Around the World Cup in 35 days
The news from Ireland doesn’t get much play out here in Brazil but I gather there has been a bit of to-do back home most surprisingly concerning — correct me if I’ve misinterpreted the vague reports — the usually mild and uncontroversial BBC television football pundit, Mr Garth Crooks. Did he cancel a Q&A engagement or something like that?
You’ll have to forgive my loose grasp of detail but I’m afraid that things Irish seem to barely impinge on the Brazilian consciousness. After more than a month out here, I’ve lost count of the number of conversations which essentially went like this:
Taxi driver -“Hollanda?”.
Me — “No, Irlanda!”
Taxi driver (smiling, giving thumbs up): “Ah, Hollanda!!”
Mind, I was on one domestic flight where Ireland did feature in the little general knowledge quiz they screened as part of the in-flight entertainment. And you’ll never guess the subject matter. U2? No. Roy Keane? Nope. One small nation’s glorious fight for independence and the overthrow of empire? Wrong again. It was: “Which nationality drinks the most beer per head of population?” The multiple choice solutions on offer were: 1 Germany 2 England 3 Ireland 4 Czech Republic.
The correct answer, you’ll be gratified or outraged to hear, was the Czech Republic, the Irish presence at the top table clearly designed to have Brazilians, who admittedly like a drink themselves, going: “See, told you, it was a trick question.”
Sure wasn’t I ready to press ‘3’ myself.
He is a big, smiley man from Rio, name of Alex, but he likes to style himself ‘The Irish Brazilian’. An accredited journalist, he was pointed out to me one day in the Maracana media centre by an Irish ex-pat who enthused: “You have to meet him — he can talk at great length about Cobh Ramblers.” This proved to be no exaggeration. Affable Alex, who speaks English fluently, is a walking, talking Brazilian encyclopedia on Irish football. A typical exchange was the one I had with him one afternoon at the Dutch camp in Flamengo’s old stadium. Alex was at pains for me to understand that this wasn’t where Flamengo play any more but merely their training ground. And just in case I still wasn’t getting the message, he helpfully added: “Like Malahide.”
This was also the day when he showed me on his iPad all the Irish sports books he’s read. And as he proudly scrolled down through the covers, there they all were: the Dunph’s Roy Keane biog as well as Only A Game?, my old mucker Declan Lynch’s classic on the summer of 1990, Days Of Heaven, Jimmy Magee’s memoirs. About the only tome of significance missing, as far as I could see, was Noel King’s hard to get volume of poetry.
Alex also showed he had a good Irish-coloured grasp of Big Phil’s Brazil when, on the eve of one of their earlier games in the competition, he sent me an e-mail which read: “Tomorrow the Brazilian version [of] the Jack Charlton [way] will play again.”
But even with those deep misgivings about style, he still supported his country to the hilt. I remember meeting him after the penalty shoot-out against Chile and, suddenly, he actually did look and sound like a man who’d just read Kinger’s poetry book: “Is very difficult,” he gasped. “Is not good for the heart.” For the record, I haven’t met Alex since the catastrophe in Belo Horizonte. And, frankly, I’m not sure I want to (by the way, apologies to the bauld Mr King, whose book I enjoyed; as he’d understand himself, I just couldn’t resist the open goal).
So there I was, strolling on the golden sands of Ipanema, as you do, when I came upon a kiosk doing a brisk trade in large green fruits which turned out to be the unripened coconuts whose water is regarded as a sovereign thirst quencher by cariocas. So, on the scorchingly hot day that was in it and on the basis that, when in Rio…, I decided to take a seat and order one for myself, at which the proprietor of the stall selected a monster specimen from a huge plastic bin full of ice, expertly lopped the top off with a cleaver, stuck a straw in it and handed it over. Here’s an interesting thing I subsequently learned: unless you keep a firm two-handed grip on a coconut, it tends to roll around the table like a drunk, spraying fragrant liquid in all directions. I sent home a photo of myself in the middle of the ensuing carnage, captioned: ‘Spot the nut’.
In common, I suspect, with the majority of World Cup visitors to Manaus, I had scrupulously followed the medical advice I received before leaving home and taken a course of anti-malaria tablets, begun the day before my arrival in the Amazon and completed a week after I left the region. Rather belatedly then, I came across an interesting document newly prepared for the tournament by the local-based Foundation For Health Surveillance Of The Amazon. Entitled ‘Good Practices For Those Who Visit The Amazon State’ it explicitly stated under the entry for Malaria: “The capital urban area (ie Manaus) is currently without transmission… so if your residence is in the urban area of the capital, there will be no need for specific preventative measures.” Indeed, it went even further, declaring: “The use of drugs to prevent the disease is not advisable, due to the difficulty of acquiring these drugs, the deficient spectrum of action of these drugs, emergence of resistant strains among other factors…”
To which I can only observe that, before I left Ireland, I’d experienced absolutely no “difficulty in acquiring these drugs” once I was convinced by expert opinion of the importance of doing so – and, of course, had demonstrated a willingness to acquire them at not inconsiderable expense.
Oh well, at least I was in good company — the England team were also taking the tablets. Although, in light of their abject performance at World Cup 2014, perhaps ‘bad company’ is the phrase I’m looking for.
Sign in English outside the elevator on the 10th floor of my hotel in Sao Paulo: “If you open the door and the lift is not there, please do not step in.” A good one, you’ll agree, but still only trotting after my all-time favourite, as featured in Charlie Croker’s hilarious compilation of misadventures in the English language, Lost In Translation. Taken from a list of driving tips for tourists at a car-hire in Tokyo, it read, magnificently: “If a passenger of foot hoves into view, tootle your horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first but if he continues to obstacle your passage, then tootle him with vigour.”
From the untamed grandeur of the Amazon to the pulsing metropolis of Sao Paulo, from the sensational cable-ride up the Sugarloaf to the spectacular view from Christ The Redeemer, it’s true what they say about Brazil: it’s a country which absolutely saturates and satiates the senses.
Yet, it’s also true that Brazil is a place of raging and even brutal inequality where the gap between the have nots and have yachts is all the more striking for frequently being, physically and geographically, so small. The tumbling favela on the neighbouring hill might be little more than a long ball away from the Maracana but, over the course of this World Cup, it might as well have located in another universe for all that its people would have had in common with the comparatively gilded lives of most of those — us journalists included — who were inside the stadium.
Sometimes the two worlds intersect and always uncomfortably: the one-armed guy in bare feet and wearing only filthy shorts, begging for money from car drivers stopped at traffic lights; the unfortunates living rough beneath the grimy flyover just a few hundred yards down the road from our security-controlled apartment block in the leafy suburb of Laranjeiras; what looked like an open air crack house, all bust-up sofas and smoking fires, its ravaged denizens milling about in a kind of agonised daze, under the trees on a traffic island between the roaring freeways in Sao Paulo.
Everyone knows that Brazil has deep social problems and everyone knows that, once the World Cup circus leaves town, the lives of most of its disadvantaged people will not have been improved one iota by the experience. Worse, as the activists here have always maintained, they’ll likely have been left all the poorer because of the vast, inflated expenditure on the Mundial.
And yet, for the Irish visitor on a flying visit to this tremendous and tortured country, there can be no escaping the equally uncomfortable knowledge that, when I get back my hometown, it won’t be to a land of milk and honey.
And the young and old sleeping rough on the streets of Dublin every night of the year — I doubt we’ll be seeing them in the Aviva or Croker any time soon.
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