Almost 14 years ago, on 19th September
1999 my team Newcastle United beat Sheffield Wednesday 8-0, which was their
biggest win since beating Newport County 13-0 almost 53 years previously, in
what was my late father’s first ever visit to our stadium, St. James’ Park.
Sadly, I did not see any of the 5 goals our record scorer Alan Shearer
plundered in the 8-0 win, as on that Sunday I flew from Newcastle to Prague and
then on to Bratislava, to start a job teaching English to Slovak students at
Akadémia Vzdelávania
in Gorkeho.
Just less than 2 weeks later, on 2nd
October 1999, I saw my first game of football in Slovakia when a deflected 63rd
minute strike by full back Martin Baliak gave visitors Petržalka victory away
to Slovan. The last game I saw in this
country was on 20th July 2005 when Petržalka overcame a 2-0 first
leg loss to defeat Kairat Almaty 4-1 after extra time at Senec’s ground. The
fact that both contests were momentous victories away from the traditional,
historic and incredibly beautiful home ground of the Slovak side I fell in love
with at first sight, makes me despair even more that, at the moment of writing
(18th February; the 77th birthday of Dr. Josef Venglos),
my beloved Stary Most stadium is no more and Petržalka lie bottom of Division 3
West. However I am led to believe that there is reason for optimism, in the
shape of the club’s new ground south of the Danube, back in Petržalka; though
as someone who spent 2 years resident in Ružinov, the proximity of the
temporary former home at Rapid’s old ground on Mierova, would have been
particularly attractive for ease of access for those Sunday 10.30 kick-offs I
grew to love.
It was not the quality of play that attracted me to
support Petržalka; rather typically, that 1-0 triumph over Slovan was followed
by a thoroughly terrible 4-0 humiliation by Košice the week after. However,
that particular game was my first visit to Stary Most and, despite the worst
efforts of players of the questionable standards of Martin Kuna or Tomas
Medved, it was the beauty and atmosphere of the stadium that immediately held
me in thrall; though the black and white strips didn’t dampen my ardour very
much it has to be said.
The fences at Slovan and running track (as well as
utter absence of either crowd or atmosphere) at Inter’s Pasienka home did not
appeal, despite their relative proximity to where I lived. Instead, I opted to
take bus 50 to Stary Most, where the green seats that came to cover 3 sides of
the ground were then only on one side, with small covered sections behind each
goal and a bizarre building that contained changing facilities, offices and
what else I do not know, that always resembled a Mississippi riverboat steamer
to me. In front of this white, concrete structure which boasted an unfeasible
number of balconies to watch the game from, towards the goal furthest from the
river, half a dozen assorted English teachers from Akademia Vzdelavania and the British Council made it our home.
We came to call this section Swearers’ Corner as the most dominant voice among the crowd was the
incredible, incessant obscenity of Petržalka’s most loyal fan, Laco and his
equally profane daughter, who both kept up a continuous stream of invective
throughout the entire game, which could be directed at officials, opposition
players or, on one memorable occasion after selecting the utterly immobile
Martin Kuna in central midfield, manager Vladimir Weiss. However amidst the
endless utterances of debil, hajzel,
kokot and many other more extreme insults that would undoubtedly result in
arrest for anyone uttering them on a street corner, Laco was a source of deep
and profound football knowledge and insight. He also, unknown to him, taught me
99% of the Slovak I ever learned.
Between October 1999 and June 2001, I did not miss a
single Petržalka home game, though my last game was a wonderful 1-0 win away to
Inter, where I was able to reliably inform the soon to depart Szilard Nemeth
that Middlesbrough je hovno. My
return to England coincided with an upturn in Petržalka’s
fortunes; the Inter Toto Cup was reached the season I left and in 2004 the
Slovak Cup was won, causing me to fly back to see the club’s first UEFA Cup tie
against FC Dudelange of Luxembourg, as well as the small matter of a 3-0 home
win over Slovan a few days later, which was of more than equal importance I
must admit.
During the two seasons our group, which consisted of
disparate English teaching expatriates aged from early 20s to late 30s and who
were followers of Chelsea, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Spurs to name but a
few, watched Petržalka from Swearers’
Corner or indeed from any other part of the ground, we did not once
encounter any hostility, aggression or indeed curiosity from Petržalka fans.
Once a fortnight we turned up, paid our 15Skk entry, bought klobasa and either
Pivo or Kofola depending on the severity of our hangovers and stood in our
usual place. I suppose it helped that we mastered the two songs (both of which
consisted of the same 3 words Petržalka
Do Toho chanted at a slightly different tempo), but other than that we made
no real attempt to either hide our nationality or our native language. It was
not necessary to do so, as we felt under no threat at any time.
