The Virtual Stoa

In matters of football
The fault of the Dutch
Is scoring too little
And fouling too much.

– With apologies to George Canning.

This week has been a fantastic week for Gordon Brown’s “Britishness” agenda, as two events have united the people of Britain as almost never before.

First, the people of Britain came together to support Barcelona in the final of the Champions League (with the exception of a small handful in the Northwest of England). Second, we are (almost) all of us delighted to welcome a dozen Norwegian beavers into the wild (with the exception of a small handful within fifty miles or so of the beaver-reintroduction zone in Scotland).

I’m feeling fairly patriotic this week, at any rate, certainly much more than usual.

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.)

Although it’s impossible to dislike the German team entirely when they have a player called Jansen.

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.