There are only two class of men this season, those who play and those who watch. So there wasn’t much of a choice but to go Waka Waka and let the ball take a dribble this time in the column. After a big time hunt for a football-savvy book buff, Kamalram Sajeev helped manage a sneak, just in time to meet the deadline. And to him, “soccer is not about the statistics but the aesthetics, and that is precisely why my all-time favourite football book is Galeano’s Football in Sun and Shadow.”
The book, as the title’s adage rightly says, is best described as an ‘emotional history of World Cup football’. Galeano, born in Uruguay in 1940, like most Latin American boys, dreamed of becoming a football player when he grew up. It is his yearning for the game that is reflected in Football in Sun and Shadow, one of his early books. The book traces the history of the game, it’s evolution into a religion especially in Latin America and paints vivid sketches of the immortal football moments with poetic panache for which the book is best loved.
“The book is an aesthetic enlargement of the game’s great moments, an analysis of the style of approach of players. It transports you to a different level, where the book reads as beautifully as the game itself,” says Kamalram Sajeev. “Also, this book is the basis of much of the football philosophy that we see employed in Malayalam texts on the game, fiction and non-fiction.”
Full report here New Indian Express
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