In the quarter-finals and semi-finals of Euro 2008, I have supported Portugal against Germany, Croatia against Turkey, the Netherlands against Russia, Italy against Spain, Turkey against Germany, and Russia against Spain. I have, nevertheless, enjoyed myself enormously.
Since I shall be cheering for the Spanish on Sunday night, people who like to gamble may think this is reason enough to bet heavily on Germany to win the competition. (On the other hand, see this post.)
Why do the (male) Russian fans, but not the Dutch fans, insist on taking their shirts off in the stands at Basel? Or does the cameraperson just have a thing for topless Russian men?
On 3 April 1938, at any rate. Very interesting article in the New Statesman (and it’s not often you can say that).
Here’s the French football team and the better part of a hundred thousand fans singing the Marseillaise before the start of the 1998 World Cup Final. (Starts at 5 minutes in; jump forwards to 5.48 or so for Jacques Chirac in full-throated song.)
David Runciman, over here.
Well, not really. But I’m terribly pleased to see that England have drawn Croatia again for their World Cup qualifying campaign. (And Andorra, too.) The BBC seem to have produced the best subtitled version of Tony Henry’s notorious performance of the Croatian national anthem the other night; the video link is from this page.
Long before he published his fine book about football in Eastern Europe, Behind the Curtain, Jonathan Wilson was writing for The Voice of the Turtle (currently in hibernation). Here’s his review of Puskas on Puskas: The Life and Times of a Footballing Legend, from 1999.
UPDATE [2.30pm]: I see that Jonathan also supplied something of an obit for tehgraun.
Corriere della Sera has a nice Zidane headbutting game of sorts on its website.
So I didn’t have to prepare my “Only Zinedine Zidane can interrupt the inexorable logic of history” post, after all. But I did laugh when I noticed this morning that Le Monde’s pre-match supplement had the headline “Zidane, la touche finale”, the words appearing just above where his forehead was in the picture.
UPDATE [5pm]: Make sure you read Daniel Davies’s tribute to Zizou’s headbutt over at Comment is Free.
In the various World Cups since 1966 (excluding 1982, owing to its funny 2d-round group format, which messes things up), England has failed to win the World Cup in only three different ways. EITHER by not qualifying at all for the Finals (1974, 1978, 1994). OR by going out to the eventual winners in the knock-out stages (1986: Argentina [QF], 1990: Germany [SF], 2002: Brazil [QF]). OR, more interestingly, by going out in the knock-out stages to a team that goes out in the next round, usw. (So, in 1970: England lost to West Germany [QF], who lost to Italy [SF], who lost to Brazil [F]; in 1998: England lost to Argentina [2R] who lost to Holland [QF], who lost to Brazil [SF], who lost to France [F].)
Of these three patterns, only the third is still in play. On the basis that this kind of inexorable historical logic is, well, inexorable, I therefore predict an Italian victory tonight.
I think I’m one of the few blog-writers to have easy access to a copy of Tutte le Barzellette su Totti (with a preface by the great man himself), so here’s a sample:
Totti cerca di finire un puzzle. ci mette quasi quattro mesi. Poi gira la scatola e legge: “Dai due ai tre anni”. Commenta: “Ah�, ma allora so’un genio!!!”.
Totti jokes are quite similar to David Beckham jokes, but in Italian and with bits of Roman slang (which I don’t usually understand) thrown in. I don’t know whether Beckham or Totti jokes came first, or whether, as with the differential calculus or neo-classical economics, it is basically a case of simultaneous discovery.I thought it was a penalty, anyway. Lucas Neill sort of lay down in front of Fabio Grosso and invited him to trip over him, which isn’t terribly sporting.
UPDATE [27.06.2006]: The resident Italian police-bear is quite pleased, too:
The BBC TMS commentators are chatting away about how the Oval was once kitted out as a prisoner-of-war camp (though never actually used as one). The New Orleans Superdome and the Houston Astrodome have recently been used for disaster-relief. General Pinochet found alternative uses for the Santiago national stadium, the Taliban used to hold public executions at the Kabul football stadium, and the French police used the V�lodrome d’Hiver for the mass round-up of Jews for deportation in July 1942.
Please post other examples of historically interesting, important or disturbing uses of sports facilities in the comments.
