It’s
debatable when the post-Christmas depression really starts to cut in. For me, never
has this inevitable dampening of the spirit been more pronounced than Tuesday
December 29th 2015, when news came of the death of former Newcastle
United goalkeeper Pavel Srníček. While I love football, I despise with a
passion the simplistic narrative that defines the region and population as an
aggregation of sport obsessed hedonists. However Pav was a super fit,
teetotaller and non-smoker aged only 47; a universally admired and fondly
recalled hero among the whole populace, thus his loss was all the more
profound. While he was born and died in his home town of Ostrava, a former
mining stronghold in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic, there is no
denying Pavel Srníček was an adopted Geordie.
The iconic
photograph of Srníček’s time on Tyneside shows him on the pitch at St. James’
Park in May 1993, celebrating promotion after a 7-1 thrashing of Leicester
City. He’s applauding the sell-out crowd, attired in a grey t-shirt, emblazoned
with PAVEL IS A GEORDIE in emphatic
capitals, showing just how far he’d come since he arrived on Tyneside two years
earlier when the Magpies were in the doldrums. Within a year Kevin Keegan
returned as Newcastle manager to assemble a supremely talented team that won an
immediate promotion, followed by 3 beguiling attempts at Premier League glory,
each failure more agonising than the previous. After Keegan there was the dull
fare of Kenny Dalglish and the sporting equivalent of the Emperor’s New Clothes
under Ruud Gullit, with Pav quietly exiting the club after 7 years in summer
98.
This does
not tell the full story of Srníček’s popularity with the SJP crowd. Certainly
at first, he was erratic to say the least; nervous, unable to speak the
language and appearing in an awful team, but Srníček understood. He saw the
importance of the club to the region and the responsibility being a player
entailed. He buckled down, grafted hard, became recognised as a consummate
professional and highly popular figure in the changing room and on the terraces.
In life, as in death, nobody ever had a bad word to say about Pav.
Following 8
years away from Tyneside, Pav was to make one further appearance for Newcastle,
having returned to the club amidst an injury crisis in late 2006. Two days
before Christmas, with the team easing to a 3-1 win over Spurs, Pav was called
from the bench in the 87th minute, receiving a tumultuous reception
from the 52,000 crowd as, aged almost 39, he rolled back the years and saw the
game through. He stayed with the club until the end of the season, and then
retired. The tributes from that time were as warm and fulsome as the
grief-streaked words following his tragic and untimely death. While Pav left
the north east public in no doubt their love was requited, I had learned
first-hand how his fellow Ostravans all seemingly held Newcastle to their
hearts as well.
In 1999, I
moved to Bratislava, capital of Slovakia, on a two year contract to teach
English. Like Pav back in 91, I was a goalkeeper with no knowledge of the
language of my new home; however that didn’t matter in my job, nor when I
signed for the ex-pat team Bratislava Academicals. During my 2 years by the
Danube, I sought not to view my job as a way of filling in the time between
weekends away in Prague, Budapest or Vienna, but as a means to rediscover
stability and a sense of purpose. Travel didn’t broaden my mind, watching and
playing football, or talking about it in the pub did. Returning as a
quasi-tourist for each of the next 5 summers, I saw what I hadn’t in terms of
culture and architecture, travelling by train from a Bratislava base to those
places I ought to have visited first time around, with football the torch that
guided me through Slovak, and Czech, life, which is how I found myself in
Ostrava.
Arriving in
Bratislava on Friday 1st August 2003, I find the next day I’ve the
choice of attending the wedding of a dull former colleague from Wokingham to
his equally tedious Slovak fiancé, or of getting away somewhere different for
the night. A quick check of the Gambrinus League programme shows me Baník Ostrava
are home to Slovan Liberec. Flicking through the phonebook sized railway
timetable, I see there’s a direct train at 10.10, arriving at 1.37; plenty of
time for the 5pm kick off. Direct trains cost more, but there’s far less chance
of missing a connection or getting lost. This isn’t exactly a tourist route, so
the train is near deserted.
