Wednesday, December 09, 2015 

The petitioners and the Fury.

As another miserable year draws to a close, it does so with an air of deja vu.  The year began with demands that Ched Evans be denied employment with any football league club after being released on licence from his jail term for rape.  It ends with demands for Tyson Fury, not convicted of anything but with a whole array of obnoxious opinions, to be denied so much as a place on the shortlist for Sports Personality of the Year.

Sports Personality of the Year has always been a misnomer; some might go so far as say an oxymoron.  Rare has the public vote ever been about personality as opposed to achievement, with it only coming into play when there is something resembling a choice on offer, as opposed to the usual one or two with the main claim to being the outstanding performer of the year.  And let's face it: when Zara Phillips can win (worth noting is that the infinitely more deserving Beth Tweddle came third that year), despite having no discernible personality beyond being a minor Royal and on the basis of being quite good on top of a horse trained to do something you can't so much as gamble on, there has in the past been something rotten at the heart of Dodge.

Fury everyone agrees does have a personality.  He is as Barney Ronay puts it in an excellent profile a more complex figure than merely a boxer with a sideline in expressing his unpalatable religiously influenced views on homosexuality, women and the fast approaching apocalypse.  Not many pugilists will during their careers admit to any sort of weakness, let alone as Fury has talk about depression and suicide.  Not many "dickheads" with boneheaded, antediluvian views will be able to outfight and outthink an opponent like Wladimir Klitschko, proving the experts wrong.  Not many from Fury's background will have a moment in the sun beyond getting the chance to appear on a Channel 4 documentary, to be gawped at, laughed about and feared all at the same time.

Fury in short breaks all the agreed upon rules of being a sportsperson in 2015.  No, you can't be a completely blank canvas and succeed, but nor can you be any more divisive than say, Andy Murray is, criticised in the past for coming across as grumpy and morose.  The vast majority will shrink from making any sort of comment on politics whatsoever, not least because it's often written into their contracts and is bound to come into consideration when sponsors make their decisions on whom to fund.  Only once you've achieved the success of someone like Murray can you then start to make your views known on a topic as controversial as Scottish independence and get away with it, personally and financially.

We are then back in the parallel universe where some truly believe the aura of a sportsperson can be so overwhelming, it can subvert every norm and value inculcated in an individual since birth.  Ched Evans, the argument went, could not just waltz back into his former position at Sheffield United as he was a role model.  It would send the message that you could commit a crime as terrible as rape and be welcomed back afterwards as though nothing had happened.  With Evans there were the further extenuating circumstances that he continued to claim his innocence (his case has since been referred back to the Court of Appeal), that he was out on licence rather than having completed his sentence, and that his victim had been repeatedly named and abused on social media by supporters of Evans, connected with him or not.  The campaign as it was succeeded, and failing the quashing of his conviction it seems Evans will not play professional football again.  To me at the time it seemed a punishment out of all proportion with the offence, however grave; others felt strongly the other way.

With Fury there are no such extenuating circumstances.  Nothing he has said is or should be illegal, as Peter Tatchell for one has set out while condemning his views.  The absurdity of not so much as wanting the wider public to be allowed to reject him in a vote is made clear by the petition itself, which says


The BBC clearly do not understand that by nominating Fury, who has on a number of occasions expressed homophobic views and compared homosexuality to paedophilia, they are putting him up as a role model to young people all over the UK and the world.

In this strange view of how things work, it's not Fury's achievement of winning the world heavyweight championship that makes him a role model, it's the BBC's recognising of his success.  Leave aside that you can look up to someone's sporting prowess while at same time despising them in every other respect, as you can with the man Fury was named after, or as will become the case with Oscar Pistorius, and you're left with the impression the petition starter truly believes if only the media were to ignore or ostracise people who make their unpleasant views known in public, the remaining barriers to LBGT participation in sport would fall away.

Scott Cuthbertson presumably doesn't believe that, as discrimination is far more insidious and embedded in both sport and society as a whole than encapsulated by the brash statements of a throwback, and yet both he and 130,000 others seemingly don't want to chance the British public deciding otherwise.  While it can often seem as though the great British value of tolerance isn't all it's cracked up to be, do the signatories truly believe someone who says a woman's place is either in the kitchen or "on her the back" and speaks in the same breath about homosexuality and paedophilia can win such a major award, rather than Jessica Ennis-Hill, whom Fury insulted?  Wouldn't those who signed it better serve their cause if they campaigned for Greg Rutherford, who has made clear his unhappiness about Fury's inclusion but decided not to withdraw?  Indeed, wouldn't this country be a better place if the ridiculous pretence was dropped that a person's talent, or when it comes to "reality" stars complete lack of, means they should be judged and treated more harshly?

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12/09/2015 11:59:00 pm | |

Monday, August 17, 2015 

Planet football: The Mourinho delusion.

Jose Mourinho, hijo de puta.  Jose Mourinho, hijo de puta.  So the fans of Atletico Madrid gleefully sang a couple of seasons back, watching their team knock Chelsea out of the Champions League at the semi-final stage.  Translated that's son of a whore, which while not pleasant is one of the tamer chants to be heard at a football ground.  It's also apparently what Mourinho himself exclaimed as his medical team of Eva Carneiro and Jon Fearn ran on to the field in stoppage time at the end of the second half of Chelsea's first Premier League game of the season against Swansea, having been beckoned on by referee Michael Oliver to treat Eden Hazard.  In what was a fairly transparent attempt to deflect attention away from his team's stuttering performance, Mourinho went on to accuse the pair of "not understanding the game" in post-match interviews.

Normally, that would have been as far as it went.  Mourinho, like Alex Ferguson before him, is a master of blaming everything other than his team or indeed himself when his charges fail to win.  Ferguson was at least on occasion magnanimous in defeat, notably when Barcelona outplayed United in the 2011 Champions League final.

Such concessions come much harder for Mourinho, a stance that often rubs off on his players.  Mourinho is a natural cynic, making things up as he goes along, and is unashamed of resorting to tactics that are at best unsporting and at worst on the very edge of cheating.  While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with "parking the bus", a phrase Mourinho himself coined, i.e. putting 9 or all 10 outfield players behind the ball and aiming for a 0-0 draw, as the other team in such circumstances should almost always be able to carve out one decent opportunity during the 90 minutes, it's something else to tell your side to make the most of every challenge and try to get opposition players sent off, the apogee of which was reached in last season's clash with Paris St. Germain.  Despite having Zlatan Ibrahimovic red carded midway through the first half, PSG persevered with 10 men and won on away goals after equalising on the night in the second period of extra time.  Arguably, Chelsea's reputation for theatrics, especially from Diego Costa, has started to count against the team: a number of fouls on Costa last season which should have resulted in penalties were waved away.  Not that this has altered Mourinho's thinking.  Rather, he chose instead to accuse referees and the league of having a "vendetta" against his club, which at the same time deflected attention away from his underperforming players.

