A green flag with a white shamrock declared that Apilion was the training ground of Panathinaikos FC. Surrounded with olive and almond trees, fig-bearing cacti, wild orchids and flocks of ragged sheep and goats, the air was clear and clean after the congested atmosphere of Piraeus and downtown Athens. From time to time one of the local farmers fired a gun at some birds, scattering them to the wind like a handful of seeds and startling our more metropolitan-minded players. In spite of that and the presence of several journalists camped alongside the carefully screened perimeter fence, Apilion felt like an oasis of calm. Nothing was too much trouble for the people from Panathinaikos; as the other half of the city’s Old Firm all they cared about was that they might assist us in sticking it to their oldest rival, Olympiacos. Football is like that. Your enemy is my friend. It’s not enough that your own team succeeds; any victory is always enhanced by a rival’s failure, no matter who they’re playing. Panathinaikos would have supported a team of Waffen-SS if they beat the red and white of Olympiacos.
‘Fucking hell,’ exclaimed Simon Page, staring up at the flag as we got off the bus. ‘Are we in bloody Ireland, or what?’ He clapped his hands and shouted at the players. ‘Hurry up and get on that training ground, and watch where you’re putting your feet in case you tread on a four-leaf clover. I’ve a feeling we’re going to need all the luck we can get here.’
I could hardly argue with him since our new team doctor, O’Hara, was returning to London after his wife had been taken ill. Antonis Venizelos, our liaison from Panathinaikos, was still trying to find us a replacement doctor in case of emergency.
‘The doctors’ strike doesn’t make this easy,’ he explained a little later on. ‘Even doctors who don’t work in the public sector are reluctant to work today. Operations have been cancelled. Patients sent home. But don’t worry, Mr Manson. The Karaiskakis Stadium is right next to the Metropolitan private hospital. Even though it is in Piraeus this is a very good hospital.’
He lit a menthol cigarette with the hairiest hands I’d ever seen and stared up at Mount Hymettus.
‘I have some other news that might have an important bearing on the game.’
‘Oh? What’s that?’
‘I just heard on the telephone,’ he said. ‘The Olympiacos team were paid their wages today, and in full. This will put them in a very good mood. So tonight I think they will try very hard.’
‘When do they normally get paid?’
‘I mean that it might be two or three months since those American bastards last got their wages.’
‘Bloody hell,’ I said.
Antonis grinned and popped some seeds in his mouth that he chewed like gum and which sweetened his breath. He was a handsome man with an Alan Hansen-sized scar on his forehead that travelled across his left eyebrow like tiny tramlines, lending him a vaguely Cyclopean aspect.
‘Exactly. It’s hell for everyone right now. At least it is in Greece, my friend. Nothing that happens in this country is like anywhere else. Remember that. Your boys get paid at the end of the month, just like other people in England, yes? But in Greece, the end of the month and payday might be several more weeks in coming — perhaps longer — if you know what I mean. Our university teachers haven’t been paid in months.’
‘I can’t see our lot going without their wages for very long,’ I said as Simon and some of the City players returned to the team coach. ‘They’re coin-operated; like everyone else in the English game right now.’
‘You got that right,’ Simon grumbled.
‘Sometimes,’ said Antonis, ‘the people in this country work for months without pay only to find out at the end of it that their employer has gone out of business and doesn’t have the money to pay them. In Greece getting paid what you’re supposed to be paid is like winning the lottery.’
‘But why do you call Olympiacos American bastards?’ I asked.
Antonis sneered. ‘Because American navy warships used to dock in the port of Piraeus. You see, when their sailors came ashore they used to sleep with the whores of Piraeus. Which is why we call them the sons of whores or American bastards, although quite frankly all of the women of Piraeus are whores. It’s not just us. Everybody in Greece hates Olympiacos. They’re a bunch of cheats and liars.’ He shrugged. ‘Believe me, my friends, they say much worse things about us.’
‘That’s a little hard to believe,’ said Simon. ‘But what do they say?’
Antonis shook his head as if what anyone from Olympiacos thought could be of no real account. ‘They think that because we’re Athenians we think we’re better than them. That we’re snobs. Which of course we are when it comes to Olympiacos. They call us lagoi — rabbits, because they think we run away from a fight. Which is just wishful thinking on their part. That is no surprise. They’re just a bunch of gavroi.’ He smiled. ‘This a kind of very small fish you find in the harbour that eats the shit from all the ships docked there.’
Simon and I exchanged a look of surprise at the level of enmity from a man who otherwise seemed perfectly civilised and urbane. I knew what the big, xenophobic Yorkshireman was thinking just by looking at his face. Since we’d arrived in Athens, he’d said it often enough: ‘Bloody Greeks. They’re their own worst enemies. I might feel sorry for the bastards if they weren’t so fucking bolshie.’
‘Good footballers, though,’ was what Simon actually said now. ‘How many times have they won the Greek League? Thirty-six times, is it? And the Greek Cup twenty-three times? And they’d have won the league this year again, if they hadn’t been docked all those points by the Hellenic Football Federation. Which is how we come to be playing them now, in the play-offs.’
Antonis pulled a face and looked away. ‘You can teach anyone to play football,’ he said simply. ‘Even a malakas from Piraeus. That is why they have to cheat. You might be the favourites for this match but don’t underestimate the capacity of the gavroi for low tricks. Tonight, it won’t just be eleven men you are playing. It will be sixteen, if you include the five match officials. And the crowd, of course; don’t forget the so-called Legend. They’re like another player, and a vicious one. There will be nothing friendly about the place you’re going tonight. And you can forget all your English ideas of the beautiful game. There’s no beautiful game in Greece. There’s no beautiful anything. There’s just — anger.’ He nodded. ‘In Greece it’s the one thing of which we have an unlimited supply.’
16
Whenever you see a football manager pacing up and down his technical area shouting encouragement and making signs at his team like a demented on-course bookmaker it makes for compelling television — the cameras love to see ‘the pressure written on the manager’s face’. In truth, the players shouldn’t even be looking at the manager but at the ball and, above the noise of the crowd, they seldom hear anything but the ref’s whistle, unless you’re Sam Allardyce. Most of the time you patrol your lonely ten yards of space only for the sake of appearances; your suffering shows that you care. Plus, it’s harder to sack a manager who is soaked to the skin, with mud on the knees of his Armani suit, not to mention some gob on his back.
Occupying a technical area in Piraeus is even more intimidating with thirty thousand baying Greeks at your back, and frankly it could be something more lethal than a bit of gob that’s coming your way. Just ask the Greek assistant referee who got hit with a flying chair during the Greek Cup in 2011. Venturing from the dugout at the Karaiskakis on a swelteringly hot night in August, it felt like I was leaving the safety of the walls of Troy to duel with Achilles; not recommended. But at Olympiacos it isn’t just crazy fans you have to watch out for: in 2010, despite winning the game 2–1 following some questionable refereeing decisions, the Olympiacos owner, Evangelos Marinakis, attacked Panathinaikos players Djibril Cissé and Georgios Karagounis at the end of the game.