Wake-up call for a nation

Impac winner Juan Gabriel Vasquez on how the slaying of soccer star Andres Escobar marked a tipping point, writes Alan O’Riordan

EVERY four years the World Cup becomes the global lingua franca. It’s hard to meet anyone from a participating country without asking for an assessment of how they think their team will do. So it was when the Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vasquez was in Dublin to collect the Impac Prize for his novel, The Sound of Things Falling.

As we drank the thankfully up-to-scratch coffee (Colombians have high standards in such things), our talk turned inevitably to football. But, this being Colombia, it did not take long for us to go from this year’s tournament to the fallout from the 1994 World Cup, and the murder of Andres Escobar, the defender who scored an own goal in a much-fancied Colombia’s ill-fated campaign.