I once saw an interview with basketball player Charles Barkley, in which he discussed his retirement. Barkley was a Hall of Fame player, and like most of those guys, he hung on a few seasons too long. Even having lost a step or three, Sir Charles was still a decent player, but that’s all he was — a decent player, but getting paid like a superstar and with a superstar’s reputation. A few seasons after retiring, he admitted as much. He said something like (from memory) “I’d guard a guy and think, ‘this is going to be easy, this guy is terrible’. And then he’d beat me, and I’d realize I just got beat by some guy who’s terrible, and then I knew it was time to hang it up.”
One thing chicks of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to genders don’t realize these days is how competitive men — actual biological males — are hardwired to be. Things like World of Warcraft and fantasy football only exist because the genius who invented those figured out a way to tap into that heretofore-unexpressed male competitiveness. And indeed, it’s the guy who’d never even dream of putting on shoulder pads who’s the most insanely competitive guy in a fantasy football league or (I’m certain) a whatever-they’re-called in World of Warcraft. Even the uber-dorks in the Math Club and the Speech and Debate Society went after each other like Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti. It’s just how guys are … or, at least, how guys used to be.
[…]
When it comes right down to it, that’s why men of a certain age simply don’t get “women’s sports”. Few will be as crustily chauvinistic as yer ‘umble narrator, and come right out and say it, but here goes: Women’s “sports” are just a shoddy knockoff of the real thing, because women just aren’t wired that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t competitive women, or athletic women — obviously there are, some very athletic and very competitive — but the female of the species just isn’t wired to put in the work the way males are. When faced with the prospect of three straight hours in the batting cage, swinging at curve after curve until your blisters have blisters and your shoulders feel like they’re falling out of their sockets, most women will quite sensibly ask “why bother?” Competition-for-competition’s-sake, even when it’s only against yourself in those long, long, looooong hours in the cage, just doesn’t motivate them the way it does us.
Which is why a person’s reaction to Simone Biles, or the USA Women’s soccer team, or the WNBA, or what have you is an almost perfect predictor of their age, not just their “gender”. I judge sports as sports. I don’t care about soccer, but if I did, I’d care about it as soccer — meaning, I’d want to see the best possible players, playing at the highest possible level. Women’s Olympic teams — that is to say, all star teams, the very best players — routinely get smoked by teams of 15 year old boys. Sir Charles is pushing sixty, but he could dominate the WNBA right now, in street clothes. Obviously this doesn’t apply to Pee Wee or rec leagues, but if you’re going to take a paycheck for doing it, then I want to see exactly what I paid for.
In estrogen-drenched, synchronized-ovulation Clown World, it’s all about appearances. Sure, she let her team down and wussed out (while still talking up how great she is), but can’t you see that it gave her the sadz? Sure, Megan Rapinoe et al keep getting smoked by 14 year old boys, then choking in international competition, but can’t you see her out there, with her pink hair and her tats and her Strong, Confident Empowerment? The “competition”, such as it is, is an excuse for the display. Michael Jordan ought to give baseball another shot. We know he can cry. These days, that’d get him a first-class ticket to Cooperstown.
Severian, “On Competition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-02.
October 8, 2024
QotD: The competitive instinct
June 22, 2024
“We can learn a lot about our betters from looking at each exception to their rules”
Julie Burchill isn’t a soccer fan, but she points out that the “exceptions” to the usual “rules” that the kakistocrats allow during international soccer tournaments tell us a lot about them:
Patriotism is not the only “bad” thing we’re suddenly “allowed” to do in the weeks when the national team plays on the world stage. The BBC in particular reminds men that they can disregard the finger-wagging for a few brief weeks. In EastEnders, male characters cringingly ask their mates to “get the beers in for the game”. Alcohol would generally be condemned as a public-health menace by Auntie, but during “The Game”, one more “cheeky” tipple apparently won’t hurt you.
