Mud, Mobutu and a Wembley Final
From Sheffield Sunday League mud to Mobutu's stolen bonuses, and the grass roots who'll cheer loudest when the World Cup lands
Writing is a great way to reflect, and football has a habit of pulling you back through the years. Sunday morning was once a time for tightening the screws on my football boots in preparation for a fixture in Sheffield’s GT league. The pitches more often than not resembled something out of an apocalyptic movie set. Some of the players wouldn’t have looked out of place in an over 25s nightclub, yet there we were, the Hoyland Common Falcons trudging through the thick mud in hope of getting picked up by a scout.
Grass roots football is very much alive, and as we approach the World Cup, with all its bling and corporate sheen, it’s a reminder that local communities do the heavy lifting. Coaches, match officials, league administrators, social media volunteers and parents give up huge chunks of their free time so that kids get to do the thing they love.
The non league seems to have exploded, or has it always been heavily watched? One of my first articles for Headers and Volleys looked at the National League playoff picture, a two horse race between York City and Rochdale. The battle to return to the English Football League went down to the wire. York’s dramatic late equaliser meant they’d be swapping league memberships with neighbours Harrogate Town.
Rochdale face Boreham Wood today at Wembley in the Enterprise National League playoff final. Good luck to both sides.
Speaking of trophies, let’s swing back to the international stage and the most lucrative prize football has to offer.
Last night I was talking to my brother about World Cup brilliance, and the bizarre side of it. From Maradona’s outrageous brilliance against England in Mexico 86 to the strange tale of Mwepu Ilunga. It’s Ilunga’s story that always made me laugh, until recently. Ilunga, of course, is the Zaire defender who broke from his team’s defensive wall and booted away a Brazilian free kick before the ball was even in play.
Over the years I’ve heard British pundits use that incident to take a swipe at Zaire. Looking back, the comments about Zaire not understanding the rules are naive at best. Lines like “a bizarre moment of African ignorance,” John Motson’s no less, are way off the mark.
Why am I bringing this up? Because when you step away from the antics on the pitch, you discover a far darker story behind Zaire’s tournament. They were no mugs going into West Germany 1974. The reigning African Cup of Nations holders, they were the strongest side on the continent and the first Sub-Saharan African nation ever to reach a World Cup. Scotland barely beat them 2-0 in the opener at the Westfalenstadion, despite Willie Ormond’s pre match boast that if his side couldn’t beat Zaire they should pack their bags and go home.
Then it all unravelled. President Mobutu had set up a fund for the players to draw on for wages and bonuses. The entourage of officials he had stuffed into the camp quietly drained the kitty before the players had seen a penny. Mutiny followed. FIFA reportedly stepped in with 3,000 Deutsche Marks per man just to get them onto the pitch against Yugoslavia. Eleven players walked out reluctantly and the result was the carnage you’ve seen on the highlights reel. 9-0. Six down at the break. The keeper hooked at the 21 minute mark for a 5’4” replacement who picked it out of his net within sixty seconds.
That should be the worst of it. It isn’t. Mobutu, humiliated, sent his presidential guards to the team hotel before the Brazil game.
Lose by more than 4-0, the players were told, and they wouldn’t be coming home.
Two nil down, with Brazil lining up a free kick 25 yards out, Ilunga panicked, ran out and hoofed the ball upfield. Time wasting. Confusion. Anything to slow the inevitable. Brazil got a third anyway, but the players got home. Mobutu then pulled the funding, and Zairean football was strangled in its cot.
That is the moment Motson laughed at. Worth remembering next time the clip surfaces on a nostalgia reel.
The World Cup is seldom without its theatricals. In my piece The World Cup Never Arrives Quietly, I wrote about fake news, political unrest and the Ghost Match of 1973. The 21st Century has hardly cleaned up the act. Tomorrow brings the broadcast of England’s 2006 story and the shenanigans of the Wives and Girlfriends, the WAGs. I’m looking forward to it, partly because I was there in Frankfurt that day doing the Crouchy.
Sven Goran Eriksson had already raised eyebrows by including a complete unknown in his squad. That, of course, was Theo Walcott, a seventeen year old picked by Sven without ever having watched him play. He never got a minute at the tournament.
In the Group B opener at the Waldstadion, a third minute Carlos Gamarra own goal handed England an unconvincing 1-0 win. This was a team featuring Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard, Steven Gerrard, David Beckham, Michael Owen, Ashley Cole and Gary Neville. England, of course, went out to Portugal in a quarter final penalty shootout. Sven’s orchestrated 5-1 demolition of Germany in Munich five years earlier had long since faded.
Players and pundits will argue all day about whether Lampard and Gerrard could ever have played together. Tomorrow’s documentary may have a fresh answer or two. I’m not holding my breath.
Because no matter how well England, Scotland or any other nation fares in North America this summer, it’s those at grass roots level who will be cheering the loudest. The studs still need checking on Sunday morning. The mud still needs dragging through. Without those people, none of this exists.
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