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With the 2010 World Cup underway, many football fans around the world will be avidly debating and agonising over the fate of their nations in the tournament. However it is often at the domestic club level that the game finds its most passionate support.

David Goldblatt, embarks on an assortment of adventures into the meaning and madness of the game. He travels to four very different football games in Italy, Egypt, Ghana and the UK, to experience the build-up and pitch action from the perspective of the fans.

BY DAVID GOLDBLATT
For decades this has been Ghana’s biggest game. These two clubs have been contesting bragging rights well before independence.

Following independence, football became crucial to national identity, part of Kwame Nkrumah’s project to achieve Pan African glory. And these two clubs have been the traditional source of players for the nation’s pride, the Black Stars.

But not now - these two clubs mirror the decline of domestic football. Kotoko, still very much associated with the regional power base of the Asante kingdom and the rule of the Asantehene - life president of the club and Hearts of Oak - are pale shadows of the glory years in the 1960s and 70s.

The money rich leagues of Europe have drained them of their best players. A top player at Hearts of Oak - the most supported club in the country - can make something like $5000 a year. A figure easily surpassed by the lowliest leagues of say Belgium or the Ukraine.

Consequently there has been a mass migration since the late 1980s that has rapidly gathered pace. To add insult to injury, Ghanaians naturally want to watch their best players play, so the games of the English Premiership, Serie A and La Liga attract huge and passionate crowds to bars and shacks across Accra, and the nation - often at the expense of domestic football attendance. That and the uncomfortable, occasionally life-threatening experience of watching the game have contributed to dwindling crowds.

In 2001, 126 people lost their lives during a Hearts of Oak versus Asante Kotoko game when riot police fired tear gas into the crowd, following trouble and triggered a panicked stampede. Last year six died at Asabte Kotoko, in a crush in the ‘popular end’, after senior officials illegally encouraged ticketless fans in and pocketed the money. To date no one has been prosecuted for either tragedy.

This fixture is one of the few that still draws a large crowd. Some 20,000 fans on both sides mingle, drumming, singing and dancing their way through a game marked by ferocious tackling, second rate football and officiating that temporarily unites all in bouts of condemnation and cursing.

In the company of local football journalist Jerome Otchere, I hear from the founder of Circle O - the musical voice of Hearts of Oak - still traumatised by the tragedy of 2001.

I also get involved in an impromptu radio phone-in, tease out the myths of royal and political allegiances and wonder whether I really should be eating one of those sweaty doughnuts hawked in the crowd.

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