Playing the Moldovans At Tennis Read online

  Fortunately for me he wasn't the champion, or if he was, then he was the champion of a version of tennis in which the ball was not required to clear the net. To be fair to Rogaciov though, he was one of the better Moldovan footballers I had played to date, possibly second best to Oleg Sischin, whom I still reckoned to have been the most talented. This having been said, it was no great accolade. Any innocent passer-by, on viewing Rogaciov's performance, would still have been moved to remark:

  'Goodness, what a dreadful tennis player.' (And not necessarily in such polite language, either.)

  I coasted home 11-3. The crowd cheered, Rogaciov smiled, Trevor punched the air, and I jumped for joy. Upon landing, I experienced an enormous feeling of relief. I had now played and beaten the three players I'd come here for, but it had been a tense affair. Too tense for comfort. Now, with the ordeal over and my noble quest still alive, I could relax and enjoy the rest of my stay.

  I had never been sightseeing with a squad of Under 21 footballers from Moldova before, and I was reasonably confident that I wouldn't do so again. It certainly wouldn't be something I'd be requesting. They were a nice enough bunch of lads, but at this stage of their lives, theirs was not really a quest for knowledge. Consequently at the first stop, the Bushmills Whiskey Distillery, they displayed an interest in the whiskey-distilling process as minuscule as Ivan the Bloody Awkward's general desire to lend me a helping hand. We were in and out of that place before you could say 'Jack Daniels'.

  At Portstewart, Trevor's offer of a beautiful shore-side walk was rejected following an overwhelming vote against, and instead a team photo was organised which, for some strange reason, I was invited to join. As I stood in the back row, quite clearly not a footballer, not Moldovan, and just possibly not looking under 21, I wondered what the players' friends and family would make of it in years to come.

  Who's that guy?' they'd ask, pointing at me.

  'Oh that was an Englishman who played tennis against Sergei Rogaciov.'

  'I see.'

  'Now they must want to see the feckin' Giant's Causeway,' said a frustrated Trevor, who took it personally each time one of the stops on his tour was rejected.

  I knew that I certainly did, never having seen it before. On the previous occasions when I'd been in this part of the world, a visit had been prevented either by a lack of time or having the burden of a refrigerator as a travelling companion. But now, as the coach drew closer to this extraordinary geological wonder – thousands of basalt hexagonal columns extending from the cliffs down to the sea – we were informed that Ivan had announced that he did not want us to stop the coach here because we did not have time to pay it a visit. Trevor couldn't believe it.

  'He's only saying that if we stop here,' he moaned, returning to his seat beside me, 'they won't have time to go shopping in Belfast.'

  'Maybe that's why he is the way he is,' I ventured, 'because he's the sort of guy who favours shopping for a track suit over visiting one of the earth's wonders. I don't think he's a very sensitive man.'

  'Me feckin' neither.'

  As the Moldovan party set off to enjoy the world renowned pleasures of the Castlecourt Shopping Centre, Belfast, Trevor and I said goodbye.

  'Listen Trevor, I really do appreciate all your help,' I said. 'I honestly don't think I could have done it without you.'

  'Maybe. Maybe not. Who cares? The point is you've done it. Now you've got to make sure you get the guy in Israel.'

  'I promise to do my best.'

  'Are you going to the game tonight?'

  'You bet I am.'

  'I'll probably see you there.'

  The European Championship qualifying game between Northern Ireland and Moldova kicked off that night at Windsor Park, Belfast, at 8.00 pm. It was the first time I'd watched an international football match in which I'd played tennis against so many of the players on the pitch. Oddly I knew nothing about them as footballers, but suffice it to say that this was a sport in which they gave a much better account of themselves.

  I watched the first half in the stands, seated next to a little old man who was grateful enough for someone to talk with, but was possibly just a little disappointed by the nature of most of my offerings.

  That was Oleg Fistican,' I'd remark. 'Nice guy – two handed on both sides – ooh and that was Curtianu with that shot – he speaks good English, you know.'

