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How easy it is to
forget that sports players at their peak are, by the very nature of
their task, young but expected to be wise in their event,
world-travelled but isolated and vulnerable.

This week, Emmanuel
Adebayor, the goal scorer for Manchester City, gave up the captaincy
and the calling to play ever again, he says, for his country, Togo. He
is 26 and a millionaire, and he says he just cannot get out of his head
the day in January when Angolan separatists fired on the Togo team bus,
killing three people in it.

Just footballers

“We were just
footballers going to play a football match and represent our country,”
Adebayor said in a prepared statement. “Yet we were attacked by people
who wanted to kill us all. It is a moment I will never forget, and one
I never want to experience again.” Whether he knew it or not,

Adebayor’s
abandonment of his national team coincided with an explicit threat by a
group allied to Al Qaeda that it plans to attack players and spectators
at the United States-England match in South Africa on June 12.

“Al Qaeda will have
a presence in the games,” read the statement on a Jihadi Web site,
Mushtaqun Lel Jannah, based in Algeria. “How amazing could the match
United States vs Britain be when broadcasted live on air at a stadium
packed with spectators when the sound of an explosion rumbles through
the stands, the whole stadium is turned upside down and the number of
dead bodies are in their dozens and hundreds, Allah willing.” What
happened to the Togolese team in January, and to Israeli athletes at
the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and last year to cricketers in Pakistan,
means that any or all threats to sports has to be taken seriously.

Interpol is already
on the case ahead of the World Cup in South Africa. U.S. State
Department officials speak of “appropriate precautions” for its
citizens at the tournament. British intelligence sources offer no
comment, but they are aware of the deadly consequences after the
kidnapping and execution of a Briton, Edwin Dyer, by Islamic militants
in Mali in June.

Never again

Italy, France and
Germany were also named in the Al Qaeda warning over the weekend.
Franco Frattini, the foreign minister of Italy, chose an equally modern
method of communication, his Facebook page, to respond: “The world
wouldn’t tolerate another Munich.” Now, as at Munich 38 summers ago,
sports officials insist their show must go on.

“It does not mean
that because we receive a threat, the World Cup should not be allowed
to be contested in South Africa, or any other country,” said Jerome
Valcke, the secretary general of soccer’s global authority, FIFA, told
journalists in Johannesburg.

“We have freedom in
the world to celebrate what we want. As the management of the
organisation that governs world football, we know there is a threat. We
will not stop the organisation of the World Cup because we got the
threat.” And, since terror is words as well as bombs or bullets, we can
expect more of this crossfire of rhetoric as the global focus on South
Africa intensifies.

Meanwhile, for some
the preparation has already begun. On the day that Adebayor issued his
statement in Manchester, a group of Mexican players became the first
participants to go into training camp for this World Cup.

Adebayor’s
withdrawal is no doubt chastened by his stated anger that not only did
the security forces fail to protect his team in an area where
separatists were known to pose a threat, but the African soccer
confederation subsequently banned Togo from the next two African
Nations Cups.

The officials still
stick to the line that the show must go on, even when a team is
traumatized and taken home at the order of its own head of state for
safekeeping and mourning.

Maybe, one day,
African soccer will stop vilifying a group of talented young men whose
only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Maybe, if that day
arrives, Adebayor will return to the fold. He is a volatile and
impressionable young man who had leadership thrust upon him by virtue
of being his country’s most visible celebrity.

What does he know,
what can an athlete living in the cocoon of being paid a hundred times
what he might earn in his own country, know about the real world?

Old custom

The isolation of
Mexico’s players, called into camp 60 days before their tournament
begins in South Africa, echoes an old Brazilian custom. It dates back
to the 1950s, when the 17-year-old-Pele was among those called into the
“concentration” of Brazil’s soon-to-be World champions.

The Brazil squad
would travel to Teresopolis, a mountain retreat above Rio de Janeiro.
They ate, slept, lived their game and their bond. And if the coaches,
physios and psychologists could not provide everything youth required,
one head coach had rules concerning access to the opposite sex.

Joao Saldanha, who
built the 1970 Brazil World Cup squad, once told me he had “many
bandits” in his team, and if he forbade them women, they would scale
the walls to get out.

His solution was to
tell players they could sleep with who they wanted, but should never
change the partner more than once a week. When, one day, the camp
commandant informed him that a player had broken the rule, Saldanha
went to the room.

“The girl was very
beautiful,” said the coach, smiling. “I had no choice. I confiscated
her!” Saldanha, a journalist as well as coach, was a fine story teller.

Javier Aguirre,
Mexico’s coach, has 17 players in camp. Others, on duty with clubs
abroad, will join when their seasons in Europe and elsewhere permit it.

Aguirre said on
Monday that he believed that he had the finest group of young Mexicans
ever. His task is to improve the collective mentality, to devise the
tactics and, for the next 60 days, the lifestyle.

“I asked the
players ‘Guys, do you want to make history? It’s going to cost, the
sacrifice is hard, and it’s difficult to leave your families to be here
for 60 days.’” He did not say whether the security at the gates was to
keep the media out, or the players in.

Hughes wrote for the New York Times News Service