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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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I happened to catch the BBC Radio 5 sports punditry show Fighting Talk on Saturday. One topic under discussion was whether soccer’s FA Premier League should “do something” about dominance of the current top three teams in the league, it being alleged that their success made the rest of the league boring. One of the pundits was against this notion, making the point that, as little as 15 years ago, there were different dominant teams. Those who celebrated Liverpool’s invulnerability in the mid 1980s could hardly have imagined that that club’s place would be taken by Manchester United in the 1990s. Indeed, barely six months ago, nobody could have predicted the emergence of oligarch-funded Chelsea as title contenders. She argued that the league had evolved “organically” – any problems would tend to correct themselves – and lamented the prospect of a “genetically engineered” league with structures designed to hobble the successful teams and boost the mediocre.
I thought it was interesting to hear those specific terms used to support a laissez faire position and it struck me that there is a paradox about environmentalism. That is that, while it holds that organic processes are desirable in food production and any kind of “artificial engineering” is bad, it holds that the reverse applies to society and the economy. Capitalism has developed without a plan. Nobody had to sit down and design civil society. Yet these natural phenomena are scorned by the likes of the Green party whose underlying premise is that society should be re-engineered so that it can become “more natural”.
On the same day that Prime Minister Tony Blair launches London’s official bid for the Olympic Games in 2012, I hereby announce the start of my ‘No Olympics’ campaign.
“The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will enhance sport in London and the UK forever,” said bid chairman Barbara Cassani.
And, by curious coincidence, ‘forever’ is about how long we are going to have to spend paying for it. No. Non. Nein. Njet. Let the French have it. Or the Russians. Or the Brazilians. Or somebody. Anybody. Just not here. Go away. Sod off. Scram. Sling your hook. Get lost.
I think I shall call a press conference.
UPDATE: The French have also launched their official bid. Apparently, they are the favourites. Good. I support the French bid. Vive la France!
Stephen Pollard quotes from and links to this article, but doesn’t comment other than calling it “fascinating”.
It certainly is. Will Buckley’s starting point is one that will now be familiar to all attentive Samizdata sports posting readers, which is that in India there are now a lot of fans of the game of cricket. More than there are people in Europe, is how I have put it here in the past. I’ll say it again, but differently. There are more Indian cricket fans than there are inhabitants of the USA. That ought to get our readers’ attention.
When Tendulkar bats against Pakistan, the television audience in India alone exceeds the combined populations of Europe. In contrast, when England played Germany in Euro 2000, the combined audience of BBC1 and ITV was 17.9 million. The chief executive of Star TV (Sky’s Asian wing) asked himself recently, what is sport in India? It’s cricket.
Indeed. And you can’t separate the rise of Indian cricket from the rise of India itself, which has undoubtedly been one of the great world stories of the last decade. Without going into the whole they’re-stealing-our-call-centre-jobs things yet again, we can certainly say that economically those Indians have sure pulled themselves together recently, partly because of all that computer stuff, and partly because they no longer have the example of the USSR to misguide them.
All of which means that India is not just crazy about cricket; it has money to spend on it. Hence the interest being displayed by Mr Murdoch’s men. Australia may be the current world champions of cricket, but India are a cricket superpower in the making. Australia have made cricket exciting now. India means that it is certain – absolutely certain – to remain so.
So, if cricket definitely has a future, what of English cricket? England versus Australia (the “Ashes”) used to be the biggest deal in the game. Not any more. What Will Buckley reports about the way cricket is played in England is, for me, the most interesting bit of all. → Continue reading: India means that cricket has a great future – and how England could still be part of it
He was not a ‘show biz personality’. He did not appear in Hello magazine. He did not share his view with us about the case for toppling Saddam, and as far as I am aware, has not greatly troubled the front pages of the world’s newspapers with drunken antics. He was, boringly, one of the finest, toughest sportsmen of the age. And boy, could he use a cricket bat.
Steve Waugh, cricketing colossus, has finally quit the field.
Here on Samizdata we quite often give a mention to sport, having paid attention to the Soccer World Cup of 2002, the recently concluded Rugby World Cup, the University Boat Race, and cricket matches between England and Zimbabwe if only to keep on reminding the universe of the ghastliness of the current lunatic government of that unhappy country. Jonathan Pearce also writes here from time to time about various interesting and diverting sports. Most recently, we have featured a denunciation of the Olympic Games, only last Tuesday. We even occasionally mention Football of the American variety.
But for a true clash of the titans, you need look no further than the contest taking place right now in Melbourne between Australia and India.
