Pep Guardiola’s yellow ribbon ties football up in knots over true enemies

This summer it will be 30 years since an event that helped inspire what is still one of the most deliciously moreish football books in English.

Football Against the Enemy is a collection of excellent, energetically compiled essays by Simon Kuper. It can seem a little dated in parts now, postcards from a world still shrouded in pre-internet mist but in a week of apparently irresolvable moral confusion over Pep Guardiola, yellow ribbons and all that, it also feels like a point of illuminating contrast.

At which point the pages rustle, the screen dissolves and we are back at the 1988 European Championship. It is hard to get a sense of the unsettling emotional power of the Netherlands’ defeat of West Germany, the feelings of delighted surprise as a fine team saw off one of the more sharp-elbowed West Germanys.

Ruud Gullit ran the semi-final in Hamburg, striding about with such regal ease you half expected to look down and notice he had spent the last 90 minutes playing in tails, top hat and wing collar. Marco van Basten scored the winner at the end. People in Amsterdam threw bicycles in the air shouting “we’ve got our bikes back”, a reference to the transport-thieving crimes of the Nazi occupation during the second world war.


Source : theguardian