The fools who read the Observer think that Nick Hornby’s somewhat engaging and mildly interesting Fever Pitch is a better sports book than C L R James’s imperishable classic Beyond a Boundary (and scroll down to #3). This is idiocy on a large scale.
On Tuesday, as on Thursday.
But wasn’t the Liverpool defence good?
I don’t really follow any football teams. I almost decided to become a mild Newcastle United partisan a couple of years back, but the day after I made that half-hearted resolution Bobby Robson decided to sign Lee Bowyer, and that rather killed that courtship stone dead. But I do have a very soft spot for AS Roma, and was sorry to hear that they lost to Lazio 3:1 at the weekend.
England go out to the first decent side they meet in the knock-out stages, in a quarter final to a team managed by Scolari, etc. But at least there’s a new name — David Beckham’s, no less — to inscribe in fiery letters in the annals of embarrassing penalty misses alongside Stuart Pearce, Gareth Southgate, David Batty…
The list goes on, doesn’t it?
I watched England v Croatia earlier this evening, the first match of the European Championships that I’ve followed on the TV rather than on the radio, and what really struck me was just how physically repulsive a big chunk of the England team is.
David Beckham was once reasonably good looking, but is now clearly trying to look nasty with his general lack of hair and tattoos and facial expressions; Wayne Rooney is a talented striker, but very ugly indeed; David James has cultivated some exceptionally unpleasant facial hair; and Paul Scholes looks like, well, Paul Scholes (fine header, though, at the end of the first half). The rest of the team isn’t so bad. But those four are quite hideous. Perhaps they can play the quarter-final against Portugal with bags over their heads to spare the viewing public.
(The Croatians were a far better looking team, even if their football was less accomplished. And it goes without saying that the Croatian fans were kinder on the eye than their English counterparts.)
UPDATE [22/6/04]: Will has posted some general theoretical rubbish on the subject. And [an UPDATE to the UPDATE, also 22/6/04], Jamie’s just pointed out in the comments that he was onto this important subject last week here and here, and has a sort-of evolutionary biological explanation for it all, which, if true, is terrifying in its implications.
MORE UPDATES [also 22/6/04]: Backword Dave weighs in, although he dissents from the damning judgment on David James, above. And Gwydion the Magician agrees, but observes that “the point Chris misses is that the players are quite representative of the nation as a whole”, and that “[h]aving spent time recently in five countries, I think it would be hard to deny that British men and women are on average the ugliest people in the advanced industrial world.”
Cars trailing Portuguese flags are driving through the middle of Oxford right now honking their horns, which, if you ask me, is splendid.
England’s, or, um, England’s? Take the Supporter or Deporter? quiz, and see if you can visually differentiate between patriotic supporters of our national football team and, er, a bunch of racist thugs.
I scored seven, with a fine streak coming to an end after bollocksing up the last two; Uninformed Jason managed all ten; and Sarah, from whom I’ve pinched the link, got six. More scores, please.
Chris Bertram is spending some of his time writing friendly criticisms of my various personal preferences over at Crooked Timber here and here. I’m now spending more of my time justifying my choices back on this blog. Yesterday I dealt with the Marxists (though read on for some second thoughts on the matter), and today I’m turning to the altogether more complicated Question of Sport.
So, beginning towards the end of his post with his double misplacements, I’m entertained to learn that when he cheers for England against Scotland in football or rugby he feels himself able to play (if necessary) the postcolonial card against the memory of Colley’s beastly Scottish imperialists… On the second misplacement, I’m not at all sure that I agree that “the displacement of the Union Jack by the Cross of St George in the hands of English sporting fans represents if not an explicit rejection of Great British colonial nationalism, at least an adaptation to something less jingoistic and aggressive”. But that may in part be because the only time I’ve experienced my own College bar as a less than fully welcoming place was the time there was a group of usually intelligent male (did I have to say that?) undergraduates with the Cross of St George painted on their faces singing, um, jingoistic and aggressive songs about how the Argentinian football team’s fondness for gay sex was grounds for asserting the superiority of the English. (Somehow I don’t think that this particular poisonous triangle of English nationalism, homophobia and football is unique to Oxford University.) One anecdote certainly does not a theoretical argument make — and I’m not going to pretend for a moment that the older Union Jackshirts never expressed similar attitudes — but I hope Chris will forgive me if my inclination is to respond to these expressions of this Cross of St George English nationalism by wanting to have nothing to do with it, rather than by launching a campaign of my own to try and contest and resignify the meanings of national symbols in sport. There’s certainly a disidentification here (though it’s a far stronger disidentification with nationalist expressions of support than with the object of support, the English football team, which I sometimes do support, as I did in that England v Argentina game), but as I’ve described it so far this disidentification has nothing straightforwardly to do with either postcolonial guilt or the romance of the Celtic nations, the two explanatory factors to which Chris draws attention.