The game? Cricket. Yes, cucumber sandwiches, more-tea-vicar, cricket. → Continue reading: A clash of sporting titans in Melbourne
Will you join me in a special Christmas prayer? “Oh Lord, please spare us from the Olympics“:
London will be unable to host the Olympics in 2012 unless the Prime Minister gives the go-ahead within the next few weeks for a £1bn rail link, the capital’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, says.
Don’t do it, Tony. Just keep those Treasury purse strings tightly drawn and, with a bit of luck, the organisers of the whole foul jamboree will look for another city to infest.
No sane person could possibly want the Olympic carnival let loose on London. It is the equivalent of begging the government to add a zero or two to everybody’s tax bills for a decade or more. Quite aside from the gargantuan cost of hosting the wretched thing, we will also have to endure blanket security measures that render every resident under virtual house arrest and months and months of laboured ‘anti-drug’ messages on every medium imaginable. And, given the times we live in, the whole chabang will be saturated with enough stomach-churning PC mummery to induce a vomitting fit.
And for what? So that we can assailed with wall-to-wall, 24/7 coverage of a bunch of physical education students from Uzbekistan competing in a culturally-sensitive, enviromentally-friendly, non-judgemental, compassionate, caring, 1500m peace-march. Feh!
I do not want the sodding Olympics. Not in 2012. Not ever.
It’s no good. Every time I think about Jonny’s sun-kissed fringe. Every time I think about Dallaglio’s try-setting run. Every time I think about that little girl at the airport, at 4:30am, holding up a homemade picture of the England rugby team framed in red tinsel, I feel like blubbing. Even now, as I write this, I’m filling up again. What a game.
I think it’s something to do with having children. You just start becoming emotionally incontinent about everything. Or at least that’s what has happened to me. But enough of this nonsense. I shall ask Mr Micklethwait to try to cure me by email.
But his post below set me thinking about something else. Having waded through various anarcho-capitalist tomes, in the last few months, there’s something I’ve found particularly unsatisfying about them all, as they babble on about private courts, private arbitration, and private police. Where’s the beef!
You hear tantalising snippets about successful anarcho-capitalist societies in fourth century Germany, in eleventh century Ireland, and in fifteenth century Iceland, but rarely, if ever, do you actually get to see the beef. What would an anarcho-capitalist society actually be like? And if it’s such a good thing, why didn’t the German, Irish, and Icelandic experiments sweep the world? Yes, those with the biggest spears, swords, and addictive philosophies, imposed their coercive natures upon the rest of us, and their useless miserable parasitical states. But even anarcho-capitalists will admit that even the worst dictator needs the support of the broad mass of his state’s population, or at least their grudging acceptance, in order to survive. Otherwise, as revolutions like the recent one in Georgia have shown, the dictator is curtains. → Continue reading: Can competitive law work?
Many weeks ago I wrote a posting here about how (a) England just might win the forthcoming Rugby World Cup, and that (b) this might work to the advantage of the Conservative Party. Well, England did win the Rugby World Cup, so how might this help the Conservatives?
I certainly didn’t have in mind that England’s front rooms will now be echoing with the claim that “now we’ll all vote Conservative then”. No. This is more the sort of thing I had in mind, from Adam Parsons in yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday.
It is easy in such times for the rest of us to fall prey to hyperbole, so let’s tread carefully here. But I think it is true to say this is an achievement of great importance, something that everybody can cherish. Not just because a British team has won the cup, nor that it is at last crossing from the bottom of the world and going to the top. It is something to do with the people who won it, and what they stand for.
England’s squad are a decent bunch of people. The likes of Josh Lewsey, Ben Cohen, Jason Leonard, Iain Balshaw – these are genuinely engaging characters, blokes you’d have a drink with.
In other words, they feel so very different from the image most footballers have come to represent over the past few years. On the one hand, we have people who have become the best in the world by training relentlessly, yet retain the level-headedness to acknowledge their supporters as their emotional crux; on the other, players who increasingly come to represent a streak of overpaid self-importance.
It is naive, I suppose, to hope that rugby could, even for a short time, replace football in the national affections, but I hope this victory will at least reverberate.
British soccer (as opposed to merely the English version) took two further knocks last week, when, in among all the England rugby fervour, both Wales (agonisingly) and Scotland (humiliatingly) failed to qualify for the European soccer championships next year.