When I
arrived in Slovakia, I knew nothing detailed of the country’s history, though I
soon got up to speed. Slovaks regarded Gypsies as subhuman, hated the
Hungarians for 800 years of oppression and occupation, disliked the Czechs as
they were atheist and liberal in outlook, rather than insular and Catholic. The
Czechs seemed, or the ones I met, to be left-leaning, tolerant and pragmatic;
their country consisted of two major provinces, namely Bohemia (capital Prague)
and Moravia (capital Brno), with a tiny fraction of Silesia (main town Ostrava)
in the latter. Unlike Slovakia, where the ultra-nationalist government had
sought to make speaking Hungarian in public an arrestable offence in 1995,
Czechs spoke the same language, but almost all were highly proficient in German
and many had a working knowledge of English. Shame there were no polyglots to
be found near the station, when my train arrived that boiling August afternoon.
In the Czech
Republic, Saturday is as much of a family day as Sunday used to be here. Shops
close at noon and much of the population head for the countryside in the summer
and ski resorts in the winter. My hope of finding a cheap hotel near the
station and grabbing a bite to eat and a shower looked a fond one as I tramped the
baking pavements of deserted streets, on my way to Bazaly Stadion. When I got there, nearly 3 hours before kick-off,
the place was still deserted. There was nothing for it but to go for a pint, in
this case to Baníček Futbal Pub, about 50 metres from the main entrance to the
ground.
Now I wasn’t
brilliant with the lingo, but I knew how to order a beer; jedno pivo, prosím. I don’t recall
if it was Budvar, Gambrinus, Pilsner Urquell or what, but I needed it. I got
another decided I needed to eat; ďalšie
pivo a jedalny listok, prosím. I was fooling nobody. There were about a
dozen other customers; including a clutch of youngish lads in shorts and
t-shirts, not replica shirts, playing pool. Deutsch?
Asked the barman. Nie, ja som z Anglicka;
nový Hrad I replied, hoping the minor differences between my pidgin Slovak
and his native tongue wouldn’t prove mutually unintelligible. Geordie? he ventured. I confirmed his
suspicions, at which point he smiled broadly and indicated a framed NUFC keeper
jersey on the wall behind me. I’ve no idea if it was one of Pav’s, but it was
the 1995/1996 design in sunburst yellow, with a Tyne Bridge motif. Turning
another 90 degrees, I saw that one wall was dedicated to a mural of the famous
photo of Pav on the pitch at St James. If Pav instinctively felt at home in
Newcastle, then I was experiencing something similar in Ostrava.
The pool
players were summoned. One lad showed me his matching tattoos of the NUFC badge
and a Magpie atop each shoulder. Another was called “Beardsley,” when I asked why;
they told me because he is ugly. If
Pavel was an adopted Geordie, they were his relatives from the old country. The
pub filled up, we drank more beer and at kick off, we entered the stadium. The
crowd was sparse, the game was a turgid 1-1 draw, but those young fellas,
predominantly students in their early 20s, drank and sang with me all game. Baník’s
late equaliser was celebrated with a rousing chorus of We’re Geordies! We’re mental! We’re off our fucking heads! as a precursor to more half litres of beer
back in Futbal Pub. Soon I realised I
needed to find a place to stay. Hotel Max was selected because it had no Prosties, which sounded like a decent
recommendation to me. A couple of nightcaps in the bar, and I parted from my
Czech mates.
I woke late
the next day, having missed breakfast. I took a long shower and then a
circuitous route to hlavne namestie
for the train. I killed an hour in the station buffet with strong coffee and a
plate of fried cheese and chips, before leaving, ignored, on a deserted train
back east of the Morava.
Since that
day, my sense of identification for Ostrava and the Czech Republic remains
undimmed, unlike my contempt for the parlous state of Newcastle United. Sat
contemplating the cruel injustice and bleak finality of Srníček’s early death,
at his memorial service in St. Andrew’s Church (Pav was raised in a country
that predominantly chose atheism as its national faith long before Stalin’s
tanks arrived) in mid-January, I wondered as to the course of the lives of
those lads I’d drank with that stifling August afternoon in Ostrava. One day I
hope to return to that pub, that stadium and perhaps the same terrible station
buffet. And I’ll come, not in mourning, but to celebrate the life of the man
who linked the two cities forever.
Odpočívej v pokoji, Pavel můj
přítel…
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