Introducing "Like a Little Eel"

"Maradona, turns like a little eel, he comes away from trouble, little squat man... comes inside Butcher and leaves him for dead, outside Fenwick and leaves him for dead, and puts the ball away..." 

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a football writer. It started off innocently enough, as I’m sure it did for a lot of kids of my generation, with issues of Shoot and Match and the odd hardback annual in the Christmas stocking. Then came doing the fantasy football with my Grandad at his yellow formica table, unfolding the back of a special edition of the Irish Independent where they’d printed the list of players and their value, and reading a copy of Brian Glanville’s Story of the World Cup at night under my blanket when we stayed at my uncle’s. 

There were football matches, too, and visits to stadiums. A wet Saturday in Manchester, getting lost with the same uncle in Barcelona trying to find our way to the Camp Nou. A favourite book series of mine as a kind was a trilogy of stories centred around a group of young Irish football playing friends - two boys and a girl - as they moved from schoolboy leagues to digs in England to playing in the black-and-white of Juventus. 

Then came the harder stuff. Simon Inglis made me want to live next door to a football stadium when I was a grown up. Swapping a copy of Theme Hospital for a CD-ROM of Championship Manager 2000/01. David Winner’s Brilliant Orange came to me at the perfect moment, when the neon orange Dutch jersey I’d picked up at a motorway Decathlon on a French summer holiday was scuffed but still fit. At one point, I tried to keep it a secret from my mother that I’d used her credit card to purchase two subscriptions of World Soccer magazine. 13-year-old me could have answered any questions you might have had about who was going to be the next breakout player from the Ecuadorian Serie A, or how Hearts of Oak were performing in the Ghanaian league.

But then football and I fell out of love. It was rugby’s fault, at first, and I was seduced by the novelty of a successful Irish team and Munster’s romantic European triumphs. And then I discovered a social life and girls, and college followed, and I stopped watching football every Tuesday and Wednesday and Saturday night. I still watched the odd game, and dragged my dad to Barcelona to see them take on some lower-league whipping boys, but the fervour just wasn’t there. 

It was a book that seduced me anew. Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid came out in 2008, and I remember devouring it in our top floor studio in Brussels. It was like I was back again under the covers again with Brian Glanville, reading about Hugo Meisl, the Magnificent Magyrs, the WM, and system football. Then came James Richardson-era Guardian Football Weekly. Second Captains. David Goldblatt - David Goldblatt! - and Simon Kuper. Jimmy Burns, Tim Vickery, and Phil Ball. The Blizzard. Eduardo Galeano, Arthur Hopcraft, and The Football Man. Messrs Peace, Duncan, and Hession. Roy Keane, Eamon Dunphy, and Roddy Doyle. Watching Zlatan Ibrahimovic annihilate Anderlecht, and sitting in the stands at Heysel grumbling over the lacklustre performance of an Eden Hazard who’d just been substituted and was somewhere below us in the stands enjoying a burger. 

I will never recapture the spirit of the obsessive mania to know everything and read everything about football that gripped me when I was a pre-teen. I’m old, tired, and jaded now, and there’s nothing like having kids to turn the odd Football Manager binge from a guilty pleasure to a potential career- and relationship-wrecker. But last year, for the first time in my life, I bought a season ticket for a local football club. Glory hunter that I am, I couldn’t resist hitching myself to the Royale Union St Gilloise bandwagon for their fairytale return to Belgium’s top division. I’ve since renewed it for another year, and got one for the kids too. At least one of them has caught the football bug, if their going to bed every night reading the 2014 World Cup Panini sticker album is any indication. 

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All of the above is why Like a Little Eel exists, and some indication about what future newsletter entries might look like - match reports, book reviews, musings, and memoir, and other ideas besides. It is also the product of some new-year creative restlessness. I’ve been writing about beer and Brussels for almost six years now, and fairly successfully too. But I arrived at the end of 2022 with some questions hanging over the future of the Brussels Beer City project, unsure of whether and what kind of future it had in 2023. I have also been incubating ideas of crossing over to new writing genres, which for someone who has found their niche and mines it well (beer, history, and culture) can be a daunting prospect.

But like I said at the beginning, I always wanted to be a football writer. And Like a Little Eel is where I’m going to see if I can.

Hope you enjoy the ride.

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The title of the newsletter comes from a famous line of commentary by the BBC’s Byron Butler, talking about Diego Maradona’s iconic slalom through the English defence during the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. I never got to see Maradona in his prime, on TV or anywhere else. By the time my football consciousness had awoken at USA ‘94, I knew him only as a cocaine-fuelled butt of jokes. But Butler’s words are such a perfect distillation of the magic of a beautiful football in full flight. That, and they’ve been seared into my memory by their inclusion in a Second Captains audio bed.