They parked heavy armour on the national stadium pitch, so ruining it; a perfect example of the breathtaking cultural ignorance of America's elites.But these stories, like many others, are second-hand. Under Saddam Hussein, clubs were handed out to his extended family and the military. Cheating, corruption and gambling were widespread and ultimate authority for sport was given to his sadistic, indeed psychotic, older son Uday. Football under Uday was a litany of torture and intimidation. These are stories worth telling but they can only be extracted and ordered from Baghdad FC by a heroic act of mental editing. Simon Freeman, who has written in haste, has not been well served by his editors.
They might have said that unless you have an exceptional story, or you are stylist of the order of Ryszard Kapuscinski, then the story of the writing of a book is no substitute for anything else. Freeman has neither excuse.Great swathes of text on how and why his research would or would not work on TV or - shock, horror! - that information on the internet about Iraq is often unreliable should have been red-lined. By the time the ersatz monarchy had been deposed and the army had set about forging a unified state, football had acquired national coverage and the team was a rare authentic expression of national identity. After the British departed, the game spread to encompass all the nation's ethnic and religious groups: Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Assyrians and Jews all played football. Iraq's football story is fascinating.
The game was introduced by the British in the oil fields of the south and at the RAF bases that constituted the sharp edge of imperial rule in the country created after the First World War from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. The "double" suggests the reduplication of the wife in the mistress, or the schizophrenic fissuring of the man into husband and adulterer The rest is speculation. Double Take implies a Freudian moment of confusion and realisation, when the world suddenly reveals a glitch in its smooth operation; Double Exposure refers to a photographic anomaly where one image is superimposed on another, as if the wife and mistress were somehow merged.The rest is speculation. Hughes himself is now dead: the Plath-Hughes estate keeps the flame for two great poets. Never has the potential, ulterior capacity for such a flame to become an agent of erasure been so obvious..