We can learn a lot about our betters from looking at each exception to their rules. Don’t be racist – except against Jews. Believe all women about sexual assault – unless they’re Israeli. Oh, and be careful not to “culturally appropriate” the slightest thing from any other nationality, even to the point of never wearing a sombrero in a Mexican restaurant – but it’s fine to be a cross-dressing man culturally appropriating my sex. Meanwhile, if you’re a woman, be a good little Transmaid and stand by smiling, even if you call yourself a feminist.
Like most other places in the West in these dog days of civilisation, England feels like a nation devoid of hope and pride. Even so, being allowed to take pride in some overpaid ball-kickers, but not in the fact that this country contributed massively to ending slavery – lest we be called out as White Saviours – is a somewhat surreal situation to find ourselves in, after all those centuries of blood, sweat and struggle.
Flying the flag for the duration of the Euros is like being a eunuch who’s permitted to have his nuts back for a couple of weeks – for old times’ sake – and wear them as earrings. But those who indulge must be sure to tear their St George’s down sharpish once the festivities are over, lest they be fingered as a fascist for liking their own flag more than others. Remember, the only flag that can be flown constantly now is the Pride flag. This must be saluted respectfully wherever it pops up – failure to do so may identify you as an unworthy citizen of Soft Play Pit Nation.
May 14, 2024
QotD: Sporting songs
Mi-illwall, Millwall
Millwa-all, Millwall, Millwall
Millwa-all, Millwall, Millwall
Mi-illwall, Millwall.
(Repeat until knife fight)Mark Steyn, “Hyperpower”, Daily Telegraph, 2002-06-22.
May 10, 2024
QotD: The artificially induced public interest in women’s football
For example, quite recently there has been a concerted attempt to persuade the European public that women’s football (soccer) is interesting and exciting. The newspapers and online publications suddenly carry stories about it, with pictures, reports, profiles, and the like, whereas, shortly before, most people were only vaguely aware that women even played football.
No one can object to their doing so, of course, but the fact remains that they are not very good at it, at least not by comparison with men. They may be good — but with for women always appended. It is not the fault of women that they are not very good at football, any more than it is the fault of fish that they are illiterate, but the fact that everyone pretends not to notice it and dares not say it, at least in public, is surely a little sinister. A man of seventy may still play a good game of tennis, but it is always for his age: one wouldn’t expect him to win Wimbledon, nor would one expect excited, breathless reports on an over-seventies’ tennis tournament. The sudden interest in women’s football thus has a bogus feel about it, like the simulated enthusiasm of a crowd for the dictator in a communist state.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Propaganda & uglification”, New English Review, 2023-12-21.
April 25, 2023
The Grauniad now thinks sailing ships are racist
Henry Getley on the Guardian‘s ongoing crusade to expiate their historical links to the slave trade which now expands to denouncing the badges of the city’s two professional football teams:
But the latest chapter in this bizarre campaign is really scraping the barrel … targeting the city’s football club badges. Feature writer Simon Hattenstone has homed in on the logos of Manchester City and Manchester United, which both include an illustration of a sailing ship. And he has reached what he clearly sees as a “Gotcha!” conclusion – sailing ships were used to carry cotton, which was produced in the southern United States using slave labour. Therefore, displaying sailing ships is shameful. Both clubs must immediately delete the offending vessels from their badges.
I hold no brief for either Man City or Man United (quite the contrary). But I find it absurd and offensive that the clubs should be thus gratuitously assailed in an attempt to shore up the Guardian‘s increasingly crazed crusade.
For the record, the sailing ships are taken from the coat of arms of the Borough of Manchester. They were granted in 1842, 35 years after Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade, and are there simply to symbolise the city’s trade with the rest of the world. In fact, no large ships were seen in Manchester until the opening of the 35-mile-long Manchester Ship Canal in 1894.
