In a year where travelling to anywhere except your local supermarket was pretty much cancelled, books like One Thousand Miles to Jamor have been a godsend. They allowed people like me to vicariously get to experience what it is like to travel across Portugal to watch exotic sounding clubs as well as the country's footballing giants play it out in the Portuguese Cup. It is an absorbing read that culminates in the final held at the Jamor Sports Complex, a stadium which seems to be an experience in and of itself. The book's author, is himself an absorbing character. Intelligent and erudite, he is also extremely generous as he took the time to answer in detail my questions on his book. What gave rise to One Thousand Miles from Jamor? How did the idea come about? I have been to the Cup Final several times in my years as a fan, and as most Portuguese football fans I love the atmosphere surrounding the game. The Cup Final really is the highlight of the season, for all the reasons I describe in my book. I remember one game in particular, Benfica’s final against Vitória Sport Club (commonly known as Vitória de Guimarães, or just Guimarães). I had been there for most of the day, drinking, eating and celebrating with my friends and taking in the general party atmosphere, and before heading in to the stands I decided to go for a last wonder around the woods that surround the ground. It was kick-off time and still there were thousands of people milling about. These people didn’t have tickets, they were just there for the fun, a great day out. The barbecues were still going, the last of skewered pigs still steaming, women and babies napping as their husbands found a place to sit and watch the game on portable TV’s or listen to the live commentary. I knew about all of this, but that was the first time it really struck me that what happens in the Portuguese Cup Final is unique in Western European football. The stadium is old and completely anachronistic, located in the middle of a forest, making it a logistical nightmare in terms of safety, there are few facilities such as bathrooms, and yet people will arrive in the early hours to spend the entire day out in the open and every single one of them will agree that they wouldn’t want it any other way. It would be unthinkable to have a major football game in these conditions in any other modern Western country. Yet we can all agree that if you put an end to it, you’ll be killing one of the best parts of the game in Portugal. It was at that moment that I first thought that this was a story worth telling, especially to foreign readers. The idea was consolidated the following season when two small clubs sensationally made the semis. Desportivo das Aves and Caldas had a remarkable two legs which eventually saw Aves make the final, where they would incredibly beat Sporting to win their only piece of silverware. It was such a remarkable David and Goliath story that I was truly sorry that I hadn’t been able to follow it more closely. From that point on I decided that the following season I’d watch at least one game a round, all the way to the final, and if it was a book-worthy material, all the better. Turns out it was, which is great. Was the idea of how the book would look clear in your mind from early on or did it change shape as the season went along? The problem with a book like this is, where do you start? With so many small clubs involved, there had to be some way to decide which one to focus on in the first round. One criterion that I liked was the club that hailed from furthest away from the National Stadium, where the final is held. However, that posed a problem, because the club that hails from furthest away is invariably from the Azores, in this case two clubs from the small island of Graciosa who share a ground. With absolutely no budget to speak of, going to the Azores to watch a football game would have been unthinkable, but fortunately one of those clubs was drawn to play Casa Pia, from Lisbon, that happens to be the closest club to where I work, and one of the closest to my house. My initial idea was, after that, to follow the winning side – or their adversary – in a straight line to the final. But I didn’t want that to be set in stone. If it came to a point where that would lead me to an uninteresting match, I would feel free to break with that and try to get the best stories for the book. At one point it did come to that and from then onwards I picked the most interesting fixture in each round. You were quite prescient, writing and publishing a book just before a global pandemic made such trips impossible… My goodness, yes! I have thought about that many times since I got the book out. If I’d put it off for another season, I would have had a frustrating fan-less final that was moved from the historical Jamor to more modern stadium. This season would have been pointless also. Unfortunately, besides the fact that fans are still not allowed into stadiums, several of the Azorean clubs dropped out of the first round matches because having to pay for Covid-19 tests and quarantining when they returned was an unbearable strain for them. Unfortunately, the Football Federation