Soccer in Sun and Shadow — Eduardo Galeano
If there is one book about football you can read — Read This!
Galeano’s words are words of a man who has lived football. He says, “… [he] had no choice but to ask of words what the ball [he] so desired denied [him] …” — the sheer joy of being immersed in the beautiful game. His words come from a life spent in terraces watching games, in bars debating nuances, and in his living room pondering over what-ifs.
The book is a series of vignettes of players, goals, matches, fans and their reactions — some well known, others less so. No two are the same. The joy of football Galeano writes, lies in its capacity to be unpredictable in face of all efforts to program it down to the smallest detail. And therein lies the joy of this book too — one does not know on finishing a page if the next vignette is an account of the occult rituals practiced on football pitches across the world, a homage to the great “La Machina” forward line of River Plate, or a broadside on the current crop of bureaucrats ruling the game. Galeano writes everything with equal amount of panache and humor — the vignettes feel like a reel of highlights from the birth of football to the modern age.
Galeano is a football fan but this is no armchair ramble. It is an erudite work — though with an evident left-leaning bias — on the socio-cultural history of football. “The history of football”, he says, “is a sad voyage from beauty to duty”. Players with tango in their feet have now become automatons drilled to achieve the highest efficiency. And yet Galeano recognizes that this is the price of being popular. Football once looked down by the rich and mighty is now more widely known than Coca Cola. The fan in him does not like this, the communist in him despises this, but the analyst in him sees it as inevitable. It is in the throes of this tension that Galeano writes his best prose.
Ultimately, Football in Sun and Shadow is a celebration of the beautiful game by someone whose life and work has been deeply influenced by it. Galeano words are a rarity — they come straight from his heart, but are sharpened by his brain.