Carneiro's real offence it seems was to acknowledge the people who had taken to her Facebook page offering support.  As Marina Hyde says, perhaps her response was slightly grand, thanking the "general public" for their response.  Nonetheless, this simple gesture is apparently what led Mourinho, supported it seems by the rest of the hierarchy at Chelsea, to demote both Carneiro and Fearn to junior positions at club.  Mourinho at his press conference on Friday read out a statement to the effect that both could yet return to being on the bench at games, but they would certainly not be there for the game on Sunday.  Accordingly, when the two replacement medics were called on in yesterday's 3-0 defeat to Manchester City, the home fans cheered and chanted "you're getting sacked in the morning".  Mourinho's response to the utterly deserved defeat, which if anything should have been more emphatic?  "A fake result", and his team was the better side in the second half.

Mourinho can of course think and claim whatever he likes.  His responses to the opening three games of the season have all though been either delusional or to deflect attention.  The defeat to Arsenal in the Community Shield (disclaimer: I support Arsenal) was down to the opposition abandoning their philosophy, playing on the counter-attack, as though he has the right to lecture anyone else about using such tactics.  The draw with Swansea, as well as leading to the ridiculous and dictatorial treatment of Carneiro and Fearn, also saw him "refusing" to comment on a penalty incident once again involving Costa, the refusal intended to be nothing of the kind.

Other managers would not be allowed to get away with such behaviour, or at least not without widespread mocking and criticism in the media at large.  Leicester's Nigel Pearson was on a number of occasions last season brought to account for overly aggressive treatment of journalists, players and fans, and he had the decency to admit he had gone too far and apologised following his "ostrich" rant at Ian Baker.  That Pearson despite succeeding in keeping Leicester up left the club in the summer, with journalists after the apology asking if he was a bully and paranoid, is probably instructive.  Any sign of weakness from a manager is swiftly leapt upon, and when three unfavourable results in a row for a "top" club is inevitably deemed to be a crisis, deflecting the blame onto others rather than one's self is almost always going to be the first rather than last resort.

The chances of Mourinho ever being labelled a bully are remote, just as Alex Ferguson was almost never called on his similar behaviour.  As long as a manager succeeds, is seen to be succeeding, or alternatively/at the same time provides journalists with good copy, it's in the media's interests not to rock the boat, not least when clubs are increasingly treating anyone who has as much as a critical word to say about them incredibly spitefully.  There have been almost as many articles written down the years on the "mind games" between managers as there have on the matches themselves.  This refusal to at the same time as acknowledging the genius of the likes of Mourinho and Ferguson to make clear their antics are self-defeating and also damaging to the game as a whole is what leads to Mourinho and Chelsea getting away with the sheer pettiness of the all but sacking of Carniero and Fearn.

When Alan Shearer, the game's idiot's idiot, says that if Mourinho was the manager of any of last season's top four they would win the league, it's an invitation for Mourinho to imagine himself bigger than the game, to grant him carte blanche, to do as he pleases.  No one is bigger than the game.  Nor should a player be denied medical treatment because a manager deems a win to be more important, let alone those doctors then have their jobs threatened for doing what was asked of them by the only person in the position to make that call.

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8/17/2015 09:10:00 pm | |

Monday, June 01, 2015 

Corruption, Fifa and humbug.

When it comes down to it, there's nothing that warms my cold, cynical heart as much as some good old fashioned humbuggery.  Watching the Eurovision song contest a couple of Saturdays ago, the crowd had the temerity to boo as a summary of the points was given, Russia at that time being in the lead.  I don't recall exactly what one of the presenters said, but it was along the lines of please don't bring politics into this especially when this year's theme is "building bridges".  Eurovision is of course as much about politics as it is a festival of camp and instantly forgettable songs, hence the only people you can ever remember winning it are Abba, Bucks Fizz, Dana International, Lordi and last year's sensation, Conchita Wurst.  Every year the same countries vote for each other, and every year the same people get slightly pissy about how manifestly corrupt the whole thing is, then the next day they forget and the experience repeats when May rolls round again.

We must then discuss the unfortunate problems at Fifa.  Good lord did the media spend the back end of last week in a state of incredibly amusing hysteria at the brassneck of Sepp Blatter, the old rogue refusing to stand down despite the rest of the board being under suspension, arrest or having already pleaded guilty to being only slightly less crooked than Robert Maxwell.  He didn't stand down because he knew he had the support of enough delegates to hang on, at least for now: as Vivek Chaudhary goes against the grain in the Graun to point out, Blatter has legitimately helped enough confederations in both Africa and Asia to outvote the majority of European and Latin American countries that have now turned against him.  Yes, there probably still is an element of graft in some of those dealings, but no one's managed as yet to find a trail of evidence leading back to Blatter himself, despite as it appears the best efforts of the Americans.

The obvious cliché everyone reaches for in these circumstances is Casablanca, as so many find themselves, shocked, shocked, that there could possibly be corruption at play in the handing out of hosting rights to tournaments and multi-billion dollar marketing and advertising schemes.  Oh, the newly appointed US attorney general Loretta Lynch wailed, the kickbacks have "profoundly harmed a multitude of victims", not just the fans, but the "youth leagues and developing countries that should benefit from the revenue generated by the commercial rights these organizations hold".  And you think, I'm sorry, when did youth leagues and developing countries benefit from any sporting extravaganza ever without something being wanted in return?  It just doesn't happen, regardless of whether cash-stuffed brown envelopes are handed out or if less obvious if-you-scratch-my-back arrangements are the order of the day.  The biggest legacy from the London Olympics is going to be that fucking shopping mall and West Ham getting the stadium practically gratis, which is very nice indeed for those captains of industry Gold, Sullivan and Baroness Brady of Knightsbridge.

Blatter's great mistake has been in not respecting Europe and especially England as the footballing superpowers they so clearly are.  Letting Germany host in 2006 simply wasn't enough; few begrudged Japan and South Korea hosting in 2002, or the World Cup going to Africa in 2010, nor Brazil in 2014, despite it becoming ever clearer that the latter two were as reliant on bungs as the subsequent awards have been.  Had Fifa been cleverer, they would have let our good selves host in 2018, rather than the visibly corrupt Russians.  Our bid was unbelievably parochial and self-obsessed, yet it would have meant we could indulge in some good ol' football's coming home feel good crap instead of bitterly looking for excuses for why the damn Russians got it instead.  Going a step further and choosing Qatar was just asking for it.  It's one thing trying, as Sepp Blatter has always attempted, to push football beyond its heartlands of Europe and Latin America, and another to hand it to a country that gives kleptocracy a bad name.  A country so tiny and has such extreme weather conditions that hundreds of enslaved workers drop dead in the process of building the stadia.  Yes, this is going to be an incredible success, I can just feel it.