This relative rise of rugby in the affections (England) and respect (elsewhere in Britain), and the relative decline in the esteem felt towards football, has, I feel, something of an end-of-era feel to it. It all adds to the sense of that New Labour/Princess Di/Things Can Only Get Better bubble bursting back into nothing whence it came. To put it rudely, that brief moment when the English told themselves (or were told by their newspaper columnists) that they preferred emotional incontinence to the old manly virtues of stoicism, calmness under stress, and grace and dignity whether one is victorious or defeated, to the uncontrolled emotional display of weeping copiously and in public when someone utterly unconnected with you dies, or running about like an escaped mental patient when you’ve scored a goal. → Continue reading: England’s Rugby World Cup win and the retreat from emotional incontinence
What an amazing game. What an amazing number of mistakes. What an amazing result. Jonny Wilkinson, can I have your babies, please? What a star. I’ve just aged about 300 years, watching the match, which went into overtime, and I’m just about to watch the post-match commentary, but what a sensational result. England. Rugby world cup champions. Fantastic.
Oh, and a few words for David Campese. No worries, mate.
Well, as Samizdata’s token Australian, I guess it is my job to do a little bit of cheering from the point of view of England’s opponents in the final of the Rugby World Cup on Saturday. Like Brian, I have also been writing about the tournament on ubersportingpundit, but if he is going to bring it here and the commenters are all then going to complain about Australians I might as well use my God like Samizdatista powers too.
For in the other semi-final on the weekend, Australia versus New Zealand, the Australian side that have looked second rate all year suddenly came good, and played superbly to beat New Zealand. Sydney is getting excited. The final is Australia v England, a great grudge match.
Which leaves me with two things to discuss. The grudge, and the match. First, the match. → Continue reading: Australia in the Rugby World Cup Final – and New Zealand hung out to dry
I should have had a good brag about this well before now, but at least the delay has given the Guardian the time to translate the comments in the French and Australian sporting press about it all – it all being the fact that, last Sunday morning London time, England beat France 24-7 in the second semi-final of the Rugby World Cup, in Sydney, and are through to next Saturday’s Final against Australia.
This was something of a surprise to some, and some included me. France had looked terrific all through the early rounds, while England had stuttered against lowlier opposition. But when it came to le crunch England were up for it and France crumpled.
The twin nemeses of France were the two Ws, the Weather, and Wilkinson. → Continue reading: England in the Rugby World Cup Final – and France hung out to dry
Yes it’s the Rugby World Cup, and in the early hours of this morning London time, the mighty Fijians came within a point of suffering a shock defeat at the hands of plucky little USA.
USA captain Dave Hodges paid tribute to his players after coming within a kick of beating Fiji.
“No-one in the world of rugby gave us a chance, but we came out with a good game,” said Hodges, whose team lost 19-18, having spurned a chance to win.
Fly-half Mike Hercus kicked for glory after Kort Schubert’s try, but narrowly missed with the last action of the match.
“It was a good effort from all the players. We were very, very disappointed,” said Hodges.
This rugby tournament still hasn’t had a decent surprise result, having instead suffered an abundance of one sided results along the lines of Goliath 70 David 10, the most extreme of which so far has been England 84 Georgia (the one next to Russia – every name except one ending either in -dze or -vili) 10. Rugby is that sort of game. If one team is well on top the points will accumulate. Running over a line with a rugby ball in your hand and planting it down on the ground (in rugby touching down actually does mean touching down) is relatively easy. So, in rugby, upsets are rare, and it only gets really exciting when the teams are pretty evenly matched, as Fiji and USA turned out to be today, and as will be the case in the later rounds of this tournament, but has has tended not to be the case in the early round games now being played. So this Fiji USA game was very refreshing, and I eagerly await the recorded highlights of the game this evening.
In soccer, by contrast, a team can have all the possession and a string of chances, and have nothing to show for it. And then the other guys can run up the other end and score a goal with their one attack. Converting a solid chance into a soccer goal still takes some doing. Even open goals are appallingly easy to miss, as you will know if you’ve ever played this game, and when chances are missed the sturdiest shoulders can drop and underdog spirits can soar.
The Soccer World Cup not so long ago contained many upsets, with France (sensationally beaten by their own ex-colony Senegal) and Argentina, to name two famously strong and fancied teams, both going home after the first round of games. This is one of the many reasons why soccer is now the great World Game, while rugby is not. Soccer minnows can (sometimes) take great bites out of soccer sharks, so the fans of the lowliest soccer nations can still dream of fantasy results with their heroes winning.
Samizdata readers in particular will surely never forget how the mighty Portuguese – sporting no less a person than Luis Figo of Real Madrid – were humbled 3-2 by … plucky little USA.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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