  'Is that so?' he'd reply politely, instead of saying what he was really thinking: 'Look, I'm supporting Northern Ireland and I don't give a toss who the others are.'

  I think Moldova surprised Northern Ireland rather, leading twice in an exciting match which finished in a 2-2 draw. I particularly enjoyed the visitors' second goal.

  That was Ion Testimitanu!' I shouted. What a shot! That's probably good enough to secure his transfer to Bristol City, you know.'

  The little old man turned to me, his face contorted with restraint.

  'Is that so?' he just about managed.

  *

  For the last five minutes of the game I took advantage of the photographer's pass which had been arranged for me by my good friends at UTV, and I watched the game's final action from the touch line. This afforded me the privilege of rushing on to the pitch at the final whistle. Unlike the local press, who immediately bombarded the Northern Irish players for reactions and comments, my goal was entirely different. I headed for the Moldovan players that I knew – the ones I'd met in such a novel manner. Our second meeting was no less peculiar. As the players left the field, exhausted but delighted at the result, they were greeted by a vaguely familiar figure wearing a bright orange bib, offering his own congratulations.

  Well played!' I blurted to each one in turn. Three cheers for Moldova!'

  The reactions varied. Some looked confused, others delighted to see me again, even in these unusual circumstances. I was particularly pleasantly surprised by the response of Radu Rebeja, who in Chisinau had been a little cool towards me, but here in Belfast that had changed.

  'Ah hi Tony!' he said as he recognised me, adding while miming a tennis swing, Tony the tennis!'

  'Congratulations Radu,' I said.

  The player nodded, knowing that I had said something of a positive nature, and moved off to join his retreating colleagues.

  I turned around to watch them; my former tennis foes, soldiering towards the players' tunnel, the back view of their shirts reducing them to mere numbers. Regretfully, to me, they had been little more. The protective nature of their employers had meant that the time we had shared together had been limited to brief spells at opposite ends of a tennis court. How I would have loved to have joined them tonight to celebrate their courageous performance, to have allowed beer to bundle and bully us towards that pleasantly inebriated state where communication transcends words.

  But it wasn't to happen. The powers that be, fearing that their heroic players might have had the opportunity to go out and have a good time, had chartered a plane which was leaving for Chisinau at midnight.

  Never mind. Perhaps I could get pissed with Spynu in Israel.

  16

  Holy Land

  The selfish actions of Saddam Hussein nearly messed things up for me. He had incurred the wrath of the Americans by refusing to let UN investigators see if Iraq had as many evil weapons of destruction stashed away as they did. The US decided that air strikes were necessary, and Britain immediately agreed with them, in accordance with the 'special relationship' which required them to do exactly that. For a few scary days it looked like things would escalate horribly and that Israel would be targeted by Saddam's scud missiles just as it had been in the Gulf War. Fortunately for the interests of world peace, Saddam backed down after having the crap bombed out of him, but not before having claimed it as a 'magnificent victory'. This is an excellent tactic to adopt should you ever have the misfortune of being flattened by someone in a pub brawl – simply pick yourself up, say Well, that showed you!', and then walk proudly off to nurse your black eye in private.

&n
bsp; Despite the rather alarmist withdrawal of UK tourists from Israel which had taken place during the air strikes on the recommendation of the Foreign Office, I elected to go ahead with my trip. My business was altogether too important to let the trifling matter of international warfare stand in my way.

  I made one call to the Israel tourist office in London to check whether I needed visas and innoculations, and I got talking to a very chatty girl there called Nurit. I asked her whether she knew much about Israeli football and, on learning the nature of my trip, she got me to call a journalist she knew from an Israeli national newspaper called Ma'ariv. He loved the sound of what I was undertaking and arranged for a reporter to meet me in Tel Aviv, lay on transportation and to take me to meet Marin Spynu, provided I granted Ma'ariv an exclusive in the story. Well, of course they could have an exclusive! Especially if it meant I could knock this game off very quickly and then head down to Eilat to sun myself for a week. I reckoned I deserved to have it easy after all the tough times I'd had in Moldova. Surely I deserved a nice smooth run.

