Talking Sports Books this month Robert O'Connor joins me to talk about "Blood and Circuses"

 In the last decade of the twentieth century, Eastern Europe
was plunged into chaos following the disintegration of the Soviet
and Yugoslav regimes. Politicians who had once jostled for power
on the periphery of the Communist world suddenly became engaged
in bloody campaigns as military frontiers sprang up across the
region and new nations attempted to assert themselves.


Journalist Robert O’Connor follows those peoples for whom
sovereignty and freedom have come at the highest price, telling
their stories from the perspective of the ultimate laboratory of
social science, the football pitch. For these communities,
football has been used both as an act of resistance and as an act
of rebuilding.


In Blood and Circuses, O’Connor embarks on an odyssey
through the conflict zones of Eastern Europe’s rebel republics to
investigate the role that football has played in the bloody
inter-ethnic wars in eight of the region’s disputed territories.
He discovers how in this part of the world the beautiful game has
served as a platform for the expression of identity and an outlet
through which to escape the hail of bullets and the iron fist of
repression.