Introducing... Sports Strangest Crimes Presents: Shadows On The Pitch
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Hi Football Daily listeners, I'm football writer James Montague, and in Sports Strangers Crimes Presents, Shadows on the Pitch, I'm digging into a World Cup conspiracy theory that refuses to fade. Did the US influence a qualifying tournament to keep its enemies from playing at USA 94? It's a conspiracy theory put forward by the Iraqi Football Federation over 30 years ago. and one that's obsessed me for over a decade. Here is just a taste. But for the full series, search Sports Strangers Crimes on BBC Sounds. This is episode one. No terrorists in America. Have you ever heard a rumour so tantalising you just can't stop thinking about it? A twist to reality so potent it makes you question everything. and makes you see the world completely differently?
Well, I'm about to share with you one of the best. A rumour, a conspiracy theory really, that's lived rent-free in my head for over a decade. A World Cup whopper to give Burger King a run for its money. And I came across it while doing my day job. My name's James Montague and I'm a football writer. Though I don't really write about football. I mean, football's always in there somewhere. But my stories are more about the world of football and how crime, power, politics, identity and civil unrest interweave with the game we all love. Over the past few decades, I've been on my fair share of budget airlines and stayed in hostels barely fit for human habitation, all while chasing stories around the world.
And I've been called some pretty weird things as a result. I spent months in revolutionary Cairo hanging out with a group of Egyptian ultras who were absolutely convinced I was from MI6. Which was quite flattering because the Palestinian men's national team nicknamed me Face Like Rooney, which is maybe why you're hearing my voice rather than seeing me on TV. And when I reported from Zambia for the New York Times, the late great American soccer writer Grant Wall called me the Indiana Jones of soccer writing. And I've been shamelessly dining out on that ever since. And apologies to Wayne, I'll take the comparison with a 30-year-old Harrison Ford over that any day of the week.
I've had some pretty incredible experiences on my journeys too. Like touching the sweat-soaked sleeve of Diego Maradona after watching him nutmeg children on a five-a-side pitch in Doha. I've sat with monks in Bhutan struggling to breathe at 8,000 feet as we watched the Himalayan Kingdom's first ever World Cup qualification match. But sometimes my football stories can go off the rails. Like when I was bussed across Indonesia with a group of fans, only to be confronted in Java by a large gang of machete-wielding ultras. Rivals who'd taken exception to us driving through their territory. That was a close shave. Then there was the time I went to North Korea to watch their national team play Lebanon.
Just at the time, North Korea decided it was going to test a new hydrogen bomb. For nearly three days, me and the Lebanese players didn't know if our visit would also mark the start of a global nuclear war and whether or not this was in fact the end of the world. Thankfully, it wasn't. And even better, the game finished 2-2 in a packed Kim Il-sung Stadium in Pyongyang. But one of my favourite memories is from 2007, when I danced bare-chested with the Iraqi national men's team in their team bus in Jordan. They'd survived years playing under Saddam's sadistic son, Uday Hussain, who controlled football with an iron fist. Uday was long gone, killed by American forces four years earlier. But Iraq at the time was on fire.
And so back then, even a brief escape from Baghdad was worth celebrating. Players from Shia, Sunni, Kurdish and Christian communities and me with my belly out, all dancing on the team bus.
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