did not seem to make much of an effort to accommodate them. I thought at the time that they could have adapted the format, perhaps had the Azorean clubs play amongst themselves until a later stage, when either the situation had improved or the stronger and richer clubs remained, who would be able to handle the logistics and expenses. The great thing about the Cup is that even though it is usually one of the big clubs that wins it, so many smaller clubs get to participate and dream of making it as far as possible. To have that cut short before the first games were even played took some of the magic out of the tournament. Of course, having no fans in the grounds isn’t helping, but that is a different issue. Whilst the book is about football, its real stars are the fans. How was it to visit so many different places and meet such a variety of fans? Before getting to the second part of your question, I take issue with the first part. The way you frame it, it seems like the fans and football are two different things, but I don’t agree. Professional football wouldn’t be this thing we love so much if it weren’t for the fans and although I don’t have much patience for the whole “Against Modern Football” fad, the truth is that a game in which fans are seen as surplus, unnecessary or, worse, a nuisance to be tolerated, is one that I have no interest in at all. That is why I always wanted to make the book about the fans, because they are the heart and soul of the game and the Cup is the competition that highlights that the most. That being said, visiting the different grounds and meeting the local fans really was amazing. I made plenty of friends along the way. I don’t think of myself as a groundhopper, and although I have been to dozens of stadiums, it has almost always been following my own club, Benfica. Since Benfica are a first-tier team that means that I rarely got to visit the smaller grounds, and that was fun to do as well. Also, it means that when I did go to see Benfica against smaller clubs their fans were invariably the opposition, and though that doesn’t mean there was necessarily hostility, it does mean that we wanted different results and I would not be likely to mingle with them. Travelling for this project gave me the opportunity to be one of the guys and, at least for those two hours, suffer and celebrate with them, as one of them. To listen to their stories, their anecdotes, to feel their rivalries, etc.. It really was a great experience. Is there anything that fans of smaller clubs have in common with those of bigger ones? There was one incident that really stuck with me. I went to watch Tondela play a small club from the Azores and when I spoke to the local fans and told them what I was doing they’d insist that I should speak to Matrecos. It became clear that Matrecos was the local die-hard fan, the crazy or eccentric element. Eventually I did find him, and we sat down for a beer and it turned out that Matrecos was basically just a hardcore Tondela fan, the likes of whom you can find by the hundreds in bigger more successful clubs. He wanted Tondela to win every single game, he demanded it, no matter how unlikely it might seem. He didn’t support any other club. He said that if the club was playing in the first division, they should want to win it. Things like this. And the more I talked to him the more I realised that this guy was pretty much just like me. The difference is that my club is successful and wins trophies and his isn’t, but that was it. The fact that everybody in town knew him just goes to show how rare this sort of attitude is. Of course, there is plenty that smaller club fans and big club fans have in common. Perhaps, though, I wouldn’t divide along those lines. I’d say that there are “proper” fans on both sides. And that a proper Benfica fan, one who is willing to make sacrifices to go to games, who is willing to go the distance, who will stand, and sing even when the team is underperforming, and turn up even when the club is out of the running in every competition, has as much value as a Leixões fan who does the same. And although that has something to do with one’s own personality, there is also a club culture than can foster it. And so, it is not true that all clubs are basically the same. You may not choose the club you support, but if you make it a central part of your life then it is bound to have an effect on your personality. One of the things that was interesting in my journey to write this book was seeing the differences between clubs and sometimes within them. Graciosa and Angrense, for instance, are small clubs and for their fans it is perfectly natural to support a bigger club as well. But the same does not apply to Leixões fans, who are proud of supporting only Leixões, no matter how poorly it is doing. Then you have situations like Tondela and Aves that are traditionally small clubs but are, or in the case of Aves were, punching above their weight. There you could see a culture of proper support starting to emerge, but still only amongst a small group of hardcore fans, the supporter firms. That was interesting because these guys are not only supporting a small club, they are