close to going down, I would estimate that around half of these games are meaningless, at least in the way that sportswriters talk about meaningless games. There are no chewed nails and chewed chuckles and screwed-up faces; your ear doesn’t become sore from being pressed up hard against the radio, trying to hear how Liverpool are getting on; you are not, in truth, thrown into agonies of despair or eye-popping fits of ecstasy by the result. Any meanings such games throw up are the ones that you, rather than the First Division table, bring to them.

Para Navidad, el Atleti normalmente ya no tiene nada que hacer en la Liga. El hecho de seguir viéndolo es inexplicable, porque sabes que no va a ganar nada. Pero siempre hay algún aliciente que tú mismo le pones, aunque sea ver si todavía lo pueden hacer peor (a las malas) o ver cómo juega una nueva promesa, ver al nuevo entrenador, ver si juega titular el maldito Perea…

The trouble with the orgasm as metaphor here is that the orgasm, though obviously pleasurable, is familiar, repeatable (within a couple of hours if you’ve been eating your greens), and predictable, particularly for a man – if you’re having sex then you know what’s coming, as it were. Maybe if I hadn’t made love for eighteen years, and had given up hope of doing so for another eighteen, and then suddenly, out of the blue, an opportunity presented itself… maybe in these circumstances it would be possible to recreate an approximation of that Anfield moment. Even though there is no question that sex is a nicer activity than watching football (no nil-nil draws, no offside trap, no cup upsets, “and” you’re warm), in the normal run of things, the feelings it engenders are simply not as intense as those brought about by a once-in-a-lifetime last-minute Championship winner.

Yo también creo que orgasmo supera la consecución de un título por parte de tu equipo, aunque lo poco esporádico que se da lo segundo lo hace de alguna manera más “mágico”. El éxtasis que sentí viendo el gol de Forlán en la final de la prórroga de la Europa League o el gol del bendito Iniesta en la final del Mundial por lo menos se asemeja mucho en intensidad al sentimiento orgásmico.

I started playing football seriously –that is to say, I started to care about what I was doing, rather than simply going through the motions to appease a schoolteacher – at the same time as I started watching. There were the games at school with the tennis ball, and the games in the street with a punctured plastic ball, two-or-three-a-side; there were the games with my sister in the back garden, games up to ten in which she received a nine-goal start and threatened to go indoors if I scored; there were games with the local aspirant goalkeeper in the nearby playing fields after “The Big Match” on a Sunday afternoon, where we would re-enact high-scoring League games and I would provide live commentary at the same time. I played five-a-side in the local sports centre before I went to university, and second-or-third-team football at college. I played for the staff team when I was teaching in Cambridge, and a mixed game twice a week with friends during the summer, and for the last six or seven years, all the football enthusiasts I know have been gathering on a five-a-side court in West London once a week. So I have been playing for two-thirds of my life, and I would like to play throughout as many of the three or four decades remaining to me as possible.

Y es que claro, tanto como ver fútbol, me gusta igual, o quizás todavía más, jugar, aunque tenga ya 31 años y dé pena, pero la sensación de marcar un gol, aunque sea a otro equipo de patanes, siempre te hace rejuvenecer.

Bueno, y hasta aquí mi resumen. Perdonad el rollo, pero espero que al menos así mucha gente nos entienda (a nosotros los futboleros) cuando nos tildan de fanáticos del fútbol.

Nada más gente. Tan sólo os mando un fuerte abrazo y deciros que quizás pensáis que estoy loco, pero yo ya veo el verano en España a lo lejos en el horizonte.

Un besazo,

Paco