As soon as we heard the news, the players and staff gathered outside the front of the hotel and watched as, handcuffed, Soltani Boumediene was driven away to the airport. No one said anything very much but the mood was subdued and several of the players told me they were in favour of us all following Soltani back to London on the next available plane. In view of what happened next, it might have been better if we had.
The press had got hold of the story by now and by some fluke this included BBC World, which hadn’t had a scoop in two decades. Somehow they managed to persuade Bekim Develi to be interviewed about what had happened and Bekim proceeded to give the lucky reporter an even bigger story than the one he thought he was reporting.
Bekim was the only Russian in our team and took what had happened to Soltani very personally:
‘As a Russian citizen,’ he said, ‘I feel deeply ashamed by what’s happened here at the Nyenskans Stadium this afternoon. Soltani Boumediene is a friend of mine and has nothing to do with the Muslim Brotherhood. He does not support terrorism. He is one of the most democratically minded players I’ve ever met. How else could he have played for an Israeli football team for as long as he did? The Israelis never found cause to deport the man when he was with Haifa FC. But the Russian authorities think they know better than the Israelis. Of course this is merely typical of modern life in Russia: no one has rights and people can be arrested without trial as a result of a single phone call. And why does this happen? Because of one man who is above the law, who does what he likes, and who is accountable to no one. Everyone knows who this man is. He is Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. He is of course just a man but I for one am fed up of Vladimir Putin behaving like he is the tsar or perhaps God himself.’
Bekim also announced that he was joining the Other Russia, an umbrella coalition of Putin’s political opponents. He even suggested that Dynamo St Petersburg was affiliated with the Russian FSB — the secret police — just as Dynamo Moscow had once been a front for the old KGB.
‘There are secret people in St Petersburg,’ he told the BBC, ‘members of the FSB who are in bed with certain businessmen who need to make their dirty money as clean as possible. A football club is a very useful way of laundering dirty money, which may of course be why these crooks started Dynamo St Petersburg in the first place. To wash their ill-gotten gains. Money that has been embezzled and stolen from the Russian people.’
All of which left Vik having to make several more calls in order to try to prevent Bekim Develi being arrested, too.
4
In Moscow — the next leg of our tour — things went from bad to worse. And this time neither racists nor Russia’s autocratic president had anything to do with it.
By now it was strongly suspected by almost everyone who knew anything about football that Christoph Bündchen, our young German striker, was probably gay. And in no way could Russia be described as tolerant of homosexuality, as the lead-up to the Sochi Olympics confirmed; it was not uncommon for Russian men to be beaten up on the streets of Moscow merely because they were suspected of being fond of flowers. All of which meant that as soon as Christoph touched the ball in the Arena Khimki, where Dynamo Moscow currently play their home games as they await the construction of the new VTB Arena, the crowd would wolf-whistle, make kissing noises and not a few even bared their pale, spotty backsides.
It was ugly and intimidating and while Christoph did his best to ignore it, scoring a peach of a goal that left Dynamo’s otherwise brilliant keeper, Anton Shunin, looking about as agile as a Douglas fir that someone had planted in the goalmouth, I could see from the way he didn’t even celebrate his goal that the crowd was getting to him. At the team captain Gary Ferguson’s suggestion I took Christoph off at half time and told Bekim Develi to go and shut the crowd up with another goal; he did, twice, in the space of ten minutes.
Normally, when Bekim scored a goal at Silvertown Dock, he adopted a sort of spear-chucker stance that put me in mind of Achilles or the Spartan King Leonidas in the film 300; sometimes he even pretended to hurl an invisible javelin at the away fans; but lately he had started biting his thumb, which left me puzzled.
‘Is that some sort of Russian insult?’ I asked our assistant manager, Simon Page.
‘What?’
‘Bekim biting his thumb like that. That’s the second time he’s done it today.’
Simon, who was from Yorkshire, and as blunt as a muddy tractor tyre, shook his head.
‘I haven’t a bloody clue,’ he confessed. ‘But there are so many fucking foreigners in our side that you’d have to be Desmond fucking Morris to know what the hell’s going on out there sometimes, what with all these quenelles and fucking R4bias and cuckold horns. And giving people the bird, is it? In my day you flicked some bastard a V-sign when he tackled you off the ball and most referees were clever enough to look the other way. But nothing’s missed these days; fucking telly sees everything. BBC’s the worst for that. They love to stir the PC shit-bowl when they get a chance.’
‘Thank you, Professor Laurie Taylor,’ I said. ‘I certainly wouldn’t have missed that explanation.’
‘Bekim doesn’t bite his thumb when he scores,’ said Ayrton Taylor, who was still recovering from his broken metatarsal and the disappointment of England’s World Cup. ‘He sucks it. Like Jack Wilshire.’
I hadn’t seen Jack Wilshire score that many goals — certainly not for England — so I was still puzzled.
‘What the fuck for?’ asked Simon.
‘Because of his new baby boy. It’s his way of dedicating the goal to his son.’
‘Fucking hell,’ muttered Simon. ‘You’d think a tattoo would be enough. I think I preferred the spear chucker he used to do. That looked a bit more becoming for a man. Sucking your thumb like that just makes you look like a twat.’
‘I think I preferred the spear chucker, as well,’ I said.
‘He’s stopped doing that because Prometheus said he didn’t like it,’ explained Ayrton. ‘He said he thought it was insulting to Africans.’
‘He said what?’ Simon was appalled.
‘Prometheus asked him to stop doing the spear chucker. He was very polite about it, to be fair.’
‘Fuck him,’ said Simon. ‘Who’s he? Just some Johnny-come-lately who’s yet to prove he can hack it in English football. Bekim’s the real deal.’
But the serious trouble began not on the pitch but in the dressing room after the match; and it wasn’t the Dynamo supporters who caused it but one of our own players.
‘Those Russkies blowing kisses, and showing us their bare arses,’ said Prometheus. ‘Do they think we’re queer or something?’
‘Forget it, son,’ said Gary. ‘They were just trying to needle you. To piss you off.’
‘Makes a pleasant change from a banana, I’d have thought,’ said Jimmy Ribbans.
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Prometheus. ‘People want to call me a black bastard then that’s okay. As anyone can see, I am black. And as it happens I’m a bastard, too. At least according to my mother. What’s more I like bananas. But what I don’t like, man, are batty boys. In my country you call someone a batty boy, that’s enough to get you killed. Is it because we’re an English side that they think we’re queer?’