often in conflict with fans of their own club who will be supporting Aves one day, and Benfica, Sporting or Porto the next. But there are no less significant divisions among the fanbase of bigger clubs. Benfica, for instance, has millions of fans. That means you’ll have fans who live and breathe for the club and others who can’t really be bothered, or who only turn up when things are going well. So, as I was saying, I prefer to see the division between fans who really care about their club, and lose time, money, sleep and health because of their club and those who are just there for the fun, but aren’t going to be to bothered if things don’t go well. You're a Benfica fan: did the romanticism of supporting a smaller club ever tempt you? Was there a moment where you thought 'these guys might not be watching the same level of football but they have more fun than I do'? It definitely did occur to me. The problem with supporting a big club is that anything less than a win is considered a disaster, whereas for small clubs avoiding relegation is something that merits celebrations. That is something that I sometimes envy. Smaller clubs do tend to have more of a sense of community. In a club like Benfica it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. On the other hand, when you are a hardcore fan, like I have been for the past 25 years, you will find that sense of community eventually, and I have benefitted from that, and regardless of results, going to football is, for me, a fun day out with close friends. Regarding your question, though, one of the things I was always careful to stress was that even though writing this book made me feel a special affection for clubs like Graciosa, Angrense, Casa Pia and Leixões, I would never go so far as to call myself a fan. Being a fan is a special thing, in my eyes, it implies a special relationship that I don’t have with those clubs, and with other fans. Basically, if I’m not losing sleep over the fate of the club, then I don’t deserve that label. How did you plan your trips? What was the planning process like? It may not seem that complicated, considering Portugal isn’t too big a country and I only had to go to about 10 games. But since I often work on weekends and, more importantly, I have a large family (six kids) it was actually quite difficult. For most games I would try and get in touch with one or two local fans, sometimes through mutual friends, other times just trolling social media until I found one willing to speak to me. That way I at least had a couple of contacts. For some of the clubs I did phone interviews beforehand, but the most important was to just go to the games, speak to fans and take in the atmosphere. I always made it one-day trips, which was tiring in some cases, but I couldn’t afford to be spending more time away from home. I remember that with some games I made it home in the early hours of the morning, but the trip back was always exciting as I had all this new information in my head and was already picturing what the chapter would be like. With a few exceptions, I went to the games alone and then met with people there. I had several friends who loved the idea behind my project, but then couldn’t take days off to go with me to games further away, so that was a shame. However, it did force me to interact more with local fans, which was good. How do Portuguese clubs view the Taça de Portugal? They all love and value the competition, but from different perspectives. For the big clubs, winning the Cup is always a high priority. But the thing about the Cup is that smaller and medium-sized clubs can legitimately dream of winning it as well. Just in the past few years it has been won by Desportivo das Aves, by Vitória de Guimarães, Vitória de Setúbal, Académica and so on, whereas the League is only ever won by the same big three or, in the past couple of decades, two. For the fans of the big three clubs it is also a great competition because it gives us the opportunity to visit smaller clubs and new grounds. Unfortunately, the smaller clubs often switch to bigger grounds to increase ticketing revenue when they play a big club, and that sort of defeats the spirit of the competition, but some do insist on playing in their home stadium and fans appreciate that. For smaller clubs, things are different. They know they won’t win it, or that it is extremely unlikely, but just to progress and get one stage further is reason enough to celebrate. It is a competition where you can always keep dreaming, because there is that chance that the David v. Goliath story of the season will be yours. Also, recently the federation upped the award money for getting through to a new round, which has made it even more interesting for smaller clubs to invest in the Cup, as a good season, making it three or four rounds in, can be very handy in paying the bills. I think that the great advantage of cup games is the fact that there has to be a winner. No 0-0 draws here, and that makes every game exciting. I saw some pretty dreadful football, as you can probably imagine, but even so it was always exciting as you knew that something had to happen at some point. People respond