A Summer Night, 1982
Where I return, every four years
The year is 1982, I am 11 years old. I’m living in downtown Tampere, Finland, with my mother and older sister. I don’t quite recall how exactly I’ve learned to get enthusiastic about football. We live in a block of flats, but there is this backyard with a small grass field, where, when I was probably something like 4 or 5, my mother used to take me to kick the ball.
It was fun already then. I remember the small white rubber ball with painted black patches whirring along the grass and running after it. Somewhere, some hundred miles to the east, a boy 5 days older than me, called Jari L., is probably doing the same.
I have two good friends who live two floors above us, and we play football together, as we do hockey in the winters. There is a patchy field nearby, no goals, but it’s enough for us. We go there after school, during the weekends, plus we started playing in a team of the local football club.
There is the English premier league on the telly every Saturday, and I’ve started to get into that. I’ve also come to realise that there is international football, where countries play against each other. I kinda remember couple of years back this big newspaper story in the sports page, a photo of a German guy celebrating them winning something. Now I know it was the European Championship.
But Finland sucks in football, so I haven’t really paid attention that much. Yet, now something is different. The other day I noticed a new magazine at the nearby kiosk’s selection. We go there to buy candy and comics, but this time I set my eyes on the magazine.
It’s about the World Cup in Spain. An entire magazine devoted to that. It has a picture of players with orange and white and blue striped jerseys. I learn the photo is from the final of the previous World Cup in Argentina, four years earlier.
I had to save a bit in order to afford the magazine, but finally I have it. It tells everything about the competition and it’s history, it lists all the teams and players. I can’t get enough of it.
Suddenly the World Cup is an obsession for me. And when it starts, it doesn’t exactly help that I fall in love with the Brazilian team. Their comeback against the USSR is not some average comeback, but a comeback with two fabulous strikes by Socrates and Eder.
Eder is so cool. I want to be like him. I am so into World Cup. I love football. It consumes me.
There is a problem though. Every summer, once my mother has her vacation, we go to our summer cottage for a couple of weeks, where there is no electricity. I like it there, but now it looms like a dark cloud over my World Cup. I’m going to miss the key matches, and I don’t know what to do.
To my relief, for some reason, my mother goes into the trouble of fixing this, like the best mothers do. She gets a cheap portable b&w telly, and with the help of a friend, a car battery which can be used to operate the TV. And we don’t even have a car!
As we head to the cottage the group rounds are over, and the elimination rounds are about to begin. The battery weighs a ton, and smells weird, as we lift it and the telly to the shelf at the foot end of my small bed, located in a narrow alcove in our tiny, 15 square meter cottage. But I like the alcove’s comfort, it’s my own small cave with piles of comic books, and now, the World Cup.
The next two weeks of my world cup obsession become characterised by the white glow emanating from my alcove, with sound turned low, as the others already sleep. I sit in my bed, eyes gazed upwards at the TV. There is one unforgettable match, to which the cottage setting will lend a special place in my future memories.
Yes, it is France against Germany in the quarterfinals, and it goes to extra time. My mother becomes curious as the match goes on and joins me in watching the rest of it. Penalties will follow after a breathless back and forth during extra time. Together we witness Uli Stielike collapsing in tears after missing a penalty.
I have never seen or experienced anything like this. My heart is bumping like a rabbit’s. The penalties go on to the inevitable conclusion. The glance of disbelief from Maxime Bossis in the direction of his team-mates after he misses. I like Karl-Heinz Rummenigge so I hope Germany wins, as they eventually do. (I come to appreciate Platini & co only two years later.)
We close the television in the nightless night of Finnish summer, and I find it hard to sleep as my heart still races. I’ve see grown men cry, and it’s ok. I wouldn’t have expected anything else. I kinda know there and then that this was special.
The final matches I again see back home in the city, in glorious colour. Yet Italy’s victory fades with the memory of the drama in black and white. It’s the memory of the night of what World Cup, and football, means to me.