Hattenstone’s argument is that the city was still using slave-produced US cotton up to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, so the symbolic use of the vessels must be denounced. Talk about clutching at straws! I wonder if he knows that in 1862 Manchester mill workers supported US President Abraham Lincoln’s call for an embargo on Confederate cotton, even though it meant destitution and starvation for them and their families. He could have read about this selfless gesture in a Guardian article ten years ago.
I’ll tell you what, Mr Hattenstone, if we’re talking about links to slavery, how about demanding that the Guardian abandons its main headline typeface, which is shamefully called “Guardian Egyptian”? After all, slavery was practised in Egypt from ancient times right until the late 19th century. Yes, it’s a ridiculous link to make, but no more ridiculous than calling for the removal of ships from football badges. Sorry, Mr Hattenstone, you may be a self-proclaimed City fan, but this is an own goal.
April 24, 2023
QotD: The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
A little joke for psychologists there.
In 1994, someone left a comment on the website of the St. Paul Pioneer Press (Minnesota) saying that he had heard two references to the Red Army Faction, AKA the Baader-Meinhof gang — a 1970s German terrorist organisation — in the space of 24 hours, having never previously been aware of them. This somehow provided a new name for a cognitive bias. Don’t let anyone tell you that posting online comments on regional newspaper websites is a waste of time.
Otherwise known as frequency bias, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a combination of selective attention bias (paying more attention to some things than to others) and confirmation bias (looking for things that you agree with or which serve your purposes in some way).
Arnold Zwicky added another aspect when he wrote about the significance of things happening recently, describing the “recency illusion” as …
… the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.
The classic example is people’s tendency to notice a certain type of car once they own one themselves, especially when they bought it recently.
Of course it is possible that the thing you’ve just started noticing is truly becoming more frequent. I have noticed more shirts, flags and other merchandise related to Arsenal FC recently. This may be because the team is doing very well this season and I am more conscious of them as a result. Or it may be that Arsenal fans are less coy about showing their support after years of under-performing. What is less likely is that there are significantly more Arsenal fans than there were before.
Christopher Snowden, “Sudden deaths and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon”, The Snowden Substack, 2023-01-21.
October 15, 2021
Alphonso Davies is “CONCACAF’s best player — which is to say, the continent’s best player”
I had been a follower of the Canadian national soccer teams back when I was coaching my son and his friends in U-4 through U-16 house league soccer, but while the women’s team is among the world’s best, the men’s team has always lagged a long way behind. In Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh shows that there’s a very big spark of hope in the person of Alphonso Davies of Edmonton:
Alphonso Davies playing for FC Bayern Munich, 28 April, 2019.
Photo by Granada via Wikimedia Commons.
Reaching the [2022 FIFA World Cup] tournament involves finishing in the top four in an eight-country “octagonal” round-robin tournament that include the best sides from our continental soccer federation, CONCACAF. Last night, Canada faced a critical home match in Toronto against a traditional close rival, Panama, who stood just ahead of us in the octagonal table after a shock 1-0 home win against the United States.
This game wasn’t a very big deal even in dedicated sports media, but if you were paying close attention, you knew this was a crucial match for our World Cup hopes, which have quietly begun to build in the last year or two. Panama has a strong side, strong enough to have qualified for the 2018 World Cup finals ahead of us. But some awesome young Canadian talent is coming into full flower, and our country now possesses, by common consensus, CONCACAF’s best player — which is to say, the continent’s best player.
If anyone doubted the credentials of 20-year-old Edmontonian Alphonso Davies before last night, they have been silenced, if not entombed. Canada fell behind one-nil to Panama early in the match, then equalized shortly before half-time. Panama was lucky, at that point, to stand even, and their players knew it.
That’s when Davies, who had already filled a highlight reel with unstoppable dribbles in the first 45 minutes, put Canada ahead with the most astonishing goal ever scored by any man wearing the national colours. [Twitter link] Let us emphasize: you don’t need to be a soccer fan to appreciate this one. Phonzie’s pursuit and robbery of Panama’s Harold Cummings, who had a 35- or 45-metre head start to a harmless ball on the touchline, resembles nothing so much as the targeting and evisceration of an antelope by a cheetah. Davies then humiliated a second defender and wrong-footed Panama keeper Luis Mejia, who certainly would have made a better effort if his soul hadn’t already departed his body.
