We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Last weekend I watched some good tennis from some young British players. True they were hammered by the best male tennis player in the world, one of the fastest servers in the world, and one of the all-time great doubles players. But the Australian tennis team would have fancied their chances against any comers on a surface of their own choosing, in front of a partisan crowd.
An Australian paraded a banner which listed a series of sporting indignities heaped upon the British in the previous year: massacres in the cricket, rugby league etc. But neither football (soccer), nor rugby union were mentioned. Patrick Crozier, writes about the novel indignity of being beaten by the Australian soccer team: nicknamed the “Socceroos”, so what they call the England team I shudder to even think.
However, Patrick, like many British people goes from one extreme to the other. Just because the English invented soccer over one hundred and forty years ago, there is supposed to be something shameful about defeat to a newcomer. The same attitude exists in all areas of British endeavour since the mid-19th century. First it was an inferiority complex with Germany and the USA, later with Japan, then Germany and “Europe”. In most cases whether it is the navy, the health system, schools, food, beer, state television, industry, Britain is always assumed either to be “the finest in the world” or it ought to be.
If there were anything remotely approximating the amount of effort put into achieving these ideals as there is spent on moaning about failure, perhaps these delusions would at least be productive. Instead we get whingeing succeded by overbearing gloating, then back again. Little wonder that for any foreigner that regularly competes against the English, there is great pleasure in victory.
But this time things have got truly out of hand. The England rugby union team has been beating the supposedly superior New Zealand, South Africa and Australia teams for several years. The latest round of matches was a professional execution of southern hemisphere pride. So instead of bleating about a soccer match, English sports fans would do better to find out what the rugby team is doing right. England deserve to be favourites to win the rugby world cup this year.
Sadly [not!], the English rugby team faces a truly superior force tomorrow at Twickenham: the French national side, who I have no doubt, will rub snotty English noses into the cold Middlesex mud. I shall of course observe this with my usual detachment… and resist wrentching my phone and pestering every English rugby fan I know for at least two minutes.
Then you’ll have something to moan about!
Patrick Crozier writes the editorial that The Times didn’t publish:
No right-thinking Englishman can fail to be shocked by the unspeakable events that took place at Upton Park on Wednesday. Wednesday 12th February 2003 will long be remembered as a day of national shame; the day when the flower of English manhood, opened a can of beer, sat down in front of the television and watched aghast as its champions, men they trusted, allowed themselves to be beaten by Australians at football.
There will be those, ignorant of the ways of the world, who will say “Hey, the Aussies beat us at cricket, rugby, tennis and just about anything else so why should we bothered about a game of football?” Oh Lord, have mercy on them for they know not what they do.
Football is far more than just another sport. Football is sport. All others are mere distractions. Literally. The whole purpose of inventing minor sports was to give undesirables something to do and Australians something to win at while we, silently and imperiously, continued to hog the main prize. Now, even that is under threat.
There have been worse times to have been an Englishman. Oh, hang about, there haven’t. But we have been humiliated before (remember Norway, remember Calais?) and we recovered then. The task now is to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and prepare for the fightback. Quite simply we must show the World who’s boss.
We must begin by conducting a full enquiry into what happened. We must look at all aspects that led to this defeat with the intention of ensuring it never happens again. We must end the club versus country conflict. We must allow our champions to rest. We must consider whether it is time to rid ourselves of clapped out has-beens like David Beckham, Rio Ferdinand and Michael Owen and find room for the young stars of tomorrow. We must put pride aside and scour the world for the coaching techniques and tactical savvy that will restore our game to its proper place. No stone must go unturned. No sacred cow unslaughtered.
And having restored our team we must right the wrong. We must put piffling concerns such as European Cups, European Championships and Gulf Wars to one side. We must challenge the Australians to a series of footballing tests (perhaps we could call it a Test Series). Anytime, anywhere, any number of games. Let them choose the ground so that when we beat them none shall doubt our superiority – just like the Canadians did in ’72.
There are dark days ahead but we can take inspiration from the words of Field Marshal Haig in 1918: “With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend on the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.”
Patrick Crozier
Okay cricket. There’s a World Cup on, and it is focussing attention on Zimbabwe, and on Mugabe – extreme nastiness of. So cricket is worth explaining to people whom I wouldn’t normally bother to bother about it.
