Behind the Curtain: Travels in Eastern Europe Football by Jonathan Wilson
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(Paperback - New)
- Pub. Date: November 2006
- 256pp
- Sales Rank: 400,941
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Product Details
- Pub. Date: November 2006
- Publisher: Orion Publishing Group, Limited
- Format: Paperback, 256pp
- Sales Rank: 400,941
- ISBN-13: 9780752879451
- ISBN: 0752879456
- Edition Description: New
Synopsis
From the war-ravaged streets of Sarajevo, where turning up for training involved dodging snipers' bullets, to the crumbling splendor of Budapest's Bozsik Stadium, where the likes of Puskas and Kocsis masterminded the fall of England, the landscape of Eastern Europe has changed immeasurably since the fall of communism. Jonathan Wilson has traveled extensively behind the old Iron Curtain, viewing life beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall through the lens of soccer. Where once the state-controlled teams of the Eastern bloc passed their way with crisp efficiency—a sort of communist version of total soccer—to considerable success on the European and international stages, today the beautiful game in the East has been opened up to the free market, and throughout the region a sense of chaos pervades. The threat of totalitarian interference no longer remains; but in its place mafia control is generally accompanied with a crippling lack of funds. Jonathan Wilson goes in search of the spirit of Hungary's Golden Squad of the early 1950s; charts the disintegration of the soccer superpower that was the former Yugoslavia; follows a sorry tale of corruption, mismanagement, and Armenian cognac through the Caucasuses; reopens the case of Russia's greatest soccer player, Eduard Streltsov; and talks to Jan Tomaszewski about an autumn night at Wembley in 1973.
Biography
With A Palestine Affair -- a combination thriller/literary romance -- Jonathan Wilson sweeps readers up into the chaos of 1920s Palestine. "Like the best of historical fiction, Wilson's story is placed in an imagined past, but it is really happening right now," says The Washington Post of Wilson's breakout novel.
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