More ludicrous still however has been the reaction of politicians and the media, both of which know corruption, nepotism, patronage and abuses of power when they see them, and boy are they seeing them now.  So absurd has the sense of moral superiority become that no one seems to have noticed that the apparent clean pair of hands standing against Blatter last week was the offspring of the Jordanian autocrat king, trained at Sandhurst along with all those other dictators in waiting, while just to mirror things up the president of the FA is none other than Prince William, clearly there on merit.  Why oh why are the sponsors not taking a tougher line has been one of the other cries, as though the likes of Visa and McDonalds could give a damn about a few days of bad publicity when in their minds it's the brand exposure of a month of sport that makes all the difference.  This isn't like the News of the World, where a dying medium could be abandoned without a moment's thought.  That, and as the allegations against Nike and Brazil may well show, they're just as ensnared in the dealings as the Fifa executives themselves.

We should then be ready to boycott the 2018 World Cup, just to show how truly disappointed we are.  The Sun demands Uefa takes a firmer line on Blatter the "tyrant", as clearly it's implausible he didn't know what his underlings were up to, unlike, say Rupert Murdoch, or Rebekah Brooks.  A jury cleared her on that score after all.  There's also nothing to be concerned or wonder about in the £5.14bn deal recently agreed between the Premier League and the broadcasters, while UEFA looks set to water down the financial fair play rules on the basis they could have the perverse effect of stopping other obscenely rich individuals from buying clubs and success along with it.  Think there might have been something equally fishy about the IOC giving the Winter Olympics to Sochi, or how the IOC has just as strict rules as Fifa does on athletes daring to make political statements, which in turn are written into the contracts said athletes need to sign to get funding?  Don't be silly.  Or perhaps you might wonder if rather than Blatter being the embodiment of hubris and shamelessness, it could instead be politicians who have no qualms whatsoever about greasing the wheels when it comes to arms deals with dictators, so long as it's good for UK plc.  Who cares a fig for the people in Yemen, Bahrain or Syria?  There's plenty more where they came from, just as the Qataris know there's plenty of Nepalese waiting for the chance to die in Doha.

Money, like it or not, corrupts everything.  We've seen it with the banks, where the barrel is completely rotten but nothing can be done lest it disintegrate entirely.  The FA and the Premier League like to think of themselves as better than Fifa when they're just as lucre obsessed, and have figureheads only slightly less objectionable than a Swiss who doesn't know when to quit.  We've seen it when not so long ago our then prime minister ordered a halt to a corruption investigation into the al-Yamanah weapons deal, as the saintly Saudis had threatened to stop sharing intelligence with us if we didn't.  Few kicked up a fuss beyond the usual suspects.
 
Don't let us get our way at the old kicky ball game though, and just sit back and watch the repercussions fly.  It might take years, we might not be personally responsible for the downfall when it comes, but it'll happen eventually.  We might not win at Eurovision, be any good at football itself, or be much other than an inexorably fading nation with an incredibly high opinion of itself, but boy can we bear a grudge.

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6/01/2015 10:27:00 pm | |

Wednesday, February 11, 2015 

One solution to Scudamore: piracy.

The Premier League could not have a better representative than Richard Scudamore.  He is the embodiment of absolutely everything that has gone wrong with football at the highest level over the past 20 years, or rather everything the not always right critics who often don't so much as like the game point towards.  Do you for instance believe the Premier League should not exist in a vacuum, that it ought to "redistribute" some of the money it receives from the broadcasters from your bank account down to the lower leagues, to sport at the grassroots, that clubs should be at the heart of their community, rather than in the hearts of the community?

You do?  Well, in Scudamore you have a man who believes in one thing and one thing only, which is getting as much dosh as he can from the likes of BT and Sky for the 20 clubs that make up the league, and then letting them do whatever they like with that money.  It's not for him to say clubs should pay their staff the living wage for example, that's up to the government.  Does he think it's completely obscene for a club to pay a congenital idiot like Wayne Rooney £300,000 a week for his on-off ability to kick a bag of wind around an enclosed grass field while the poor bastards who stand in the cold selling match programmes at £5 or however much a pop get only slightly more that that for an hour's work?  Don't be silly, as just as in "any talent industry" the world market sets the rate, whereas cleaners, training staff and kit men are ten a penny, almost literally.  If the government suggested introducing a maximum wage the screams would be banshee-like, but a minimum wage set barely above the poverty line is clearly there to be respected, not as precisely that, a minimum.

Scudamore is just a figurehead.  He can't tell clubs it looks really bad if they don't pay their staff the living wage despite the new £5.14bn television deal (fun fact: that's more than the BBC's total income for 2013-14, £3.72bn of which is from the licence fee), as the clubs themselves answer to no one.  Only when the fans make it abundantly clear they want an owner to go, as Liverpool did the non-dynamic duo of Tom Hicks and George Gillett, is anything close to accountability encountered.  Scudamore was also right to point out that despite the complete insanity of the latest deal, most Premier League clubs are not "staggeringly wealthy": only 8 out of the 20 clubs made a profit in 2012-2013, including Wigan and Norwich, both since relegated.  It's no coincidence the current top 2, Chelsea and Manchester City, have owners where money is no object, considering in both cases said money was looted from the people of Russia and the UAE respectively.  At the moment it's just the players, their agents and the broadcasters making anything out of the game, as the owners themselves hardly ever do.

Except this might just be the deal to change that.  Recently introduced rules on financial fair play from both the Premier League and UEFA should, in theory, mean an end to the apparently endless increases in wages and transfer fees.  We've already seen this somewhat with Chelsea needing to sell Andre Schurrle before they could bring in Juan Cuadrado.  How the clubs spend their further largesse is of course up to them, and some of the mid-table clubs may well use it fund splurges of their own.  Other proprietors however will undoubtedly pocket it, seeing it as being reward for having sunk their own money in down the years while taking little if anything out.  As the difference between profit and loss outside of the mega-spending clubs is often relatively slight, West Ham for instance losing £4m before tax in 2012-2013, this latest increase will help them considerably.

