The last time I had anything to do with football was sharing a lift with Ryan Giggs. We were staying at a hotel in Tirana. He held a pair of muddy boots and stared at the floor as around him American voices on a UN mercy mission talked about afforestation and the turbidity of local red wine. Outside, dictatorship was deceased. In its place, young and exceedingly raw capitalism was bringing its own brand of savagery to the streets of the Albanian capital. Giggs had missed a sitter in the national stadium, and Wales hung on for a 1-1 draw with Europe’s leading emerging nation. Emerging from the hermetic isolation and the paranoid fantasies of its recent past. Emerging perhaps from purgatorial poverty. But not emerging, it transpired, from the culture of the blood feud or the rituals of ethnic violence. Five years later, I picked up the microphone. It was a midsummer midnight in Lahti, one hundred kilometres north of Helsinki. The sky was the colour of vodka. It was my job to commentate on a Finland versus Rest-of-the-World soccer match.