  It was New Year's Eve and I had expected the flight to be pretty empty since the region was still considered to be dangerous, but the airline had compensated for this situation by laying on a much smaller plane than usual. Consequently it was packed. I failed in my attempts to get a window or aisle seat and ended up wedged in the dreaded middle seat of three, a position from which you enjoy absolutely no 'Armrest Rights'. If you are seated by the window then the armrest below it is clearly yours, and likewise the aisle armrest is the property of the aisle seat. However, where I was, neither armrest is yours by rights and you have to niggle, nudge and cajole in order to gain even temporary possession. Quite why the airlines have not got their act together to rectify this situation is quite beyond me. It seems that as long as your seat-back is in the upright position for take-off and landing they do not care what injustices the 'middle-seaters' have to suffer.

  On the screen at the front of the cabin, the morning's news was broadcast to us and I watched how Iraqi anti-aircraft guns had attacked American and British planes which were patrolling the 'No fly zones'. I kept my fingers crossed that there would be no escalation of violence and that I wouldn't have to play my final game wearing a gas mask (apparently they hamper low volleys). A report from Israel itself outlined how the Palestinian peace talks were floundering badly. It seemed that the voices of the extremists were having a disproportionate influence over the moderate majority who just wanted to live in peace with their neighbours. The fanatics on either side appeared to be winning the day. It hadn't been so long ago that Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated by a fanatical Jew who had been opposed to peace with the Palestinians, and what had happened? At the next general election the government had lurched to the right with Binyamin Netanyahu sweeping to victory on a wave of anti-Palestinian rhetoric, and the peace process was faltering as a result. It was a tragedy, but the murderous fanatic had achieved his aim.

  It has always seemed a great shame to me that the moderate cannot arouse the same passions that the fanatic can, but the fact remains that organised marches accompanied by chants of We'll talk and we'll talk until we find a compromise!' or 'Let's try and see this from both points of view shall we?' tend not to set the heart pumping and blood coursing through the veins. The suicide bomber is always going to grab the headline ahead of the decent chap handing in a signed petition. The hunger striker is always going to provide better copy for the newspapers than the bloke who just lays off cheese for a month. The trouble is that the moderate's hands are tied by his very rationality. And so it is that the peace-loving majority are pushed around by fundamentalists, fanatics and extremists. What about the poor old man in the middle?

  Like me. With no armrest. I couldn't even see the armrest on my left such had been its wholesale smothering by the obese gentleman in the window seat. On my right, the woman had unilaterally taken both armrests by force with no consideration for my rights. I wanted to call in an air hostess to act as a UN arbitrator but I could see that too many meal trays needed to be collected to allow time for any meaningful mediation. Armrestless, I consoled myself with the knowledge that there would be other flights in the future, and until then the tray in the seat-back in front of me was all mine and nobody could take that way from me.

  Three and a half hours later we landed in Israel. The armrest of the Middle East, the struggle for which was unrelenting and fanatical.

  I had been to Israel once before, nearly twenty years previously, when I had worked as a volunteer on a kibbutz. My motives had not been so much to discover a new and idealistic way of life as to try and get off with as many girls as possible in one month. Some may argue that this was shallow, but I was a young man and I needed some experience in swimming before I ventured into deeper waters. It was during this period that I perfected my breast stroke.

  It was also on the kibbutz that I discovered that both farm labour and early rising were not for me. On one occasion I had been allotted the dreaded job of 'Chickens' which was one that only came up a few times a year and involved gathering up the chickens which had reached an age and size which made them suitable for slaughter. Conventional wisdom had it that this was best done at 4 am when the birds would still be fast asleep. The flaw in this thinking was that at this time of the morning those charged with catching the buggers were also half asleep. In my case I was still drunk, the night before having been my twentieth birthday which I had celebrated in something of an alcoholic frenzy.

