You can tell a lot about a country’s reputation from the sharp intake of breath from friends when you tell them where you’re going. That, and the height of the raised eyebrow. On a scale of ten, Iran was 8.4 on the breath and 9.1 on the eyebrow monitor. “Hope you can get a couple of years off work,” said one.
Now, there are some places where even an intrepid south London football team would think twice about going: Colombia, Somalia and Iraq come to mind. And no one would say the streets of Tehran are safe. But that’s nothing to do with mobs or carjackings; it’s just the traffic is so chokingly, monotonously bad. Not anarchic, like in Delhi, or aggressive, like in Athens. Tehranis simply get to where they’re going. Slowly.
Will you get harangued by imams or beaten with sticks for wearing shorts? Certainly not. The clerical class keeps a very low profile. We took Foreign Office advice and stuck to long trousers for a couple of days. Then someone pointed out that half the blokes in the streets and bazaars were wearing football shorts or cut-offs, so we tentatively graced the populace with proper, hairy, lily-white English knees. No arrests resulted, despite the strong case for police action on aesthetic grounds alone. Will you be held hostage? Only if you give any indication, however slight, that you’re interested in buying a carpet.
“Iranians think of themselves as Europeans: it’s that simple,” said Geoff over dinner at the British Embassy. Geoffrey Adams is the British Ambassador to Iran. The very thing he needed after a hard day’s nuclear brinkmanship, we decided, was a drink with a bunch of English footballers. Besides, half the team went to school with him, and his wife, Mary-Emma, is veteran of an earlier Blackheath tour (spectator rather than player). Being a career diplomat, he knew when his room for manoeuvre was limited, so we found ourselves sitting in chairs once occupied by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin (1943 Tehran conference) discussing the long-ball tactic and Chelsea’s chances in Europe.
The embassy sits stolid, calm and Victorian under one of Asia’s finest wisterias, the traffic keeping a respectful distance beyond the ample grounds. The dining room is the kind you usually see behind a velvet rope, next to a sign saying “no flash photography”. It’s said Stalin walked across the threshold, took one look at the fine portrait of Edward VII and threatened to walk out of the entire conference, claiming an imperialist plot. The late king did indeed look a lot like his relative, the last Tsar.
In the salon after dinner, we stood on priceless rugs drinking our last gin and tonics, listening to Suzanne Vega on the Adams’ CD player and playing hide-and-seek with their children behind antique vases and tables. Such is modern diplomatic life. Geoff’s comment struck me as curious. If the Iranians think they’re in Europe and the rest of the world believes they’re in Arabia, and the American neo-cons think they’re slap bang in the Axis of Evil – where on earth were we?
“WELCOME,” said the sign. “WELCOME TO SHEMIRANS MARTYR COMMANDERS FOOTBALL CENTER.” ‘Welcoming’ wasn’t the ideal word to describe the portraits of Ayatollahs Khamenei and Khomeini glaring down from the stands. Above the banner, a Revolutionary Guard with an automatic rifle paced the terraces. Higher above him, the Alborz mountains above northern Tehran rose hard and burnished like prison walls in the afternoon glare, their ridges dusted with snow.
There was a smaller banner on the back terrace: “Welcome to England football legend team.”
The England football legends stepped gingerly onto the Astroturf (or “artificial gross”, as the tour operator described it), feeling hamstrings and calves creaking after an hour in a traffic jam. England football legends were also experiencing a little nerve jangling. We weren’t nervous because of the bored-looking soldier with the gun, nor the Ayatollahs looking at us like referees about to administer a red card for a particularly decadent tackle. It was pure fear: fear that we were about to be exposed as impostors – Westerners who had travelled to Iran pretending to be proper footballers.