When you then add in the recent increase in "parachute" payments to relegated sides, the gap between the Premier League and the lower divisions is getting to be a chasm.  It's always been a major challenge to win promotion and then stay in the top division, but with £99m as a minimum guaranteed to the club finishing bottom, the teams yo-yoing between Premier League and Championship look set to become a secondary elite.  The story of this season has almost certainly been the rise of Bournemouth, looking to repeat the unlikely promotion of Blackpool a few years back.  They won't though want to repeat Blackpool's subsequent fall, or a couple of seasons from now to be propping up the table as the Lancashire side are, while the QPRs of the world continue to alternate between being there or thereabouts season in season out.

For all the complaints and whinging today, as well as the cynicism over the likelihood of ticket prices dropping as a result of the influx of cash from television, hardly anyone is going to cancel their TV package or not renew their season ticket.  Loyalty to your team trumps everything, and demand for more live games just continues to increase.  Purists like me will snort and harrumph at the introduction of games on a Friday night, further reducing the number that will kick off at 3 on a Saturday afternoon, but we're just stick in the muds.  Besides, I'd rather transfer my allegiance to Spurs than give Murdoch any money, and the same goes for BT, so I'm hardly your average punter.

If there is something that might just bring change, it's the same thing as mentioned when BT won the Champions League rights: illegal streaming of games is only going to increase and will fast become a viable alternative to a TV package, if it's not quite there yet.  Moreover, such piracy is frankly less morally questionable than handing over your cash to such lovely people as Scudamore, Sheikh Mansour and the Glazers.  Somehow though you can't see it having the same impact as it has on the film and music industries, and just as the real victims there have been the little guys rather than the behemoths, so too it will be your Swanseas and Burnleys that suffer rather than United and City.  Sigh.

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2/11/2015 10:18:00 pm | |

Monday, June 23, 2014 

Why would anyone want to play for England?

20ft. high on Blackpool promenade.  Fake royalty second hand sequin facade.

Everyone loves Harry Redknapp, right?  Our 'Arry.  Always tells it like it is.  Never knowingly undersold.  Took QPR down and didn't receive a lick of criticism because he's 'Arry, ain't he?  Didn't get the England job despite the press dearly wanting him to as he's hand in glove with them.  Can always rely on 'Arry for a quote.  Brought QPR back up this season because he's 'Arry, ain't he?  Got off the tax evasion charges by making out he was an idiot in all things apart from football.  In his autobiography he insists he was the "people's choice, the only choice", unlike the man Liverpool sacked for being useless.

There's only the one problem with having a big mouth.  Well, probably more but stick with me here.  Eventually it will get you into trouble, even with your pals in the media.  NAME AND SHAME screams the Sun.  Redknapp told to name and shame, says the Graun.  You see, apparently while 'Arry was ensconced back at White Hart Lane, "two or three players" used to ask him to try and get them out of England games.  His wider point, supposedly, was the modern English player sees the national side, the baggage that goes with it, and decides they're more than content with just earning hundreds of thousands, millions of spondulicks, playing in the Champions League against the greatest teams in the world.  Who needs the hassle of representing your country?

Cue the attempts to work out who the traitors in our midst could possibly have been.  Not Jermaine Defoe, according to Roy Hodgson, who reacted with anger to Redknapp once again making an obviously calculated intervention in the whole why are England so completely and utterly crap debate.  Probably not Peter Crouch either.  Ledley King maybe, who was forced to retire with a chronic knee injury and so could have had a justifiable excuse?

Who knows, and who cares.  It's completely irrelevant to what befell England this time round, which was the bad luck to be drawn in a really tough group.  This might look like being wise after the event, but I didn't think they would make it out of it, and it was probably better to crash and burn after two games than do so after three with hopes having risen.  You could say Hodgson should have tried to persuade John Terry to come out of retirement, or brought Ashley Cole, and plenty have.  It might have tightened up the defence had they heeded the call.  Would it have made us Netherlands beaters, though?  And pigs might.

It could be I haven't properly been paying attention, having ahem, had other things on my mind, yet it does seem as though this time round with hopes not as high as in previous years there hasn't been quite such a colossal backlash.  We certainly haven't had the Sun telling the players they'd let the country down, although there have been calls for apologies, as Barney Ronay relates.  He also points out that, away from home, England's best achievement in 64 years has been the semi-final.  For all our grandeur, our sense of entitlement, our pride in the Premier League (yeah, right), our supposed self-deprecation, we don't take well to losing, at least at football, when we should be all too used to it.  Personally I've started finding it all colossally amusing, hearing the same moans time after time, the Chris "pelanty" Waddle's ranting away about how we never ever learn, and how, despite everything, we keep getting worse, going out earlier and earlier.  It's almost as though it was karma.

Those possibly mythical players going to 'Arry (considering he claimed in court to not know how to send a text, and both his own book and those by other managers detail he most certainly does) do after all have a point.  Why would anyone want to play for England?  You find yourself putting on a show in front of some of the most boorish prats on the planet, who find it great sport to boo the opposing side's national anthem and dress up as crusaders, offer the kind of tactical encouragement that would shame a under-7s league, and then have the temerity to complain if you don't manage to find the same form you do in the league despite the two situations being all but incomparable.  The media, bless them, build you up and then at the first sign of trouble tear you limb from limb.  They can see you hurting and still they demand more contrition.  What do they want, blood?  The FA are about as useful as having teeth in your arsehole, their big idea the introduction of "B" teams into the lower leagues, while the amount of money flowing to the top sides never trickles down to where it's needed, in coaching and development.  It might just be the problem isn't with those who don't want to play for England, it's with everything else.

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6/23/2014 11:59:00 pm | |

Thursday, February 06, 2014 

The collusion and complicity of the IOC.

Is there a more ridiculous and self-evidently false bromide than the one that claims politics and sport don't mix? We seem to now have a biennial media battle between the hosts of the World Cup/Olympics/Winter Olympics/European Championship, FIFA, UEFA, the IOC and the various malcontents, protesting over either the exorbitant cost of staging the showpiece event, the abuse of those who built the facilities, alleged corruption, or the human rights situation in the country in general.

With the Sochi winter games every single one of these issues has come into play. Costing a staggering £31bn, or not far shy of 3 times the amount we pumped into London 2012, with almost the entire resort being built from scratch, billions have almost certainly been creamed off, to little apparent concern from the IOC. Despite this, and while it seems the athletes' accommodation is befitting of the no expense spared philosophy from the Russians, journalists report their hotels are unfinished and unfurnished, the staff not always particularly helpful either.

Something the IOC could not predict was Putin would choose the past year to sign into law the kind of antediluvian anti-gay legislation designed it seems to wind up the West as much as position himself as a defender of traditional values in the face of metropolitan liberalism. Think Section 28, only with even more transparent emphasis on linking homosexuality with paedophilia and you're pretty much there. When you have Putin himself and other officials all but saying gay men are desperate to inculcate innocent children in depraved sexual practices, you might have thought an organisation which in its charter decries discrimination would have had made a more substantial stand than it has.

