Football brings people together. But forget about the World Cup, that's just watching. Go to any British airport on a Friday in early summer; chances are you will see groups of men with sports bags slung over their shoulders heading abroad for an end of season tour.
These tours are now a niche sector of the travel industry with agents who find teams for you to play in Rome, Berlin or wherever. My Sunday morning team, called Kenchels (it began life as the social services department team of Kensington and Chelsea), has done many such tours. But this year was special. We went to play in a European city that seven years ago was under siege: Sarajevo.
Why Sarajevo? Our captain, Robin Moore, works for Logica and had sold a software product to the Bosnian central bank. The bank is run by a foreigner (New Zealander Peter Nicholl). Under him are vice-presidents from the three former warring groups: a Croat, a Muslim and a Serb. Robin befriended Muslim vice-president Kemal Kozari´c. . They found a mutual interest in football and Kemal suggested that Robin bring his team to play a couple of local veterans teams-veterans, not of war (although some of them are that too) but of football. Veterans football in Britain means forty-something blokes trying to stay half-fit while enjoying some camaraderie. In Bosnia, as we discovered, it can mean something altogether superior.
So one Saturday at the end of May I was standing between the posts (I am the keeper) trying to keep out a hail of shots from the veterans of Medjugorje. The town is three hours south of Sarajevo. The journey to it follows the Neretva river, with its strange turquoise water, past towns like Mostar that we all recalled from the war. The country flashing by outside our coach looked less desolate than I had expected. There were smart cars and houses being built. About $5.5 billion in aid has flowed into Bosnia since 1995. People say much of it has vanished in corruption and that the only industry around Sarajevo is servicing the 10,000-strong international community.
Medjugorje, however, is a town of Catholic pilgrimage and thanks to tourism looks affluently west European. It is in a Croat part of the country where people say they are Croats first, Herzegovinans second. (Bosnia's 3.6m people live in either the Croat-Muslim federation or a Serb republic which wants to be part of Serbia-it is held together by an international body now run by Paddy Ashdown and 19,000 Nato-led troops.)
The Medjugorje veterans thrashed us 6-3. After the game we were taken out to a noisy meal, the wine and goodwill compensating for the lack of a common language. On the way back to our hotel Kemal said the team we were playing the next day in Sarajevo were even better, including four former Yugoslav internationals.We began to wonder whether, as has happened before, we had been mistaken for the Chelsea FC veterans team. Is that why a Sarajevo newspaper had published a long article about us?
The game the next day was against the veterans team of Zeljeznicar-the most successful of the two big clubs in Sarajevo which used to play in the old Yugoslav league against teams like Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb. The 20,000-capacity stadium, like most of Sarajevo, bore shell-mark scars of the siege. It was almost empty for our game but it was still thrilling to play there against such opponents. Almost all of the Zeljeznicar players were ex-pros. One of them, Enver Hadziabdic, had played for Yugoslavia in the 1974 World Cup in West Germany (including in the 9-0 defeat of Zaire which, by chance, one of our team had witnessed).
Most of their players were not only former pros but younger than us. For 25 minutes we held them. They weren't going flat out but we made them sweat a bit. Then Amar Osim (who used to play in France) scored from a free kick. I should have saved it but it came that little bit harder than usual and squeezed past me. Then the goals rained in. Kenchels is not used to being crushed-there were some ugly tackles and harsh words. But we recovered our poise, scored a couple ourselves and went down 8-2.
Professional football in the Balkans has been, well, Balkanised. Following the break up of the Yugoslav league, the Zeljeznicar first team is a shadow of its old self. We were shown the pendants in the trophy room from European games with British teams like Derby and Kilmarnock in the 1970s and 1980s. Now they only play against teams in the Croat-Muslim federation, and the best players go abroad as soon as they can.
But things are slowly improving in Bosnia. One measure of that is in football. Next season, Bosnia will have a single professional league, rather than a league for the federation and one for the Serb Republic. It may not sound much. But it means teams, and fans, travelling all over this divided country seven years after the end of a brutal "war of neighbours." It will mean the friends and relatives of the Serb snipers who sat on those handsome green hills above Sarajevo coming down the hills to play or watch the friends and relatives of the 11,500 people-Muslim, Croat and Serb-who died in the three-year siege.
Kenchels has, in a tiny way, contributed to normalisation. We were the first amateur club from western Europe to visit the young country of Bosnia. Meanwhile, Zeljeznicar are in the qualifying rounds of next season's Champions League. And Bosnia and Croatia have made a joint bid to host the European Championship in 2008. That would trump Japan and South Korea...
