Book of the Week: Mad, bad, sad world of football nationalism

Back Home: How The World Watched France 98

By Andy Lyons and Mike Ticher WSC Books pounds 9.99, paperback

BILL SHANKLY was right in a way. Lives are lived and deaths are died but football goes on. Little matters like, says, elections, have nothing on World Cups for stirring up people's feelings about their country, and there are few events in the collective life of a nation more momentous than its team's big games.

The English think they have a monopoly on investing their national side with more baggage than is healthy, but Back home with its reportage from 25 of the 1998 World Cup countries, provides page after page of material demonstrating emphatically that it just ain't so. We think our newspapers, with their perennial angel/devil dichotomies, are bad. After the Germans had gone out to Croatia complaining about being robbed, the tabloid Bild spat "Stop Whining!", while Romania's Pro Sport raged at its wage-disputing players, "You haven't been paid yet? It's because you played like idiots!"

History is rich with fuel for the fires of nationalism. English tabloids are never slow to dig into their chest of war cliches, but on the eve of their game against Germany, Yugoslav papers reminded people of the law imposed during the second World War: "For one dead German soldier, one hundred Serbs have to be killed." Of that fateful night in St Etienne when England fell in battle, the Argentinian paper Clarn was clear: "What happened... was not a simple football match... what was on the pitch was the collective Argentine memory, that long series of episodes - some sporting, some political - internalised since childhood, which build the image of the unpleasant Englishman, first an invader, a usurper of our riches, then a model of the dominant classes." Phew. No wonder they hate us.

Though we have all chafed at Brian Moore's one-eyed patriotism, we can all give thanks that we don't have the likes of Eduardo Bonvallet, who predicted that Chile would beat Cameroon "because the Africans" feet will be sore after playing in two matches in boots when they're not used to wearing shoes."

But Back Home is not just a trawl through newspapers and television, and the pieces that work best (a few, like the ones from Jamaica, Italy, and Nigeria, are perfunctory) are those most packed with detail. In Mexico City, Mike Mitchell tells us, the notorious smog actually cleared for a while as the streets emptied. Priests round the country dressed wooden figures of Baby Jesus in tiny Mexico strips and statues of the Virgin of Guadelupe wore the No 12 shirt to indicate her symbolic presence on the bench. In a salsa drag bar in Bogota called Abysmo, "in an atmosphere heavy with cigarette smoke and perfume the city's she-males whooped and wolf-whistled as a TV cameraman took a lingering, full-length look at each of Colombia's players." It is details like this that make Back Home a rewarding read.