The reality is that the IOC has been hand in glove with Putin from the beginning, and could hardly start expressing something resembling independence now.  The IOC forbids competitors from making political statements during the games, including according to the Russians at press conferences as well as on the podium.  This is then written into the contracts of the athletes themselves, according to John Amachei, something only half-denied by the British Olympic Association, who say that they have to balance an athlete's right to freedom of speech with the IOC's own rules.

It's this ever increasing stifling of anything approaching spontaneity or which could be construed as going against the values of either the organisers or the sponsors that has led to the current trend for either developing countries or authoritarian states to be favoured as the hosts for such showpiece events.  South Africa saw the introduction of a short-lived court system to deal with those who transgressed against the various rules and regulations FIFA had set down, while Sep Blatter's monopoly also demands the kind of tax concessions that would shame Vodafone and Amazon.  Brazil undoubtedly deserves the 2014 World Cup, but it's not a surprise it also won the 2016 Olympics.  WIth Russia due to host the 2018 World Cup before it then heads to the kleptocracy of Qatar, with the abuse of migrant workers there already so well documented, the pattern has been well and truly set.

Some of the coverage of Russia's human rights record has nonetheless been over the top, at least when compared to how politicians had far fewer qualms about going to the Beijing games, when China is by any objective measure far more repressive than Putin's Russia.  This said, the pathetic criticism by the IOC's head, who decried the unofficial boycott of the opening ceremony by various world leaders as an "ostentatious gesture", completely sums up the organisation's approach to anyone who dares to criticise their decision making.  Gestures are all that left to those who want to stand in solidarity with the forgotten and abused in Russia, the very people who have paid for the games in the first place.  A boycott would be self-defeating, so what other way is there to express disapproval than in whichever way those taking part can?

One possible solution to the burden placed by major tournaments on host countries is perhaps to follow the example set by the 2020 European Championships, which will see 13 different cities in 13 countries host the games.  While it poses an obvious problem for fans travelling from one match to the next, it will spread the cost and mean just one nation won't become the sole focus for protests.  Whether it's an idea either FIFA or the IOC will look into remains to be seen; one suspects there's far too much for them personally to lose than for the taxpayers of future hosts to gain.

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2/06/2014 08:47:00 pm | |

Monday, November 11, 2013 

The real victors? The pirates.

As I suspect was the case with most other people, I cautiously welcomed BT's successful bid for the rights to show 38 Premier League matches a season.  I have neither the inclination nor the money to subscribe to Sky or BT, and frankly anything that undermines Sky's ultimate owner is fine by me.  I make do with 5 Live and Match of the Day, and don't think I miss anything not hearing the insights of Jamie Redknapp, or even Gary Neville.  Analysis of the game has always been done better in the papers, and the mute button works wonderfully when it comes to Alan Shearer and most of the other cretins the BBC employs, although it doesn't quite work when Robbie Savage is co-commentating on the radio.  Terrestrial broadcasting of Premier League matches clearly isn't coming back, and I have no problem with the decadence the game has sunk into since Sky invented football back in 1992 being on the conscience of others.

It looks as though, as per usual, we should be careful what we wish for.  Emboldened by signing up 2 million subscribers, BT has spent an astonishing near £900m to secure the rights to every Champions League and Europa League game, more than double the sum ITV and Sky jointly paid 3 years ago. Come 2015, those who don't wish to further enrich the oligarchs of the intertwined business and football worlds will have to make do with the final of both competitions, and probably just the one free-to-air game featuring a home team a season, likely translating to a grand total of 6 matches in the CL shown gratis a year.  ITV currently show one game live every round of the competition, so those not prepared to shell out are soon to be in a similar position to F1 fans stiffed by the deal cut between the BBC and Sky.  To get an idea of how out of reach coverage is becoming to the BBC, ITV, and Channels 4 and 5, the BBC's total yearly income courtesy of the licence fee (including the government picking up the tab for the over 75s) amounts to £3.65bn.

While you can detest how the modern game has developed, the Champions League, despite the best efforts of UEFA under Michel Platini is something of a rejoinder to the glib sentiments of those who argue the Premier League is the best in the world and an unalloyed good for football in this country.  Unable to watch foreign leagues free to air, Champions League games let us compare just how good the top four truly are, as well as how the different systems of training and development on the continent contrast to our own.  Over the past couple of years it's been obvious that despite the vast sums injected into the top clubs, the Uniteds and Cities have fallen well short of the top sides from Spain and Germany, while Chelsea were lucky to win on 2012 on penalties.

The loss of most of the free-to-air matches will certainly do nothing to fix the gap developing between British sides and our European brethren, while likely exacerbating further the stranglehold the clubs with the most money have on the top half of the Premier League.  Despite none of the four English clubs making it past the quarter finals last season, they still shared £100m between them, while the winners, Bayern Munich, picked up £43.2m.  These sums will only increase with the new deals.  Nor is there any suggestion Sky will cut its prices having lost another of its selling points, while BT admits it will have to put its own up, on top of the 6.5% rise their customers already face in January.   Despite this, BT's head of consumer division has the chutzpah to say "in difficult times people deserve access to sport".  Chance would be a fine thing.

If there is one slight reason to be optimistic, it's that despite the best efforts of the Premier League and others, illegal streaming of live games over the internet continues to grow.  They may have had First Row blocked by court order, but other sites quickly sprang up to replace it, while those already established have not yet been targeted.  For every fan who decides to subscribe to BT, another will say screw it and turn to the streams.  It's not yet a challenge to the game and the broadcasters as say piracy has become to the music industry, it's true, but as more and more homes get access to super fast broadband the potential is there for games to be streamed in similar quality to that they're transmitted in, albeit with a slight delay.  Only then might live football once again become available to those without deep pockets.

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11/11/2013 07:07:00 pm | |

Monday, August 13, 2012 

Reality bites.

Well, the less said about the closing ceremony the better, yes? There are after all enough innate contradictions in Jessie J's Price Tag dirge without her arriving to sing it in the back of a Rolls-Royce, in surroundings which confirm that err, yes, it really is all about the money.

Musical apocalypse aside, even a hardened pessimist such as myself has to admit the last two and a bit weeks have been both a success and thoroughly enjoyable. Despite the media's overwhelming positivity though, the Graun's poll on whether it was all worth it is hardly as conclusive as portrayed; 55% compared to 35% thinking it was is a percentage that will soon fall if, as expected the Olympics hasn't done as much for the economy as the coalition insisted it would. The far from universal euphoria will soon fizzle out (And check also the depressing numbers that, while supporting multiculturalism, still think that immigrants don't bring anything positive).