Some people do have a policy of not supporting England. Dennis Skinner is one, and it was his use of the phrase, “Anyone but England” which provided the title for Mike Marqusee’s fine cricket book, which I was glancing through again last night. (C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary also reminds us that the complex relationship of cricket, social class and national politics is a spur to the very best writing on the game: I’m half regretting not voting for James and Fred Engels in Josh Cherniss’s poll, replacing Benjamin and Habermas on my list, but I don’t know whether he’ll let me submit a replacement ballot.) I don’t hold to “Anyone but England” as a policy or principle, and often I do find myself wanting England teams to win the matches they play, in football or in cricket — though quite often in cricket it’s obvious to me that my desire for the English cricket team to do well in part stems from my desire to have a competitive match: good Test cricket is one of life’s great pleasures, but when the English middle order collapses and the bowlers are crap, as has been known to happen, that’s very unlikely to take place. Cricket really is the sport where postimperial questions are quite inescapable, since the international game is entirely a product of the British Empire and matters of immigration and apartheid have done so much to shape the game, but I’m not going to try to talk about them here (go and read James and Marqusee if you’re interested) — except to say that when I experience feelings of postimperial guilt with respect to Test cricket I think that it doesn’t so much concern my feelings about the England team in particular, so much as the pleasure I derive from the entire spectacle (which we should understand here to include the Test Match Special radio commentary).
So, what of the rugby World Cup?
The two World Cup games I’ve enjoyed most were Wales vs New Zealand and Ireland vs Australia, in both cases because spirited performances by the Northern sides showed that the gap between (most) Northern and (most) Southern hemisphere rugby was narrower than it’s often taken to be. And watching the first game made it very easy to support Wales wholeheartedly against a dull and in some respects disappointing England the following week. It was a thoroughly good choice: Wales were the firm underdogs before the tournament began, in a sport where underdogs rarely win (look at both the quarter-final and semi-final lineups); and in their quarter-final they scored three tries to England’s one, played some great attacking rugby, led at half-time, and would have remained competitive right to the end if only that penalty kick had gone over in the 74th minute (or whenever it was). England won because Wales conceded way too many penalties, Jonny Wilkinson’s a good kicker, and their levels of personal fitness and discipline remained quite a bit higher. But those aren’t reasons for feeling terribly excited about their performance or their team. A dozen years ago I used to enjoy England’s ten-man rugby, but that was when I was a back-row forward myself, and I enjoyed watching England’s pack play well. Now it’s almost exactly ten years since the last game I ever played, and I find that I much prefer watching the open running game which I’ve seen Wales and France play in this World Cup better than England have managed to do — and that makes me want sides like that to do well. (I’ll certainly cheer for England if it’s an Australia vs England final, though, and that fact does say something about the ineliminably agonistic construction of national sporting identities.)
Chris writes critically of the “people who are plainly acculturated as English” who “seek to identify as �really� something else (on the grounds that this or that ancestor was Irish, Scottish or Welsh)”, but he seems to me to get things only half right here (at least in my case — though I have reason to think he was thinking of my case when he wrote those words). I’m “plainly acculturated as English”, but the point of cultivating a memory of where my ancestors came from in the context of sporting contests (in my case Ireland, Wales, England, New Zealand and Denmark) isn’t to stake an implausible claim to an authentic national identity that overrides my thoroughgoing Englishness. (What could that possibly be?) The fact of my grandmother’s Welshness, for example, and the fact that her father played rugby for Wales around a century ago doesn’t make me Welsh, but it does provide the right kind of elective affinity or affective attachment which makes it easier for me to cheer for Wales (or Ireland, or New Zealand, with reference to slightly different facts) than it would be to rustle up any real enthusiasm for, say, Australia, Scotland, Canada or Uruguay. (I’ll stop there before I start talking about interpellation and the way in which the universal does not hail. Don’t worry.)