The match ended 4-1 in Canada’s favour, with Panama visibly discouraged at the failure of brutal rugby tactics facilitated by a typically inept CONCACAF referee. Davies plays his professional football at Euro-giant club Bayern Munich, and his galactico ability is no secret across the pond. Over here, he has already won (half of) a Lou Marsh Trophy as Canadian sportsman of the year. But one doubts, talking to people who don’t follow soccer, that he has the appropriate degree of fame in Canada yet. He is probably not as famous as Penny Oleksiak, or Bianca Andreescu, or whomever’s the seventh defenceman on the Montreal Canadians depth chart.
Two years ago, the possibility that Davies might one day help drag Canada to a World Cup final or two was a foggy hypothetical for the future. Last night he took a giant step, or several hundred of them, toward doing exactly that. Canada still has to follow through in the remaining half of the octagonal, but the outlook is now good. (Many Canadian national sides might have wilted against Panama after falling behind and being presented with rapacious unpenalized violence, but our manager John Herdman has achieved a deserved new level of respect in the past year, too.)
June 15, 2019
13-0
The US Women’s national soccer team eviscerated Thailand by an unheard-of 13-0 score in the group stage of the FIFA Women’s World Cup. It was not a great day for sportsmanship, as the American women celebrated every goal as if they’d just broken a 0-0 tie in injury time of the final:
A screen capture from the highlight video at YouTube. Amusingly, if you try to watch this clip on the official FIFA Women’s World Cup site, you get an error saying “This video contains content from FIFA, who has blocked it from display on this website”
At American Thinker, Jonathan Keiler recounts the reaction to the game and the counter-reaction that followed:
On Tuesday the U.S. Women’s National (soccer) Team (WNT) obliterated a hapless Thailand squad in a 13-0 rout. That’s about 91-0 in football terms, but in a sense even worse, given soccer’s relative dearth of scoring. It would not be worth noting, except that many present and former WNT players recently sued the U.S. Soccer Federation claiming disparate treatment and pay, and to the general championing of all things female in a supposed age of “toxic masculinity.”
The game and the result might cause a reasonable observer to question popular progressive views on these issues, not because the U.S. women won, but how they did it.
[…]
This lack of competitive edge to the women’s game affects it at all levels, from youth leagues to international soccer. It’s not the individual players’ fault, but it’s a fact. I coached soccer for years (boys and girls.) On the women/girls side, routs like what happened on Tuesday are relatively commonplace in many leagues, up to and including high school — and obviously even after. And while this happens on the boys/men’s side too, it is less common and exaggerated.
So even leaving aside the issue of whether the men’s game is better in terms of speed/skill/aggression, the fact is generally the men’s game is more interesting and competitive more often. That puts additional fannies in seats, people watching on TV, and generates greater income, which is reflected in pay. Non-soccer aficionados may pooh-pooh the game’s rhythms and low scoring generally, but the fact is, first round games in the Men’s World Cup are far more interesting and exciting than the female version. So the WNT did themselves no favor in their legal case by making a major shortcoming of the women’s game painfully obvious.
They also did themselves no favors winning over international fans (and a lot of on-the-fence Americans) by their graceless destruction of the Thailand ladies. It’s not just that the WNT ran up the score, it’s that as they did so they acted as if they were heroes doing the impossible, rather than seasoned pros essentially carving up an amateur squad. They screamed, danced, ran around crazily, slid on the ground and the like, after every one of those thirteen goals. They didn’t act like children — they acted worse than children.
July 18, 2018
A great World Cup?