well to that. Is there the same worry that COVID will see a number of small clubs getting wiped out? I’m not sure if clubs being wiped out is so much of a concern. I know that Graciosa, the first club I followed, went through a tough time. Graciosa is an island with less than 5 thousand inhabitants, yet they have 5 competitive clubs. Because some clubs were in the Azorean league, and another two didn’t field teams that year, Graciosa had nobody to play against in the local island league in the 2019-2020 season. Without a league they couldn’t be promoted. But they found a loophole in the regulations and realised that by creating a B team they could play their main side against the B side in a two-team league and that way be promoted. So they did that, which also implied quite a bit of investment, and obviously the A team secured the title and promotion, but then the pandemic came and the season was interrupted for all the lower leagues and because of that promotions and relegations were suspended. For a while it seemed like that might be it for the club. They tried to protest, but to no avail. Fortunately, they managed to hold the ship and this season they are competing in the local Island league again. Overall, I think the problem may not be so much that clubs face financial collapse… I am afraid that many fans will just grow used to not going to games and decide not to go back. In my case, for instance, I really miss the ritual of going to the games, and taking one of my kids with me, but on the other hand it has become quite comfortable to not have to be managing the family schedule around fixtures all the time. It won’t be easy going back to the way things were! Finally, there is another major concern. Against the advice of anybody who knows anything about the issue, the Government has gone ahead and created a Supporter ID scheme that came into effect this season. These schemes have failed miserably in all the countries their tried them in. Of course, with no fans at the games anyhow, it is all moot for now. But we all have the sensation that when we are allowed back in things are going to be very different, and the fan ID scheme may very well be the tipping point for fans who have already gotten used to not going to games and also don’t want to put up with that nonsense. Do you read reviews? What has the reaction been like? Reactions, overall, have been wonderful, which is great. This was not my first book, but it was my first to be published and sold in English, so that opened me up to a completely new and much bigger reality. Just the fact that Pitch Publishers were interested in it was already success enough for me. Interestingly, I secured my English publishers before I closed a contract with a Portuguese publisher. I have mostly been seeing online reviews and getting feedback from readers on social media, and that has been really positive. There was one really bad review on Amazon, that accused me of plagiarizing a series of obscure documentaries on YouTube that I didn’t even know existed, which was a shame, but otherwise I have been delighted with the reviews and the feedback and it has also been a great opportunity to get in touch with football enthusiasts and fans from different parts of the world. What’s next for you? Since the book was published, I was contacted to write a chapter for a new book “From the Jaws of Victory”, which was a lot of fun. That has come out recently and has generated quite a bit of buzz, which is great. As for future plans, although I love football, I have never wanted to get pinned down as somebody who only writes about football. I have a couple of books published in Portuguese that are non-football related. One is the biography of my great-grandfather, who was a pioneer pilot and big game hunter in Mozambique, and the other is a series of interviews with nuns from different religious orders. One of my great interests is the role of religion in international relations and my masters’ dissertation was on the role of forgiveness in conflict resolution. That is something I would like to work on more, and I have a couple of ideas, one of which I think would be a great book. But it would involve travelling and I would need funding, so I am going to have to put that off until after the pandemic and travelling restrictions are off. Meanwhile I have six kids to raise, and that keeps me busy, so never a dull day in this house. You can (and should) follow Filipe on Twitter. You can (and should) buy One Thousand Miles to Jamor here.