Some of the waste involved has been obscene, none more so than the ridiculous levels of security. According to the police up until Friday they had made a grand total of just less than 250 arrests, the vast majority of which were for ticket touting. Would a minister now like to remind us just why there was a need to put missile silos on the top of blocks of flats, or indeed why we had to have the Zil lanes that went almost completely unused? There was also no need whatsoever to close off vast swathes of land surrounding the areas where the events where being held, but such were the restrictions we were told were necessary.

As should now be obvious, the only thing the Olympics is really about is the sport. If they provide something resembling a legacy to deprived parts of London then that's a bonus. Instead, apart from the left over buildings and arenas, the one other likely to remain is yet another poxy unneeded shopping mall. Much of the responsibility for this does have to be levelled at the Blairites who convinced themselves the Olympics was just what London needed, and whom inevitably fell completely for the commercialisation of everything. Remember Tessa Jowell introducing the horrid logo, informing us all that this was a "iconic brand"? Everything followed on from there, and if we needed any further confirmation then the "VISA party" to mark the closing of the Beijing Olympics provided it.

Considering those involved in the planning then, that everything went almost entirely smoothly barring a few minor hiccups to begin with was a bonus. A successful games wasn't enough though, 65 medals for "Team GB" or not. Heaven forfend that everything built specially for the games should then be handed over to local communities to enjoy and run, as that would just be a waste. Hence the early sale of the Olympic village to the Qataris, and more is likely to follow. When David Cameron sets a ludicrous target of bringing in £1bn in investment, he sets himself up to fail. Everyone enjoys a change for a couple of weeks, being in a different city that bends over backwards to welcome the foreign guests and athletes, and then they move on to the next one. This is what the modern Olympics is about, as Sydney, Athens and Beijing have demonstrated. Rather than indulging in fantasies, we could have been realistic. For all the excitement and achievements of all and sundry, it's now back to earth with a bump. Still, hows about Jess Ennis, Mo Farah and Usain Bolt, eh?

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8/13/2012 12:44:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 31, 2012 

Let's do something very British: make the best of it.

I apologise in advance if this shocks anyone, but I have a confession to make. I didn't watch the opening ceremony live. I'll just let that sink in for a second.

Yes, it's true. I took one look at the pre-released extract of the nurses dancing and thought, nope, don't think I'll bother. And on that, I stand by my initial opinion: fine sentiment, not quite as good execution. As for the rest, well, it was crap, but it was crap in the best possible way. Certainly nowhere near as crap as China's reprise of 1936, or worse yet, the handover segment from the closing ceremony last time round (my predictions for the opening ceremony were thankfully not proved correct, although I was, sadly, part right about Amy Winehouse). It still had to involve the Queen, David Beckham and Seb Coe, but dear old Brenda seemed bored near to tears by the whole thing, while Seb talked out of his foot as could be expected. The bits that nearly raised it above crap were the forging of the rings and the inspired decision not to give the lighting of the cauldron to one person; I'd had a horrible premonition it was going to be Brenda doing the honours.

Some people, naturally, wanted to read far too much into it. Not just Aidan Burley, who dug himself a hole so deep he must be somewhere near Australia currently, but also Pollyanna Toynbee, who laments that Danny Boyle's vision of a "deep-dyed social democratic nation" is being torn apart by the coalition. Fair enough, the current government is a disaster, but are we really deep-dyed social democratic? Let's not kid ourselves here. That it also annoyed a certain section of right-wingers who detected socialism, political correctness or any of the other modern British "cultural evils" in it says far more about them than it does about Boyle's direction or Frank Cottrell Boyce's script. Indeed, if anything it reflects how they've become out of touch, rather than it being the other way around.

If the media as a whole appeared to love the opening, then we could perhaps have relied on the Mail to play at least one discordant note. Given the chance to sound off in the Mail Online's RightMinds comment section, Rick Dewsbury managed to make all the other criticisms and complaints seem insignificant by comparison. It wasn't just the celebration of the NHS when it's a system that occasionally fails, it was the completely unrealistically portrait it painted of mixed-race relationships:

This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up.

Almost, if not every, shot in the next sequence included an ethnic minority performer. The BBC presenter Hazel Irvine gushed about the importance of grime music (a form of awful electronic music popular among black youths) to east London. This multicultural equality agenda was so staged it was painful to watch.

Almost immediately realising this was just a teeny bit beyond the pale, the piece was quickly edited so something approaching the opposite was stated:

This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but such set-ups are simply not the ‘norm’ in any part of the country. So why was it portrayed like this and given such prominence? If it was intended to be something that we can celebrate, that two people with different colour skin and different cultural heritages can live harmoniously together, then it deserves praise. But what will be disturbing to many people is top-down political manipulation – whether consciously or unthinkingly – at a major sporting event.

Before the Mail realised it was on a hiding to nothing and the piece simply disappeared. Luckily, John Walker managed to capture it before it disappeared down the memory hole. That perhaps not everything in the ceremony was meant to be taken literally, as the last time I checked nurses no longer wear those sort of uniform, and James Bond is, err, fictional, seems to have passed some people by.

It is after all possible to think the opening was better than it could have been and enjoy the sport while still loathing the ridiculous levels of security, the areas being closed off for the duration to the public, the privileges demanded by the Olympic "family" and the sponsors, and the likelihood that there will be no real legacy to speak of despite all the promises, as Andrew Gilligan points out. It is an incredible waste of money, but let's make the best of it while it's on, eh?

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7/31/2012 07:11:00 pm | |

Tuesday, July 17, 2012 

Outsourcing the blame.

There's one thing about the G4S Olympic security fiasco that seems to have passed everyone by: government ministers have barely directed a single word of criticism at the company itself. Take a look at Theresa May's second statement to the Commons yesterday, and if you can find her so much as saying G4S are a bit crap then you win a cookie. What she did claim was that the Home Office had absolutely no idea that G4S was unlikely to be able to fulfil its contract, and that it was completely untrue that James Brokenshire had been told about it in advance. While the hapless Nick Buckles didn't quite contradict the equally hopeless May, during his evidence to the Home Affairs select committee he did say officials knew about problems with "scheduling", and that he had had contact with Brokenshire. There was however confirmation from Buckles that the government was first told there could be a problem on the 3rd of July, 12 days before May made the announcement to parliament last Thursday, and also supposedly only the day after she herself was told there was likely to be a shortfall.