At Spiked, Mick Hume looks back at what we were told to expect from the hosting nation of the 2018 World Cup:
FIFA 2018 World Cup opening ceremony
Via Wikimedia Commons
Everybody agrees that the 2018 World Cup has been a roaring success. Yet remember how recently we were being warned that it would be the equivalent of a humanitarian disaster?
Before a ball was kicked we were assured that English and other international fans would all be beaten up, if not eaten alive, by armies of ‘neo-Nazi’ Russian hooligans, and that President Vladimir Putin would cynically exploit the World Cup ‘like Hitler did the 1936 Olympics’, as a tool in his plot for global domination and world war.
British government ministers and officials boycotted the tournament after the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal (the expense-account restaurants of Moscow might have missed their presence, but it’s unlikely anybody else did). And England squad member Danny Rose reportedly told his family ‘don’t come to Russia’, because of ‘fears that they would be racially abused’.
Questions were asked about why there were relatively few England fans at the team’s opening games in Russia. In the face of such sustained scaremongering, it might rather seem a wonder that anyone braved the journey.
Yet once the actual football kicked off, what happened? None of the above. Instead the World Cup immediately became a glorious, thrilling spectacle, capturing the imagination of fans worldwide amid a rolling party atmosphere across Russia.
This follows the similar reality gaps between political scaremongering and sporting success around other recent World Cups and Olympic games, notably London 2012. It should surely be a reminder to us all to ignore the agenda-driving doom-mongers in future and remember that, in the end, the game’s the thing. There is no chance of keeping politics out of sport, but we might at least try to keep sport out of politics and reject attempts to use our great sporting occasions as political footballs. (Rider: the idea of staging the next World Cup in Qatar still seems bonkers, but…)
January 11, 2017
“The money paid to footballers is ‘grotesque’, said Corbyn today, in his best irate vicar voice”
British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn just proposed a salary cap for professional football (that’s “soccer” to us benighted colonials on the other side of the pond) in the UK:
Is there nothing Jeremy Corbyn can’t screw up? This week his advisers whispered to the press that their leader was about to do a Donald, be more populist, try to connect with the man and woman in the street who might think of him as a bit stiff and aloof and stuck in the Seventies. And how does he kick off this project? By slagging off footballers, the most idolised sportspeople in Britain, cheered by vast swathes of the very people Labour no longer reaches but wishes it could. The money paid to footballers is ‘grotesque’, said Corbyn today, in his best irate vicar voice. Cue media coverage of Corbyn’s moaning mug next to Wayne Rooney (£250k a week, loved by millions). What next in Corbyn’s populist makeover? A call to wind down Coronation St? Close pubs on Sundays? A Twitterspat with Ant and Dec or Sheridan Smith or some other national treasure?
[…]
Labour leftists have never understood this basic fact: ordinary people don’t hate rich people. In fact they admire many of them. They don’t wince when they see a footballer and his WAG posing by the pool in Hello! — they think, ‘That looks like a nice life. Good on them.’ Corbyn bemoaned footballers’ pay as part of his proposal to enact a law preventing people from earning above a certain amount of money. Yes, a maximum wage. ‘I would like there to be some kind of high earnings cap,’ he said. It’s the worst idea a British political leader has had in years, and it reveals pretty much everything that is wrong with the left today.
First there’s the sheer authoritarianism of it. It will never come to pass, of course, because Corbyn’s footballer-bashing and bodged populism and general inability to connect with anyone outside of Momentum and the left Twittersphere means Labour won’t be darkening the door of Downing St for yonks. But that Corbyn is even flirting with the notion of putting a legal lid on what people can earn is pretty extraordinary. It would basically be a stricture against getting rich, a restriction on ambition, a state-enforced standard of living: you could be comfortable and middle-class, but not loaded. There’s a stinging moralism, too. Labourites complain about those on the right who look down on the ‘undeserving poor’, but what we have here is not all that different: a sneering at the undeserving rich, a prissy concern with the bank balances and lifestyles of those who’ve made a bomb.
