Don Watson - Dancing in the Streets: Tales from World Cup City

London: Victor Gollancz, 1994

Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - I spotted in in a charity shop, and paid an extortionate price for it because I've wanted to read it for years. So given the slimness of the volume and its relative value, I waited for a couple of years before pulling it out and giving it floor space.

About the Author - Don Watson wrote extensively for the NME during the 1980s, becoming a section editor and departing in 1989. After continuing to write across various publications, he now works in marketing for the British Council, the UK’s international organisation for cultural relations. No, me neither.

Plot - ex-music editor goes to World Cup, meets people, describes.

Review - First of all, I should declare a prior interest. Some thirteen years ago, at the start of my own professional writing career, I decided my first book-length project would be to go to a World Cup finals and experience fan culture, trying to find the single answer as to why millions of people from across the globe travel to an event that for their own or adopted country could be finished in a little over 270 minutes. The answer, of course, is because it’s something to do, but I didn’t realise that at the time, until I’d quit a job and ransacked Wikipedia for material.

The reason I’m informing you of this is that I want to make clear any suspicion of a hatchet job because of sour grapes is misplaced. I hoped in 2006 that I would be rewarded with a book contract and a writing career, but I wasn’t a decent writer at the time and there were myriad reasons why said book, though completed, was never published. My experiences at my own World Cup are far more rewarding than the work it inspired, which couldn’t be any greener had it been dictated by the bloke out of Scritti Politti.

In fact, I’ve wanted to read Don Watson’s book for a good number of years, because when I was first falling into obsession with football it was flagged as an indispensable take on the madness of the Mundial. World Cup ’94, for that’s the tournament Watson immerses himself in, is one I’m very fond of because it’s bound up with memories of pre-adolescence, where I was old enough to understand it but not yet too old to have to worry about other things. Consequently, in my mind it was observed in temperatures at least as hot as those on the midday Orlando pitch, and every move was replicated by me and my friends – Al-Owairan’s amazing dribble, Stoichkov’s thunderbastard against Mexico, Hagi’s gravity-defying cross-shot.

Around that time, when I was spending what pocket money I was given on football magazines, they very rarely came with free gifts (unlike now, where it’s only by the gifting of something unexpected and cheap that publishing houses can justify charging six pounds for a glorified business pages). So the added bonus of a couple of football anthologies from Goal and Total Football magazines, one of which included an extract of Dancing in the Streets, was a cause for great interest. I can’t claim to have devoured the prose so much as appreciated the expansion of my football vocabulary. It was like having two very slim encyclopaedias of a world I had no idea how to navigate. Years later, when Frank Skinner described the philosophy of Fantasy Football League as one where there were no clues available to the initiate, I was reminded of these collections, with their mentions of Eamon Dunphy and Dave Sexton, and recognised that life in general makes assumptions about how much you know, and also how much you bluff about it.

I don’t have a favourite football book as such. When one is well-written and researched (Calcio by John Foot, for example, or Jeff Dawson’s brilliant take on England’s tragicomic defence of their title, Back Home), or has something other than football to talk about (David Winner, Jonathan Wilson and David Conn are always at the top of this particular game), they can be as poetic as any Booker winner. Conversely, when they’re bad, they’re tedious, patronising and insulting to the intelligence. There’s a feeling, particularly these days, that football fans are Brexit-loving illiterates and happy to regress after all that middle-class wankery, but social media for all its ills directly refutes that. I’ve spoken to many opposition fans on the way out of games who are articulate, self-aware and knowledgeable. Their only failing is being an absolute idiot for supporting any team that I don’t.

After all this time, I found that Dancing in the Streets falls somewhere between the two; capable of being illuminating and vapid in equal measure. Watson’s World Cup ends up being incidental to his personal travelogue – for a man who got to go to the World Cup Final, it’s all rather something and nothing.

By accident, the book is split roughly into two halves: Watson’s time in New York City, spurred by his fidelity to a plucky Ireland side who began their tournament with a famous win against Italy, and then a rapid journey west, to San Francisco and Pasadena via Chicago. Along the way Watson observes America in flashes between bars: a trip to Little Italy here, a dive bar in San Fran there, painting characters in pencil strokes.

The book begins with Don Watson somewhere in North London, registering for tickets to Ireland’s games alongside natives and the Hibernian diaspora, and continues on a theme of how vital it is that only proper Irish fans and sympathisers get to see it. Watson is included, naturally, because he’s Scottish and a Celtic supporter, and seemingly is better placed to appreciate what it all means. With some shame I recall how I clung onto my own Irish heritage at the time because it made them a substitute I could hang onto in England’s absence, but in mitigation I was a thirteen year-old boy. Watson was a journalist of some repute, but he describes two World Cups here: one where the world turns up, and one where only Ireland give a shit about it.

Consequently, the New York sections of the book are spent in the interminable company of craic seekers in a clutch of not-really-Irish bars, with scarcely a mention of the brilliance of other teams’ football. I suppose you can only describe what you see, and if there isn’t a handy party of Bolivians bemoaning Marco Etcheverry’s red card in the opener that leaves you at a loss, but come on, it’s New York City! The world’s melting pot, and Watson is more concerned with hangovers after a night of shouting nonsense across bartops.

Talking of cities, Watson’s big conceit is that of “World Cup City”. Simply put, by travelling to the tournament every participant becomes a citizen of the abstract, part of Planet Earth but living within new, constantly moving parameters. We check our identity in at the door when we don our nation’s colours and the attendant madness, friendships and enmities exist somehow apart from it all. Whether you like that idea is a personal choice, but I found it repetitive and uninspired. My own experiences (perhaps because I preferred to be more of a passive observer in my own researches) suggest that people touch in and touch out of the Finals, coming together for perhaps an afternoon and then dispersing. Communality is a falsehood, created by circumstance, and the concept seems overworked.

The second part of the book is by some distance preferable to the first, and perhaps no accident that it improves once Ireland are eliminated. From my own memory I can recall what a damp squib that knockout game was, with Pat Bonner spannering a speculative Wim Jonk shot over his spread palms, and indeed it merits barely a mention in Dancing. The narrative takes a breath after Watson leaves New York, and maybe that suggests as a regular visitor he had a blind spot regarding the feel of the place: I’ve never been, but I don’t feel like it was described as enticing to the first-timer, more exhausting. It is as if Watson sees the vast open skies of the rest of the continent and breathes a sigh of relief – from the intense mugginess of Metropolis to the Sunshine State.

After that, it’s a straightforward travelogue where Watson backs off just enough to hint what a marvellous experience a World Cup can be. There is very little dancing, and what there is seems more of an endurance sport than an explosion of spontaneous joy in the vein of Martha Reeves’ wonderful image. The high watermark of the genre, limited as it is, is All Played Out by Pete Davies, which manages to balance reportage with context, and is so much the better for it. Davies also gained access to players and management – not something Watson ever claims was an option, admittedly – but it made for a rounded picture. World Cup ’94 was an excellent tournament, but you wouldn’t decide that based on Watson’s insights.

Dancing in the Streets is not a terrible book, more like looking through dozens of pictures of somebody else’s holiday. I have no doubt that’s what some of the people who read my book thought, but for an experience I thought was of interest from start to finish, it deserved a better literary testament. If I was pondering spending my life savings on a trip to the FIFA World Cup and Don Watson was trying to convince me, I would probably get deeper into cricket.

Will I move it from the floor to the bookshelf? - Like a professional foul, I'm happy to give one away for the sake of the team. That means no, by the way.