Fairly obvious is that for whatever reason, G4S and the government have drawn up something resembling a non-aggression pact. No minister has so much as criticised Buckles, let alone called for him to resign, and seemingly in return, Buckles didn't say anything today to throw the spotlight back on the government. Indeed, he took the ire of the committee entirely on his own shoulders, as part of an apparent masochism strategy. Yes, he agreed that the entire thing was a shambles, even though Theresa May had denied that was the case last week, and he accepted that this was a disaster for G4S's reputation, which is quite saying something considering the company's history. He won't though be resigning, and the company will still be taking the £57m management fee it so richly deserves, regardless of how astonishing someone as jumped-up as Keith Vaz thinks that is.

Neither it seems will Theresa May, or for that matter anyone at Locog, who signed the contract in the first place be losing their jobs. That G4S had never before provided over 10,000 security officials for one specific event was no barrier to their being awarded the contract, and besides, as far as they were concerned it wasn't for the money involved, as they'd only be making a measly £10m profit had everything gone smoothly. It was more to simply be involved with the games, as nothing provides a boost quite like being the company responsible for the pat downs everyone entering the various events enjoys. Instead that job will now fall partially to our wonderful armed forces, who are as MP after MP stood up to say yesterday the finest in the world. You might think that the finest soldiers in the world deserve better than to be tasked at the last minute with clearing up the mess left after an outsourcing disaster, able to take the holidays they'd booked in advance, or even say get married, but apparently not.

Truly key it seems to the coalition is that the outsourcing bonanza continues. It is after all relying on the privatisation of vast swathes of the public sector in order to bring the deficit down, or so it's claimed. Really going to town on G4S wouldn't have helped anything when they're expected to be the main beneficiaries of the outsourcing of back office police work, or indeed the contracting out of probation, to say nothing of the continuing selling off of the prison estate. That unfortunate things like the death of Jimmy Mubenga take place is to be expected, and the guards who restrained him will not now face manslaughter charges anyway, as his death could have just as much been caused by "a combination of factors such as adrenalin, muscle exhaustion or isometric exercise", to quote the CPS decision not to prosecute. No one truly believes the Olympic shambles has compromised security, even if ministers and the likes of Seb Coe keep saying it hasn't in an apparent attempt at proving the opposite, so what's the fuss? Just sit back, enjoy the circus, and you'll soon forget this ever happened.

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7/17/2012 07:36:00 pm | |

Thursday, July 12, 2012 

And so it's almost here.

There is no question, Theresa May informed us today, of the security of the Olympics being compromised. Well, no, there clearly isn't. When you've already got more troops in evidence around the Olympic park than we currently have in Afghanistan, with another 3,500 now required to make up for the numbers G4S haven't been able to provide, missile silos on roofs, fighter jets on standby and an assault ship moored on the Thames, London is nothing if not secured. What it's being secured against isn't entirely clear, seeing as the threat level remains stubbornly at "substantial" rather than the critical setting it was at for years under New Labour, but you can never be too careful. And for those with a conspiratorial mindset, can it really just be a coincidence that there are thousands of squaddies in London just in time for the anniversary of the riots, considering how critical our holidaying politicians were of the Met's initial response?

As for it being a shambles, well, what else is new? Also mysterious is that it's only now that commentators are being fully critical of the entire set-up: the obscene sponsorship deals, which meant that workers at the site could only buy chips with fish at vendors other than McDonald's, until Locog stepped in (although customers, i.e., those that have bought tickets and should therefore within reason be allowed to do whatever the hell they like while in attendance, will still only be able to buy chips on their own and with anything other than fish from McDonald's), the sell-off of the Olympic village to the Qataris, as they clearly haven't bought up enough of the capital already, the "VIP lanes" for officials and general travel chaos that will ensue, and of course, the almost constant presence of Seb Coe and Boris Johnson on our screens.

Oddly enough, the one thing that has gone well so far has been the torch relay, if you can manage to overlook its origins at the 1936 games and how the Chinese last time round used it as propaganda bludgeon. Yes, we've had to put up with the likes of Will.i.am bearing it despite his contribution to the musical apocalypse, and how it isn't so much a relay as a bus tour of England with occasional stop-offs, but it really does mean something to those ordinary people chosen to hoist the flame aloft, even if it is only for 300 metres. As for everyone else, it's impossible to know to how we'll remember the games until the err, actual sport begins. I suspect once everything gets going that the events themselves will go off without any hitches, while everyone trying to do something that isn't connected to what's going on at the venues around the country can go hang for the duration.

The truth is it was ever thus. All things going well, after the games the Olympic stadium is likely to be the new home of West Ham United; not so in China, where the magnificent Bird's Nest stadium has been little more than a tourist attraction since, or in Greece, where most of the other venues have been decaying since 2004. The entire point of the Olympics and indeed the World Cup in the modern era seems to be to provide long-term benefit not to the hosts, but to the sponsors and organisers. If there are some positives for the localised area where they're hosted, then that's just a bonus. Despite the initial scaremongering, few would disagree that the dual hosting of the Euros by Poland and Ukraine this summer was something of a triumph, but whether that will translate into long-term benefits through an increase in tourism is doubtful in the extreme.

Politicians who would never of dreamt of spending £9bn solely on regenerating the East End have naturally oversold the games from the beginning. What was a vastly expensive New Labour vanity project has become a happy diversion for the coalition, hoping above hope that everything goes well, that it boosts the economy a little and might just manufacture a feel good factor. Yeah, right. There were also additional bonuses, at least according to Seumas Milne, one minister saying the Olympics were a "tremendous opportunity to showcase what the private sector can do in the security space". Well, quite. Mainly though, as long as there aren't any more disasters, it'll fill the papers during the silly season with nonsense (no change there then) overwhelming any stories about how useless the government continues to be. And considering the year they've had, that'll be enough. Whatever conclusion the rest of us reach will be irrelevant, as our views have been from the beginning.

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7/12/2012 09:11:00 pm | |

Monday, May 14, 2012 

It's up for grabs now!

Well yes, yesterday was quite good, but seeing as the Premier League wants everyone to believe that 1992/93 was Year Zero, here's the last game of the 88/89 first division season between the teams in first and second, where if the north London side won by two clear goals they would be champions...


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5/14/2012 04:33:00 pm | |

Thursday, April 12, 2012 

A new definition of irony.

Deciding in China whether the human rights situation in Bahrain means the race there should be cancelled.

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4/12/2012 09:22:00 pm | |

Wednesday, December 21, 2011 

As if things couldn't get any worse for Steve Kean...