November 7, 2016
QotD: American sports
If Football is Handegg, then Soccer is Divegrass. Basketball is FlopDunk, Hockey is IcePunch, and Baseball is CrotchGrab.
Dave Rappoccio, “Soccer Rules!”, The Draw Play, 2015-04-01.
February 27, 2016
In Scotland, singing a song can get you sent to jail
In Spiked, Kevin Rooney tells the tale of a young soccer fan who faces jail time for joining hundreds of other fans in singing a song:
Imagine the scene: a young man is led away in handcuffs to begin a prison sentence as his mother is left crying in the courtroom. He is 19 years old, has a good job, has no previous convictions, and has never been in trouble before. These facts cut no ice with the judge, however, as the crime is judged so heinous that only a custodial sentence is deemed appropriate. The young man in question was found guilty of singing a song that mocked and ridiculed a religious leader and his followers.
So where might this shocking story originate? Was it Iran? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? Perhaps it was Russia, a variation of the Pussy Riot saga, without the worldwide publicity? No, the country in question is Scotland and the young man is a Rangers fan. He joined in with hundreds of his fellow football fans in singing ‘offensive songs’ which referred to the pope and the Vatican and called Celtic fans ‘Fenian bastards’.
Such songs are part and parcel of the time-honoured tradition of Rangers supporters. And I have yet to meet a Celtic fan who has been caused any harm or suffering by such colourful lyrics. Yet in sentencing Connor McGhie to three months in a young offenders’ institution, the judge stated that ‘the extent of the hatred [McGhie] showed took my breath away’. He went on: ‘Anybody who participates in this disgusting language must be stopped.’
Several things strike me about this court case. For a start, if Rangers fans singing rude songs about their arch rivals Celtic shocks this judge to the core, I can only assume he does not get out very much or knows little of life in Scotland. Not that his ignorance of football culture is a surprise — the chattering classes have always viewed football-related banter with contempt. But what is new about the current climate is that in Scotland, the middle-class distaste for the behaviour of football fans has become enshrined in law.
H/T to Natalie Solent for the link.
April 10, 2015
“Scotland in the 21st century is a hotbed of the new authoritarianism”
Brendan O’Neill on the odd disconnect between American views of Scotland (roughly summed up by kilts, whisky, and Braveheart) and the reality:
… far from being a land of freedom-yearning Bravehearts, Scotland in the 21st century is a hotbed of the new authoritarianism. It’s the most nannying of Europe’s nanny states. It’s a country that imprisons people for singing songs, instructs people to stop smoking in their own homes, and which dreams of making salad-eating compulsory. Seriously. Scotland the Brave has become Scotland the Brave New World.
If you had to guess which country in the world recently sent a young man to jail for the crime of singing an offensive song, I’m guessing most of you would plumb for Putin’s Russia or maybe Saudi Arabia. Nope, it’s Scotland.
Last month, a 24-year-old fan of Rangers, the largely Protestant soccer team, was banged up for four months for singing “The Billy Boys,” an old anti-Catholic ditty that Rangers fans have been singing for years, mainly to annoy fans of Celtic, the largely Catholic soccer team. He was belting it out as he walked along a street to a game. He was arrested, found guilty of songcrimes—something even Orwell failed to foresee—and sent down.
It’s all thanks to the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act, which, yes, is as scary as it sounds. Introduced in 2012 by the Scottish National Party, the largest party in Scotland the Brave New World and author of most of its new nanny-state laws, the Act sums up everything that is rotten in the head of this sceptred isle. Taking a wild, wide-ranging scattergun approach, it outlaws at soccer matches “behaviour of any kind,” including, “in particular, things said or otherwise communicated,” that is “motivated (wholly or partly) by hatred” or which is “threatening” or which a “reasonable person would be likely to consider offensive.”