Chris raises the further question of whether this “displaced allegiance [is] welcome or irritating to the recipients”. I don’t know. I imagine that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t, and that that depends on the context: there’s more than one public for sport, that’s usually a very good thing, and the problem he raises is not unique to matters of national identifications: what do local supporters of Liverpool and Manchester United make of the southern middle-class kids who fetishise those teams? Or, closer to my home at least, what do the supporters of Oxford United make of the small number of university students who go to the games, and would they like there to be a lot more of them, such that the overall character of the fan base were to change significantly in its social composition? I’m sure many Irish and Welsh fans would find my occasional support for their rugby teams ridiculous and not especially welcome. But I also suspect that if I were to go to Lansdowne Road with my Irish uncles-by-marriage for Ireland v England (not an implausible possibility), they would both want me to cheer for Ireland and reserve the right to take the piss out of me as a representative Englishman where appropriate — and that seems entirely reasonable on their part.
There’s only one sports team about which I feel thoroughly and uncomplicatedly partisan, and that’s the Boston Red Sox. I was very surprised that I became interested in baseball at all, and after first going to a game at Fenway Park in 1996 my interest has continued to grow, and has (so far) survived a migration back from New to Old England three years ago. It’s not always easy to be a Sox fan on this side of the Atlantic (the internet — which, among other things, streams the WEEI Red Sox Radio Network — is invaluable), and I don’t quite know how I’ll feel about the Sox when all of the players I used to go and see or watch on television — Nomar Garciaparra, Pedro Martinez, Jason Varitek, Tim Wakefield and a handful of others — are no longer playing for the club. But I do enjoy being a Red Sox fan, enjoy hating the Yankees, and right now all I’m thinking is, Wait till next year!…
… Except that before next year, there’s next week-end, and the matter of who to support in France vs England. Well, I have an aunt who lives in Normandy…
Clearly writing a sunday newspaper is much like writing a weblog: sometimes you just feel the need to fill space. And so, armed only with the google search engine, Tom Shields was able to fill up pages and pages of this week’s Scottish Sunday Herald with an article devoted to the observation that some people have the same name as other people who are a little more famous than they are…
But not at the Virtual Stoa, where there’s only one Martin O’Neill…
Make Mine A Double: An internet search reveals lots of faces running around with the same names
… Martin O’Neill’s primary interests are in moral, political and legal philosophy, the philosophy of action, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. This may well be how the Celtic manager spends his off-duty hours, but the Martin O’Neill we are talking about is the PhD student at Harvard University.
The philosopher O’Neill is author of a treatise called “Pele, The M25 And Artistic Post-Modernism” and is obviously almost as cerebral as the football manager O’Neill. Philosopher O’Neill is described as ‘the Bard of the Hanger Lane gyratory system, West London’s Wittgenstein, and Man with a Liver of Steel’. But can he find a goalkeeper to get Celtic through the remaining European Champions League fixtures?
Martin is, of course, a Celtic fan himself (and Arsenal and Ireland, and, I hope, the Boston Red Sox — not that anyone should think that my attention is drifting towards Fenway Park a little too often these days as the playoffs draw ever closer). But it was in his Leicester City FC days that Martin used to receive email at his balliol.ox.ac.uk account imploring him to stay with the Foxes…
I thought that my excellent friend and comrade Martin O’Neill was having a good day, as he beavers away on the metaphysics of egalitarian justice, or whatever it is that he does these days.
Ireland beat France 15-12 in a closely-fought Six Nations international. Celtic beat Rangers 1-0 in the Scottish Premier League. Arsenal were 2-1 up against Chelsea in the FA Cup, with a splendid goal from Thierry Henry just before half time.
[If he cares about any other sports teams, I'm not sure I know about it. Actually, I don't know that he cares about the rugby, but he tends to like Ireland doing well at things, so I'm making an intelligent guess].And on top of all this, he tells me, it’s his birthday.
But then Chelsea equalised a few minutes from the end and forced a replay.