Veterans of what used to be the terraces at football grounds are for the most part a tough, difficult to shock bunch. When even some of them then walk out during the first half of a game, not because of the performance of their team but because of the truly poisonous atmosphere their fellow fans have created, it's time to sit up and take notice. Regardless of how poor a manager Steve Kean, the former coach of Blackburn Rovers is, absolutely no one deserves the abuse he's been subjected to now for months. Yesterday this culminated not only in supporters engaged in running battles with stewards as they attempted to parade "KEAN OUT" banners during the match, he was also nearly confronted by a fan who got into the dug-out. At the final whistle, among the other objects thrown at Kean was a season ticket book.

In a way it's unfair to specifically pick on Blackburn and their fans, especially when it's difficult for them to properly project their rage at the incompetence of the club's owners, Venky's, who are making the Glazers look like philanthropists by comparison. It does though highlight what ought to be recognised as football's new problem after the almost eradication of hooliganism: the truly unacceptable behaviour of some fans, who seem to think that buying a ticket entitles them to subject players and managers to an endless torrent of verbal, the kind of which would result in a criminal charge should do they it on the street. As the Secret Footballer wrote earlier in the year, it isn't so much the culture among players which means there isn't a single openly gay footballer, it's the fans and the abuse they know they would receive should they decide to come out. Open racism might have been stamped out, at least among the fans, yet homophobia is still sadly all too common.

The only reason Kean is staying around in the face of such treatment is obvious. If he were to walk away, he wouldn't get anything in the way of compensation; stay until Venky's are forced to act and he'll at least have something for putting up with what would be regarded in any other walk of life as bullying. And who could possibly blame him when he's become the scapegoat?

Oh. Yes, of all the people that really ought to keep their mouths shut, up steps Jack Straw. One thing that perplexes me is how keen Newsnight seems to get Henry Kissinger on to comment on world affairs; last week, not content with one potential war criminal in the shape of the bloated frame of Kissinger, it also had on Jeremy Greenstock, our man at the UN during the failed attempts to get a second resolution authorising war in Iraq. At least there's a certain logic in getting someone responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people to comment on dictators murdering their own civilians; there is however no one less qualified than Straw to comment on when a football manager should leave his job. Having been intimately involved not only in the Iraq war, he then subsequently lied about the role of the UK in the United States' extraordinary rendition programme, back in 2005 notably claiming that anyone suggesting there was such a worldwide torture regime being run by the US was a conspiracy theorist. Perhaps that's one thing Kean should take comfort from: that at least he isn't a politician completely divorced from the concept of morality.

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12/21/2011 08:12:00 pm | |

Wednesday, October 26, 2011 

Footballers! Put up with racism!

(h/t to both Tabloid Watch and Angry Mob.)

If nothing else, Steve Doughty displays an interesting thought process in his quite remarkable article for the Daily Mail's RightMinds blog (edited by Simon Heffer, who just so happens to be Enoch Powell's biographer). After a couple of weeks in which it's been claimed that Premier League footballers have racially abused each other, Doughty does the sensible thing and relates how massively things have improved even since the 70s and 80s. He writes about how "it has been a long hard road" for black footballers, as indeed it has. He even relates an anecdote about how a man in front of him and his elderly mother at Highbury (before Arsenal moved to the Grove) racially abused Kanu, afterwards turning round and apologising for letting such an unacceptable sentiment just "slip" out.

An indication to how after all this there's a bizarre conclusion is in the aside about John Terry, accused of calling Anton Ferdinand a "fucking black cunt". Terry's explanation is that he was in fact saying to Ferdinand, after a confused encounter, that he didn't say he was a "fucking black cunt", although it seems Ferdinand hadn't realised in the first place Terry had said anything of the sort. According to Doughty, that Terry might have said such things is not that surprising "given Terry's general level of conduct". I'm not a Chelsea fan, but the newspapers have for a while now seemed to have it in for Terry: tales of him urinating at the bar in a club, showing businessmen round Stamford Bridge for a fee, the outrageous entrapment of his father and finally the more than possibly untrue story of his affair with Vanessa Perroncel would rile anyone. Even if all of these accusations were true, it's fatuous to claim that they make the allegations of racism more likely.

Having then set out how much worse things used to be, and how there are also "worse things to complain about", Doughty's advice to any players racially abused is to "put up with it and get on with the game". Yes, Patrice Evra, you should put up with opposing players repeatedly calling you a "nigger"; after all, those who blazed a trail before you had to. As for you Anton, well, you didn't even know about Terry's comments before you heard about it later, so what's the problem? Of all the absurd arguments to make, this has to be one of the most ridiculous. The sheer fact that it was fans who were so vociferous about Terry's alleged comments gives the lie to the idea that players, knowing the progress that has been achieved, should now keep quiet. The obvious truism is that if the players themselves are treating each other in such a way, then it hardly sets an example to the fans. All the more reason for players not to tolerate it.

Understandably, the Show Racism the Red Card campaign is "appalled". Leroy Resenior, who works for the campaign, put it far more brutally when asked about the situation in general:

My son is a footballer and he has not experienced racism on the pitch, but he is of mixed heritage. Those who say that black players have to toughen up haven't got a clue and shouldn't be the ones our kids listen to.

Quite.

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10/26/2011 09:58:00 pm | |

Wednesday, September 17, 2008 

The other winners.

You probably won't have noticed, but the Paralympics are over and Team GB (sic) has finished second in the medals table, behind only China, having won 102 medals, including 42 golds.

I say you won't have noticed, because the coverage has been absolutely abysmal. For all the hype and glamour of the original Olympics, with almost 12 hours or more of coverage some days on BBC1, the Paralympics have had to make to do with an hour long highlights show, if that, on BBC2 in the evening. As for coverage on the actual news or even in the sports sections of the broadsheets, you may as well have forgotten about it.

At the heart of this it's pretty obvious what's going on, no matter how we try to gloss over it or deny it, so let's face it: no one really cares if spastics win medals, as after all, they're still spastics and they're competing against other spastics. They might use the same equipment, be trained in the exact same places by the exact same people, but they're still never going to enter the public conciousness purely because they're not "normal" individuals taking part in the "normal" events. You'll probably have troubling naming a single athlete that's taken part, and Dame Tanni Grey Thomson has retired so doesn't count. Darren Kenny won four golds and a silver; Dave Roberts picked up four golds; and David Weir for example won four medals, including two golds, but all will still struggle to be remembered even by sports journalists. We will definitely remember Rebecca Adlington and Chris Hoy though, and even more so when they most likely receive honours for their efforts.

If indeed our showing in Beijing during August showed that the claim we were leaving in a broken society was piffle, then the sentiment can be doubled on the back of these achievements. It's just a great shame they won't get the recognition that they undoubtedly deserve. The full list of winners, incidentally, is here.

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9/17/2008 11:56:00 pm | |

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