Got that? At soccer games in Scotland it is now illegal to do or say anything — and “in particular” to say it — that is hateful or threatening or just offensive. Now, I don’t know how many readers have been to a soccer game in Britain, but offensiveness, riling the opposing side, is the gushing lifeblood of the game. Especially in Scotland. Banning at soccer matches hateful or offensive comments, chants, songs, banners, or badges — all are covered by the Offensive Behaviour Act — is like banning cheerleaders from American football. Sure, our cheerleaders are gruffer, drunker, fatter, and more foul-mouthed than yours, but they play a similarly key role in getting the crowds going.
The Offensive Behaviour Act has led to Celtic fans being arrested in dawn raids for the crime of singing pro-I.R.A. songs — which they do to irritate Rangers fans — and Rangers fans being hauled to court for chanting less-than-pleasant things about Catholics.
Even blessing yourself at a soccer game in Scotland could lead to arrest. Catholic fans have been warned that if they “bless themselves aggressively” at games, it could be “construed as something that is offensive,” presumably to non-Catholic fans, and the police might pick them up. You don’t have to look to some Middle Eastern tinpot tyranny if you want to see the state punishing public expressions of Christian faith — it’s happening in Scotland.
July 9, 2014
Thoughts on the “blitzkreig of Belo Horizonte”
Colby Cosh, self described as having descended from “multiple generations of German-killers” explains why he’s content with Brazil’s soccer disaster at the hands of the German national team yesterday:
It’s already being called “The Mineiraço”. Yesterday’s 7-1 slaughter of Brazil by Germany in the semifinals of the World Cup seemed an awful lot like a historical turning point, and the political ripples are already being discussed. Perhaps they are not even confined to Brazil, although the recriminations there are bound to be awesome: the government spent untold billions on a golden stage for Brazilian glory, and ended up with the sporting equivalent of the Challenger disaster, if Challenger had crashed intact into a packed stadium where the Pope was giving a homily.
What seems most remarkable to me is not the match itself but the prelude. I grew up in a colony of Anglo-Saxon Soccer World in which Germany was inevitably cast as a cartoon villain and Brazil was everybody’s second favourite national side. Brazil were what Canada fancies itself to be in hockey: the native “speakers” of the prestige dialect of the game — a national noblesse, possessing self-conscious power to establish, dictate, and impose its ideal form on lesser breeds. (Even Canadian children who played soccer were dimly aware of this: the rich ones would signify their coolness by wearing Brazil kit to practices, as I’m sure Bulgarian youth hockey players must signify to their mates by flaunting expensive Crosbiana.)
[…]
Anglo Soccer World seemed to be very much leaning toward Germany in the run-up to the Mineiraço. No doubt this is partly because we are getting ever further from the Second World War. Germany has been mostly tame, friendly, and progressive for 70 years, the Biblical specification of a human lifetime. The length of this period is approaching the duration of the trouble to which German hyper-German-ness subjected Europe between the Battle of Sedan and the Holocaust. It is hard to see any lingering trace of the old ills of the German national character in contemporary Germany.
Update: Compare the responses to yesterday’s game to the reaction after the 1954 West German team’s victory:
… the West German victory was hardly something that was welcome elsewhere in Europe, particularly to the authorities in East Berlin. Less than ten years after the end of a world war for which the Germans were held responsible, there was understandably little public enthusiasm in Britain and France at the outcome of the competition. Nonetheless the extent of the dismay and even vitriol at the time expressed in the media of both countries requires further explanation and points to deep-seated concerns in Britain and France about the speed of German economic recovery and re-armament in the mid-1950s.
For the East German regime, West Germany’s victory at the World Cup was the worst possible outcome. Communist leaders had been praying for a Hungarian win in order to prove the much-claimed ‘superiority of socialist sport’ and, by implication, the Communist form of government. Hungary’s defeat appeared to prove that the opposite was true, just at a time when East German leaders were trying to promote their state as the ‘progressive option’ for all Germans, as opposed to what they called the ‘Nazi successor state’ of the Federal Republic.
