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Beach Soccer’s European Dream- Don’t Cry for Me Argentina The young man running out for his international debut match seems so, so familiar .There’s the number 10 shirt, the shining black hair, the barrel chest and the powerful stocky body. Enter Diego Maradona.
But the player is wearing the Azzuri shirt of Italy not the pale blue and white stripes of Argentina. And he is playing in Benidorm in Spain for his country’s European qualifying place in a very different sort of World Cup from the one in which his father starred in 1986. Maradona Junior is aiming to be in the Italian team for the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup which takes place in Marseille in July. Twenty-one year old Diego Armando Maradona Junior was the product of a short affair Maradona Senior had with Christina Sanagra when he was a star player for Napoli in the 1980s. Diego Junior never met his father until 2003 and used to play under his mother’s name in the lower leagues of Italian football, but was nevertheless unable to shake off the public’s over-expectation because of his heritage. But now he uses the name Maradona and says: “I wouldn’t change my name for anything in the world because it fills me with pride.” His team-mate Masimilliano Esposito says: “It’s easier for him in beach soccer, I think. He doesn’t have the problem of comparison. He can be himself - one of the team.” Italy are one of five European teams through to the Finals. Brazil’s Copacabana stars have won the tournament for the last two years in the game’s traditional home of Rio de Janeiro. However, this year’s hosts, France - coached by Eric Cantona - hope the Marseille tournament will bring them home advantage. But other European qualifiers Spain, Portugal and Russia are strong contenders, too. Russia might seem an unlikely place for beach soccer but take a look at some of the other teams in the 24-nation European qualifying tournament which took place in May: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland are not countries renowned for their sun-kissed beaches and others like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Austria, Switzerland and Azerbaijan are nowhere near the sea at all! Most people, have kicked around a football at sometime on a seaside holiday but the fact is that the beach soccer can be played anywhere you find a piece of sand. Indeed, in the Ukraine and other land-locked countries, games are often played on the banks of wide rivers. But pitches can be laid quite easily in a small area with a few lorry-loads of sand, and temporary stands erected to form stadia. Hungry for success It is these countries, where the national football team may not even be in the top 100 but which are nevertheless still hungry for success, where beach soccer has become extremely popular. In fact twelve of the 24 teams in the European Qualifiers came from the former Eastern bloc countries and they are pushing the Mediterranean nations hard. As Kari Andri Kask of the Estonia Beach Soccer Association says: “We have been playing Beach Soccer for only four or five years but in some ways it’s our game. We can make progress faster and higher internationally than in 11-a-side football. Our country loves soccer but people like to see their team winning as well. At this level we can do that. We have proved it.” The serious intentions of Estonian beach soccer were evidenced in Benidorm by the inclusion in their squad of former top division footballers, captain Kert Haavistu and defender Taavi Tammo. Indeed, Tammo was judged among the tournament’s most outstanding defenders despite Estonia’s six-goal second-round collapse against Russia. Sergey Kharchenko, president of the Ukraine Beach Soccer Association discovered the game – as he says: “By accident!” whilst on a business trip to Spain and instantly saw its potential both in its own right and as a vehicle to help promote the senior game. He says: “I am a former player and I know from my own experience about the importance of training on the sand – especially for the seven to 10-year-olds. Later they come to big football much stronger and with a better developed sense of coordination. “We have analysed the statistics and discovered that a high percentage of the players who became World Cup-winners started off in beach soccer – which is why it is a game with a phenomenal future. Now that it is being organised and administered and encouraged by the international federations it can only progress to an even higher level.” The entertainment factor is high Beach soccer is a five-a-side game played a on a short pitch with full-size goals and the rules are pretty much the same as in Futsal but the nature of the uneven sand surface means that the ball is in the air much more than in a normal game and headers and bicycle kicks and aerobatics in general are much more common and the entertainment factor is high. Injury hold-ups are few and far between with the commonest cause for attention being sand in the eyes of goalkeepers who need as much courage as their outdoor counterparts. For outfield players, however, the challenge is not so much playing into the ball ‘into space’ but playing it into ‘air and space’. This is, naturally, where the more technically-adept players and teams score - literally. The technical necessity for free-fall (but soft-landing) acrobatics invokes an element of the spectacular which lifts the entertainment value beyond other versions of scaled-down Association Football. Maradona’s Italian team-mate Esposito was one of the most acrobatically- entertaining of the 288 players in the European qualifying tournament, throwing himself through the air at all angles and in all directions in pursuit of the ball and connecting dangerously more often than not. Switzerland’s talented team were unlucky not to qualify and was one of several teams which made use of former professionals like Dejan Stankovic who was the tournament’s leading marksman with 16 goals. Stankovic says: “Every player who comes to beach soccer loves the ambience. You can enjoy it and be serious at the same time. The setting is great, especially at a tournament like this here which helps everyone raise their performance level.” But it is the technically-gifted players of Spain and Portugal who will join Italy and Russia in Marseille, who have the best chance of taking the trophy away from South America. Madjer and Alan of Portugal are very much stars in their own country as is Amarelle of Spain. Madjer came into the beach game by accident . He was hurt in a motorcycle crash and playing on sand aided his recovery. For him, he says, the appeal of the game is: “The environment - the goals - we score a lot of goals, beautiful goals and the crowd is very close to the field.” He will now compete in his fourth FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup and is probably the best beach soccer player in the world, having been voted winner of the Golden Ball as best player and Golden Boot as top scorer in 2005 and 2006. Last year he took the second place in the Golden Ball award when Portugal were narrowly beaten by eventual champions Brazil in the quarter finals. Madjer won a runner’s-up medal with Portugal who were beaten by France in the 2005 Final. Now 31, it would be the culmination of a splendid career he were he were to claim a winner’s medal at last. England are the poor relations of Beach Soccer Curiously, England, home of Association Football and of the wealthiest premier league in the world, is one of the poor relations of beach soccer. England is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom, a nation which boasts no less than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometres) of coastline and yet their team of amateurs is based entirely on the Isle of Wight, a small island just off the South coast. John Hawkins, chief executive of England Beach Soccer, says: “Most other countries are all fully funded but we are not. We are not even affiliated to the English FA, even though we are recognised by FIFA. On that basis, being ranked among the top eight or nine in Europe is pretty remarkable.” England’s mixture of spear fishermen, postmen, students and carers reached the second round of 16 in the qualifiers before falling to Ukraine. Hawkins was an accidental convert. Tiring of the music business, he bought a beach franchise on his native Isle of Wight and launched a promotional football tournament to capitalise on the football fever generated by that year’s 2002 FIFA World Cup. Progress was fast but financially fragile. He says: “We have to beg, borrow, steal and dig into our own pockets to make ends meet – to the extent that even 100 Euros for an appeal against a red card is a big decision if it goes wrong. “But it’s such a fabulous game!” The FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup takes place in Marseille, France from July 17 - 27 2008. The teams are: Cameroon, Senegal, Iran, Japan, United Arab Emirates, El Salvador, Mexico, Solomon Islands, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, France, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain. Information: http://www.fifa.com/beachsoccerworldcup/ Football’s Hidden Story/Keir Radnedge and Caroline Gillies
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