The day we played Puchov, Laco really came in to his
own; as a former employee of Matador in Petržalka, he was deeply scornful of
his ex-bosses sponsoring our opposition and was even more relentless than usual
in his abuse. Never have I heard the adjective gumové used so often, nor spat out with such derision as Laco did
that afternoon. If Petržalka hadn’t claimed a 94th minute equaliser,
I genuinely fear Laco would have exploded. Never mind the fact we could have been watching Liverpool versus
Arsenal in the FA Cup Final in The Dubliner that afternoon, Stary
Most was the only place for true football action on a sunny May Saturday in
2001.
The fascinating thing for me that day was, despite
Puchov fielding Central African Republic international Alias Lembakoali, the Petržalka
support did not resort to any of the kind of racist comments I had heard used
on a daily basis by my almost exclusively middle class, educated students and
on my occasional visits to see Slovan. Undoubtedly Petržalka supporters regularly
exhibited deep-seated regional prejudices towards eastern and indeed northern
Slovakia (the latter could be concluded by the response Puchov had that day!!);
though not once during my regular attendance at Stary Most did I hear racist
abuse directed towards either opposition players or we non-Slovak supporters.
By racist
in this context, I mean both the kind of casually prejudicial attitudes towards
other races and ethnic groups that frequently peppered the conversation of bank
managers, senior Government officials, wealthy industrialists and, most
depressingly, university students who made up my classes at Akadémia Vzdelávania, as well as the
direct, unequivocally offensive, hate-filled outbursts and chants that Slovan
and, one horrible March morning, Nitra brought to Stary Most. As a serious
aside, I wonder whether the fact that Inter Bratislava home games were without
the level of racist abuse that could be discerned at the stadium across the
other side of Bajkalska was because there were not enough spectators present to
start a chant in the first place, or whether it was because the great Inter
side of the turn of the millennium included a significant number of players who
were ethnically Hungarian Slovaks. I ask that as a question I am unable to
answer effectively.
What I did suggest, much to the horror of many of my
middle class students who simply could not believe that we English would choose
to watch Slovak football as none of them, other than a certain Stano Griga who
I had the profound pleasure of teaching in 2000 and 2001, went anywhere near a
football ground, was that the working class fans of Petržalka were providing me
with an authentic insight in to the urban experience of ordinary Slovaks in a
post Socialist, post Velvet Divorce and post Mečiar society. It is my profound
belief that the famous quotation attributed to Albert Camus that Everything I know about morality and the
obligations of men, I owe it to football is as true now as when he first
said it. My experiences following Petržalka may not have been uniformly
rewarding on the pitch, but I feel I learned more about ordinary Slovak people,
at a time of great social uncertainty, in football grounds than I could have
done drinking beer in ex-pat pubs in central Bratislava.
There was, sadly, one bad experience following Petržalka.
In April 2000, our band of followers swollen by guests from home, numbered 11
as we took the train to Trnava, where we would make up 55% of Petržalka’s
travelling support. We lost the game 4-2, but had a great time drinking beer
and singing our support. Sadly, it did not go down well with the home fans, who
ambushed us as we returned to the station and attacked us. It wasn’t a serious
assault; one black eye, one cut ear and one sore back, distributed among 3
unlucky victims. Why did this happen? I’m afraid I am unable to claim that
Trnava’s finest hooligans believed that the cream of England’s troublemakers
had turned up looking for bother. Certainly we were a timid lot, more likely to
correct grammar errors than throw punches. Simply put, an amount of xenophobia
and a desire to achieve alpha male status were the driving factors in this
attack. Was it racist? I’m not sure. Trnava fans seemed accepting of their
long-serving Cameroonian player Souleymane Fall and he played with distinction
that day.
I am opposed to racism, xenophobia and all prejudicial
behaviour, in life as well as in football grounds, but I am also profoundly
aware of the causes of prejudice among ordinary people; unemployment, poor
housing, disengagement and alienation from society come together in the poverty
of aspiration that is the root cause of disenfranchised fans, who were not born
this way, singing abusive songs in football grounds across Europe. Such
behaviour must always be condemned, but those displaying this behaviour can be
helped to see the error of their ways; as football fans we are part of a
vibrant cultural movement that is diametrically opposed to the divide and rule
politics of the bosses and ruling elite. I am now, and have been for my entire
politically conscious life, a Marxist. For me, the solution is clear; the
complete and utter eradication of the Capitalist system is the only effective
solution to prejudice and hatred in whatever manifestation it appears. If my
conclusion is seen as anachronistic or abhorrent, I make no apology for that,
though I beg indulgence and forgiveness for my terrible use of the Slovak
language.
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