[…]
It was two events off the pitch – one immediately after the final and the other a few days later – that were to give ammunition to those keen to link the West German victory to allegations of resurgent German nationalism. First, as a rain-soaked Fritz Walter led his team up to collect the Jules Rimet trophy from the man whose name it bore and a Swiss band played the German national anthem, a boozy section of the German fans began singing the banned first verse of the national anthem – ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles’ rather than the Federal Republic’s officially sanctioned third verse – ‘Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit’ (unity, justice and freedom). Foreign journalists present immediately took note.
A few days later the damage was compounded by a speech given at the official victory celebration in a Munich beer cellar by the President of the German Football Association (Deutscher Fussball-Bund), ‘Peco’ Bauwens. In an atmosphere heavy with alcohol and emotion, Bauwens – who had joined the Nazi Party as early as 1933 – told the reportedly bemused players not only that they had been inspired by the spirit of the Nordic God, Wotan, but that victory had been made possible by their adherence to Der Führerprinzip. By this he appears to have meant unflinching obedience to a strategy worked out by the coach, Josef (Sepp) Herberger. The speech, which was being broadcast live by Bavarian Radio, was mysteriously cut short at this point and the tapes subsequently lost, but foreign reporters monitoring the coverage had already heard enough.
July 2, 2014
“Fixing” soccer games for fun and profit
Bill Barnwell discusses what we know (or what we’ve been told) about corruption in soccer matches all the way from Finland to Cameroon to the current World Cup fixtures in Brazil:
Late Monday night, FIFA’s worst nightmare began to break. The Cameroon Football Federation sent out an urgent press release announcing that they were investigating claims that several of Cameroon’s recent matches were fixed, most notably the country’s 4-0 loss to Croatia during the group stage of the World Cup. The allegations come from a story in German newspaper Der Spiegel, which reported that notable alleged Singaporean match fixer Wilson Raj Perumal told the paper in a pre-match Facebook chat that the African side would have a player sent off in the first half before losing 4-0. Both would later occur in the match. Perumal further alleged that the Cameroon team had “seven bad apples” and has been involved, to some extent, with fixing all three of its group stage matches before exiting the tournament.
Perumal has since issued a statement, via the co-authors of his biography, denying that he predicted the result.
Of course, allegations of fixed soccer matches aren’t anything new. What makes this so shocking and so meaningful is the idea that a World Cup match was fixed. It’s one thing for some third-division match under a rock in front of 40 people to be rigged. If a World Cup match can be manipulated with the globe watching, though, is there any match that can’t be fixed?
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Perumal and an associate eventually found their way to Scandinavia, where they would fix matches at a number of clubs in Finland. Most notably, Perumal offered to invest more than a million Euros in struggling Finnish side Tampere United if they allowed him to invite several awful players from outside the country on the take to come play for the club. They took about half of the money and didn’t bother to play the players Perumal brought on; they’re also now banned from Finnish soccer. For some of his fixes, Perumal was actually able to issue instructions during matches to players on the pitch from the team bench.
Perumal suggests that he didn’t need influence over much of a team to fix a match, preferring to focus on the defense. “I prefer back-line players: the two central defenders, the last man stopper and the goalkeeper. If you can get three back-line players on your payroll then you can execute a fix because, when you want to lose, the attackers can’t help you,” he wrote.
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As for Cameroon, well, it’s hard to say what will become of them. If there are seven players on the team who are proven to have fixed matches at the World Cup, their punishment will be severe, with permanent banishment from the sport a likely option. I’ll be intrigued to see what the investigation reveals, even if I’m very skeptical that an investigation conducted by the Cameroon FA and FIFA will be very thorough. They have little to gain from revealing their own corruption. I don’t know that Cameroon necessarily manipulated results during this World Cup, but I would be surprised if the entire tournament actually went untouched by match fixers. There’s simply too much to be gained and too little to stop it from occurring.
