Soccer's life and death

Should England do badly in the World Cup this summer they will be hammered by their press, Glenn Hoddle will be likened to a vegetable of some description, forced to resign from his job and left with no option but to take over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur in Division One next season. If Scotland fail they will simply be ridiculed, again.

How the manager and players of Colombia must envy the small price the English and Scots would pay for their lack of success. Thursday night's Channel Four documentary, Escobar's Own Goal, was a chilling account of the murder of Andres Escobar, who was shot in his home city of Medellin, after his own goal in a match against the USA resulted in Colombia's elimination from the 1994 World Cup finals.

The documentary, made by Richard Sanders, an English journalist who spent two years working in Medellin, was a bleak portrayal of a society brutalised by its involvement in the cocaine trade. On the night Escobar died, 39 other people were also gunned down in Medellin - an average of 80 people are murdered there every week.

Umberto Castros was found guilty of killing Escobar and received a jail sentence of over 40 years, but the two drug lords, for whom he worked as a bodyguard, went unpunished. The suspicion remains that they ordered the shooting because the own goal cost them millions in a bet on the fancied Colombians winning the World Cup.

Colombian football, though, has a long association with the drugs' trade. In fact Tuesday's Channel Four News estimated that half the teams in the country's Premier division are owned by the cartels and the former Colombian Football Association chairman, and owner of the Santa Fe club, is now in jail for laundering drugs money.

"Football in Colombia simply mirrors its society, one that is wracked by the corruption of the drug trade and by the violence that comes when a country is all but run by the drug lords," said reporter David Smith.

Sanders came to a similar conclusion. "The huge revenues of the drug cartels cannot fail to corrupt a country as poor as this and one that has been abandoned by the rest of world - and it won't change so long as the cocaine cash pours in from America and Europe. The victim is the whole country, not just football and not just Escobar."

While Escobar's former Colombian team-mate, goalkeeper Rene Higuita, and manager Pacho Maturana, recalled the horror they felt when they heard of his death, the irony is that both had (or have) their own friendly links with members of the drugs world - Higuita with Pablo Escobar, the notorious head of one cartel, and Maturana with Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, another convicted drugs baron.

And to confirm little has changed in Colombian football or society we saw Anthony de Avila dedicating his winning goal against Ecuador, which ensured qualification for the 1998 finals, to Roberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, "lords of the murderous and immensely powerful Cali drugs cartel" who are now both in prison in Bogota. "I give this triumph to two people, both deprived of their liberty, with love and respect," he said, when interviewed live on television after the match.

Channel Four News' David Smith tracked De Avila down at a Colombian training camp to ask him about his comments. "It was the human thing to do," he said. "I felt the jail sentences they got were a shame and I wanted to send them my best wishes. I did it because I wanted to."

De Avila's background gives a clearer explanation for his comments. As a youngster his father `sold' him to the Rodriguez brothers, who owned the America de Cali club. His fee? A minibus. Since then the winger has effectively been owned by the brothers and, as Smith pointed out, was "simply publicly stating his loyalty to the people who own him", despite the fact that he no longer plays for the club.

In his documentary Sanders interviewed two Medellin teenagers who are apprentices at the Nacional club. One of them showed him the scar on his stomach where he had been hit by a bullet fired by a passing gunman as he sat outside his home in one of the city's many ghettos.

The same boy had a drug problem when he joined Nacional but, his coach told Sanders, had overcome that and had a good chance of making it as a professional footballer. If he doesn't succeed his only way of making a living for himself and his family will be to work for one of the drugs barons. "It might mean you have a short life but at least you will make some money," he said.

It was a thoroughly depressing documentary, but a brilliantly made one at that. In fact, it made you feel ashamed for being so grief-stricken at something so trivial as Arsenal's march towards the Premiership title. At least Thursday night's Prime Time on RTE1 offered an escape for those horrified by this prospect. Until Unionist David Brewster popped up on the screen.

"Those of your viewers who have the good sense to be Arsenal supporters will remember Michael Thomas scoring in the last minute against Liverpool - we're still waiting for someone to put the ball in the back of the net here,["] he said of the long wait at Stormont for an agreement on the peace settlement.

There's no escaping them. Gunners everywhere. Did you see the size of Myles Dungan's grin on Saturday night when he was presenting RTE's coverage of the Masters? It's enough to make you demand a refund on your license fee.