Baghdad FC: Iraq's Football Story - A Hidden History of Sport and Tyranny
By Simon Freeman
John Murray
$35

This is very possibly the strangest sports book you'll ever read. That is because it's about Iraq or rather Iraq now, a complex riddle of a place with a violent past that goes so far beyond our sense of what is normal any attempt to describe it reads like a horror movie with scenes that can appear comic but, tragically, are not.

For example: in 1984-85, with Iraq losing the war against Iran, it was decreed that the Army win the Iraqi national league. Writes Simon Freeman: "In a game against al-Talaba the Army was losing 1-0 after 90 minutes. The referee played another half-hour and then awarded the Army a penalty, from which they scored. Against the Trade club the referee played an extra 13 minutes until the Army scored the only goal of the game. Then he blew full-time.

"In the final, crucial game of the season, the Army had to beat Air Force to win the league. After the Air Force scored two goals in the first half, the referee was told at half-time that his life depended on the result. In the first few minutes of the second half, he sent off two Air Force players."

It's hard to say where this story begins or ends but certainly the principal agent for the chaos it represents is Uday Hussein, Saddam's son who was appointed by his father to run, among other sports, soccer.

When Uday was four, Saddam took him on a tour of his regime's torture chambers. Uday liked the games he saw there and continued playing them all his life. His father growled occasionally, but no one else, it seems, ever told him Uday was wrong. He even shot his uncle at a state reception in front of the wife of the President of Egypt. From his teens, it seems, he raped, killed and tortured. Few people can have so richly deserved the violent end that eventually befell Uday Hussein.

Uday actually had no interest in, or understanding of, sport. Just as his father punished Iraqi soldiers for not winning the war with Iran, he punished Iraqi soccer players who didn't win games. They were taken to prison, tortured - often the old Arab torture of caning the feet - and beaten with cables and sticks. Then, in a way that humiliated them as Muslims, their heads were shaved and in this state they were released to prepare for the next game.

Before a particularly big match, Uday might threaten to kill someone or in fact the whole team. No one thought he wouldn't do it. Incredibly, there are places in the book where players talk about the difficulty of sustaining their love of the game under these circumstances.

Uday is dead when the book begins. Across the haunted stage left by his departure walk strange ghosts of men such as the former great of Iraqi football, Ammo Baba. Like virtually everyone else in Iraqi soccer, Ammo had wrestled with the demon of maintaining his integrity in a system that had a malign intelligence at its core.

The effort seems to have told. Ammo in particular makes little or no sense and as the book is largely a collections of quotes you have to wade through long passages such as: "I am a decent man, a Christian. I never steal. I am straight. I speak the truth. I talk for the benefit of sport, the country. I used to give money to poor people. People think I have millions of dollars. They should know I am a poor man . . . He (Uday) gave me nothing."

The author has no time for Iraq's insurgent forces - the ragbag of Sunni extremists, Baath Party fanatics and thugs who saw money in chaos - but those looking for simple answers to the problems of post-Saddam Iraq will find plenty to confound them in this book. To begin with, there is a recurring view that Uday's operatives are all back in the new organisations.

Equally, when the Iraqi national team made a goodwill visit to England, it became apparent that several leading players did not support the invasion of their country. (The tour was a farce, a scheduled match with league club Bristol Rovers having fallen through, the Iraqi national team ending up playing a team of British parliamentarians who took the field thinking it was a friendly against members of the new Iraqi parliament; the British lost 11-0.)

Later, there was outrage in the Iraqi team when they were used as propaganda in the US presidential election campaign by the Bush camp.

Freeman understandably chose not to visit Iraq. Had he done so, however, he might have given his book a governing principle that it otherwise lacks.

As it is, he concludes that "football in Iraq . . . was a microcosm of the country itself, made up of lies, half-truths, feuds and shifting alliances". Nonetheless, he is confident the game will come back in Iraq. Why? Because, as he says, it always does.