  Kibbutzniks led us down to a huge warehouse where the doors were opened to reveal a vast square footage of sleeping chickens. It was impossible to walk among them without treading on them, so we had to be taught to slide our feet along the floor like we were skating. The 'chicken shuffle'. All around me kibbutzniks and more able volunteers than myself were avidly collecting up chickens by the handful and delivering them to the awaiting trucks outside. It was okay for them, they clearly hadn't come across the obstinate 'Mother of all Chickens' which I was trying to pick up. I had sneaked up on it stealthily enough but as soon as I had gone to grab it by the leg it had turned on me, pecking away at my wrists, clucking and flapping and generally not having the decency to 'come quietly'. I threw it back down.

  'Right, you want to make this difficult do you?' I muttered.

  I had several more attempts at securing the capture of this one chicken while all around me other volunteers were on their fifth or sixth load. I made one final determined effort and dived on the chicken, completely smothering it until somehow I was in a position to haul it out to the truck. Proudly, I handed it to the surly kibbutznik in charge of loading the cages. He shook his head. I offered it to him once more. Again he shook his head.

  'Shesh!' he shouted.

  'And the same to you mate,' I slurred back mutinously.

  A volunteer alongside me explained that shesh meant six. What? He wanted six chickens? In one go?

  'I can't give you six,' I moaned. 'You've no idea how much trouble I've gone to just getting you this one.'

  'Shesh,' he repeated doggedly, pointing to all the enthusiastic chicken collectors around me.

  Seeing them rather invalidated my next line of argument which was to be that six was impossible. All of them were carrying six. Three in each hand.

  Fifteen minutes later, fifteen minutes of feathers, fury and frustration later, I handed the same grumpy kibbutznik my best offer. Three chickens.

  'Shesh,' he said unrelentingly.

  'Oh come on man, give me a break,' I whined. This is really the best I can do. I can't do six, I've tried.'

  Regretfully I had to admit that I was just no good at picking up birds.

  'Shesh,' he said, once again displaying his expansive vocabulary.

  'Okay, I'll try for six but at least accept the three that I've brought you, it wasn't easy I promise you.'

  But he would not. He wanted shesh and that was it. It was shesh or nothing with this bloke. If it hadn't have been for a kindly kibbutzn
ik who took pity on me and started handing me ready-collected chickens by the half dozen then I don't know what kind of international incident would have ensued. For me Shesh-face, as I took to calling him for the rest of my stay, came to symbolise the Israel I had left all those years before – macho and uncompromising. Would things have changed?

  The pouring rain, which God had laid on to make me feel at home, meant that the queue for the airport taxis was, by my reckoning, about one and a half hours long. I took a bus and alighted at Tel Aviv's crowded bus station. I found myself surrounded by teenagers with guns. Big guns, draped over their shoulders like sports bags, with magazines glistening with brass bullets. And not just the boys but girls too. Kids in Israel must to have grow up quickly. I allowed my eyes to settle on a particularly pretty girl, her right hand resting on the top of her machine gun. Maybe I should ask her to dinner, I thought, she ought to be able to get us a good table.

  I had forgotten that Israeli national service meant that every boy had to do a minimum of three years in the army and every girl fifteen months. They seemed to go everywhere with guns either because it was deemed not a good idea to leave them lying around, or because it made the citizens of this constantly threatened State feel that they were being protected. Then I remembered – it was New Year's Eve. I shuddered at the thought of how busy the average hospital's Accident and Emergency Unit would be back in Britain if teenagers went out to celebrate New Year's Eve carrying guns. It would certainly be an effective way of keeping the population down.

  I met Daniela, my Israeli publisher at my hotel and went for a quick drink. She had fallen in love with my previous book having discovered it on a trip to England and was busy having it translated into Hebrew. This amused me greatly since I'd always wanted to be translated into a language which you read backwards, and also it made me feel rather important. I explained to her my reasons for visiting Israel, about the bet and how I intended to track Spynu down.