Football crazy

By Naguib Mahfouz

The excitement, as teams progressed through the competition, reached a crescendo before the finals. And it did so, it appeared that the civilised veneer of centuries was being peeled away to reveal something basic in the nature of mankind. Even those who invented the term gentleman behaved like the thugs from Husseiniya and Boulaq who, I remember, used to turn up to football matches and turn them into veritable battle scenes, replete with casualties and injuries.

Strangely, the football players of my childhood, such as Hussein Hegazi, displayed exemplary sportsmanship on the pitch. Throughout his career, Hegazi never committed a foul. In the World Cup, on the other hand, footballers engaged in fisticuffs in front of packed stadiums. In my youth, violence only erupted when politics entered into sports. The annual fixture between the Egyptian national and the British army teams, attended by both King Fouad and the British High Commissioner, was one of the highlights of the season. The British authorities, however, banned British soldiers from attending. The Egyptians, for their part, were in such a state of excitement that had they won one might have supposed that the end of the occupation had come.