Steve Bloomfield @ EIBF

 

Steve Bloomfield is the author of Africa United, a book subtitled ‘How Football Explains Africa’ and was a journalist in Africa from 2006-2010. With the recent World Cup having been successfully staged in Africa, this was the perfect time for Bloomfield to talk about his book, and he didn’t disappoint, explaining how he’d tried first to watch football in Kenya but was completely puzzled by the league setup, where teams seemed to play in different places at the same time on the same day, but which turned out to be the result of there being rival leagues with identically named teams. In his time in Africa he came to see football as a largely positive force, explaining how in certain places it’s massively significant. Example? In the Ivory Coast, a civil war had been taking place for years, with various peace treaties breaking down. After one of these in 2007, Didier Drogba said that the Ivory Coast’s next match would be played in rebel territory, to prove that there was only one Ivory Coast now. It turned out to be a celebration, though largely unreported in the UK. Fascinatingly, Bloomfield also told about how he was stopped at a checkpoint and held for hours, becoming increasingly worried, by men who could not speak English, when one mention of David Beckham changed the mood entirely, resulting in him being let go…. and several other stories like these, just go and buy the book for more details. And on the off-chance you’re reading this David Beckham, Steve Bloomfield owes you a pint. [Keir Hind]