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Every day, professional writers and amateur bloggers (as well as amateur writers and professional bloggers) write tens of thousands of words analysing every aspect of every level of the game of football. Sadly, most of this writing deals with utterly predictable and uninteresting transfer chatter (which is often the work of an overactive imagination) where the only aim is to rack up hits. Indeed, the most provocative and stimulating stuff is normally that which deals with topics that aren’t mainstream; articles about or interviews with people who don’t normally attract the spotlight. In that respect, it is unlikely that anyone will accuse Paul Brown of looking for easy hits. His last two books deal with football in the Victorian era and in some instances they appear to deal with a completely different ball game. Yet it is definitely the same game, and it is equally unquestionable that these books make for a surprisingly excellent and entertaining read. For proof, just read the following interview to see how Liverpool’s birth was reported and why the club’s name could have been so different. An Interview with Chris Anderson on his book The Numbers Game – Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong In the beginning, there was Moneyball. Well, not really. What kicked off sport’s interest in statistics was an underground movement in baseball headed by Bill James and which eventually made its way into the mainstream in the form of statisticians being employed by clubs. It was James who coined the term ‘sabermetrics’ (the search for objective knowledge about baseball) and who started publishing his theories in the highly influential Baseball Abstract books. Yet it was Michael Lewis’ book ‘Moneyball’ about the Oakland ‘A’s’ use of statistics to make up for their financial disadvantage that brought it all to the public consciousness. Since then anyone wanting to try and use statistics in any sport has had to live with claims of taking a ‘Moneyball approach’. And no sport has had to hear such accusations of late as much as football. All of which makes it all the more surprising that there is still a huge misconception as to what ‘Moneyball’ actually is. Indeed, many still harbour the belief that it is all about using statistics to determine which player should be signed and which shouldn’t. Or to use numbers to determine which players to use or which tactics to adopt. But it isn’t about that. Or, at least, not only about that. It all centres around the idea of using statistics to gain an edge or to confirm whether the cold facts that are held in the numbers can support widely held perceptions. Take corners. There is an inevitable rise in anticipation every time a team wins a corner, which is understandable given that this leads to a greater chance of scoring. Except it doesn’t. That is what Chris Anderson and David Sally argue in their book ‘The Numbers Game – Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong’. Again, this being a book about sports and which uses numbers, it is somewhat inevitable that ‘Moneyball’ gets a mention, but this is much more than that: whilst Moneyball was trying to explain a movement, The Number’s Game simply want to help you understand football better. An Interview with Daniel Gray on his book Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters One of the questions that I was asked during my Italian ‘O’ Level oral was to locate ‘Lazio’ in Italy. Given that most of my knowledge of Italy was based on what I had read in the various football magazine, it was somewhat obvious that my reply would be “in Rome”. After all, the Rome derby was played between AS Roma and Lazio. Thankfully, I met a somewhat lenient examiner who guided me into providing the right answer (for anyone interested: Lazio is the region in which Rome is located). Time has afforded me the luxury to learn a bit more about the world but, even so, a lot of my geographical knowledge is linked with my knowledge of football. When I hear the name of a city, my thoughts instinctively turn to that place’s football team and what I know about it. I know that I’m not the only one who does that which is why it is somewhat surprising that it has taken so long for someone to come up with a book that mashes together travel and football writing in one book. That someone is Daniel Gray who, in writing his book ‘Hatters, Railwaymen and Knitters’, has taken a journey around England looking at a number at football clubs and the cities that host them. In the process, he manages to piece together a picture of England, its beauty and the inherent importance of its most popular sport. An Interview with Michael Calvin on his book The Nowhere MenEach day thousands upon thousands of words are written about football. A lot of it is fluff; guess work by those who either wrongfully imply they have contacts within the game or else argumentative nothing by people trying to show how clever they are. There is very little which gives you real insight into how the game works; very little from which you walk away feeling that you’re slightly more capable in discerning what is happening. The Nowhere Men is one such rarity. As he journeys into the world of football scouting, talking to an impressive number of people who work in that area, Michael Calvin slowly shows you what goes into scouting a player, bringing down the illusion – for those naïve enough to believe it – that selecting a player to add to a squad is any easy process. In this book – and in this interview (note: both the book and the interview were published in 2013) – he shows how the best scouts go about forming an opinion on players and why some clubs hold back from signing a player even though there is both the financial ability by the club and talent on the part of the player. |