Paddy Agnew World Cup letterEric was having a good time. Eric is black, he is from Togo and he lives in Stuttgart where he combines studies with doing a night time office cleaning job. Outside Frankfurt's Waldstadion prior to Togo's World Cup debut game against South Korea, Eric was a man much in demand.
For a start, he is a good looking guy. For a second, he was splendidly decked out in the Togo yellow and green team colours and for a third, he was busy beating it out on a small African drum. South Korean fans were queuing up to pose for a picture alongside him. So much so that he barely had time to talk to the man from The Irish Times.
Midway through our little chat, Eric broke off, shouting something about "the band" and ran off down the fan-zone avenue. Following Eric, it soon became clear that he was headed to the "It's Your Heimspiel" stand, the fans' karaoke stage.
Previously, the "Heimspiel" (home game) had been crammed to overload with enthusiastic, overdressed South Koreans belting out high volume, techno-style dance music that had everybody bopping. When Eric and the boys took to the stage, they asked for the music to be turned off. Just give us the microphones.
And so it was, as the Togo men (no women) launched into a series of slow, rhythmic, very loud and very repetitive Togo folk songs. The louder they sang, the more they banged their drums - Eric was giving it everything - and the more the watching South Korean (and German) fans loved it.
Togo is, of course, a small, poor West African country with a population of 5.43 million. Togo are the minnow of minnows at Germany 2006, making their World Cup debut in a tournament in which they are the lowest Fifa-ranked team. For Eric and pals, this was a rare opportunity to bang their drums.
Yet, what do the Togo team players go and do? Yeap, they kick up a huge fuss about bonuses, asking for €155,000 per player for the tournament plus €30,000 per player per win and €15,000 for a draw. The row about their fees even prompted their German coach Otto Pfister to walk out on the team, only to walk back in again in the build-up to the game.
In some senses, the South Korean-Togo "fanfest" and the Togo match fee row are two sides of the same globalisation coin. Germany 2006 has been marked - thus far and one hopes all the way - by a terrific, feel-good fan atmosphere in which thousands and thousands of "Erics" pose for pics alongside one another, exchanging scarves, stories and, in a small way, cultures. Low-tech, poor and African, Togo, after all, is a long way from high-tech, Asian South Korea, in just about every sense imaginable.
The fans have been made welcome in Germany, made to feel part of the show with an ever more extensive fan area at all the grounds. For a start, you can show your football skills by putting the ball in the hole at a sort of "hit the coconut" stand.
Alternatively, you can do a sort of "Kilroy Was Here" by writing your name on a giant-size ball. Or you can "pose for your Mastercard priceless photo" with either either Brazilian ace Pele, German coach Jurgen Klinsmann or Manchester United goalkeeper Tim Howard (none of them actually present, but the fans don't mind because you then send the pic via internet to friends and family back home). Or, like Eric, you can get up on the Heimspiel stand and let it all happen. Some of the fanfest might sound silly but by and large it is all good natured fun.
The Togo fans probably did not get to hear their coach Pfister speaking after his side's 2-1 defeat. Asked if he had "betrayed" Togo by walking out on them, Pfister replied: "I have already said 'no comment' to this. Which part of 'no comment' do you not understand?". So far, Eric and the Togo boys have been doing rather better than their team and its coach.