For example, in their first game of the tournament two of the Zimbabwe cricketers, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga made a protest on behalf of their fellow countrymen:
Before the Group-A match started Monday, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga donned black armbands and released a statement condemning the worsening violence and famine in their country, as they mourned what they called “the death of democracy.”
Brave men.
So anyway, I’ll assume you know roughly what baseball is, and I’ll assume I do, and I’ll describe cricket basically by saying how it differs from baseball.
First, the similarities, and (I’m guessing) the common ancestry. Both involve a guy propelling a ball in the direction of a batter, and the batter trying to hit the ball. → Continue reading: Cricket explained – as briefly as I can manage (i.e. not very)
At just after 11 pm London time, in about half an hour or so as I begin to compose this posting, NFL Super Bowl XXXVII will blast off, in San Diego, Southern California – and I will be watching it on British Channel 5 TV. In the last few years, Channel 5 have shown lots of American football, but not the Super Bowl itself. Sky TV would nip in and buy the Super Bowl, leaving Channel 5 with a stupid little highlights show the day after, and I eventually stopped bothering about any American football. But this year, probably because Sky has finally devoured all its adversaries in the shark tank that is British pay TV and doesn’t need to spend money on such things any more, regular Channel 5 is showing the Super Bowl as well as having shown lots of the preceding games. They of course flagged this up loudly beforehand, which means that this time around I’ve been paying attention to the entire NFL season.
Something similar has happened with rugby. All of the Six Nations games this year are about to be shown by the BBC. For the last few years regular TV only showed highlights of the England home games at Twickenham, but now I’ll be able to see all the England games in their entirety. Deep joy.
I don’t much care who wins the Super Bowl. I’ll be watching for the Americanness of it all, for Shania Twain at half time (although ST’s recent album is a huge disappointment to my ear), for the astonishing skill of one guy chucking a ball forty yards, and another guy running full tilt and catching it without breaking his stride, which means that the ball must have been thrown exactly right, several seconds earlier, at a completely blank piece of pre-selected grass. Being a successful NFL quarterback must be about as easy as being a First World War fighter ace. Amazing. And I’ll be watching because I like it when the people I hated at school inflict pain on each other instead of on me. The crowds that watch these games are exuberant, but not psychotic. The commentary is expert, but good humoured. The game itself combines immense intellectual complexity with raw human muscle power. The dancing girls on the touchline are great, as is the aerial photography of the stadium and its surrounding localities. Channel 5 TV reception in my home is very bad, but I don’t care.
I do, however, have my criticisms of American football, most of them centred on what is called “parity”, and when rootling around for a website link to include here I discovered that my doubts are shared by some Americans. → Continue reading: Super Bowl Sunday – parity in the USA and life in England
Fellow bloggers and cricket nuts Brian Micklethwait and Antoine Clarke may have their own reasons for why Australians are currently vastly better than the English at playing cricket, notwithstanding the fifth and final Test match, which England won by a canter.
I reckon this story could explain why Aussie cricket fans are, well, able to get fully behind their team, and hence cheer their heroes to victory on a depressingly regular basis.
As a bit of a “petrol-head”, I have been saddened by the recent demise of Formula One motor-racing, which is increasingly indistinguishable from a procession of cars with few chances for overtaking or for drivers to demonstrate their brilliance.
There are few characters or opportunities for eccentric outsiders to take the field, as in the great days of Fangio or Jim Clark. So it is encouraging to read that F1 bosses are trying as best they might to tweak the rules to make the sport get our pulses racing once again.
Of course we may end up being disappointed once more, but fingers crossed, this great sport can get a much-needed dose of excitement again. And of course all good libertarians should want a sport that celebrates fast driving, the internal combustion engine and obscenely-rich motoring moguls. You can bet that the Guardianistas loathe it. In fact, the killjoys would probably ban it.
John Ray identifies a teeny little error in my Anglo-Australian cricket piece that can’t be left to correct itself only in comment number 8 on that:
Dear Me!
Somebody has their history skew-whiff!
Australia ruled by the Poms in Bradman’s day?
Australia became independent in 1901.
Clang. Sadly for me, and happily for Australia, John is of course right. First it was Shane Warne not bowling very many googlies, and now this. I feel like an England batsman, again.
My misremembering of Australian history is based on a misremembering of a Bradman biography (Bradman by Charles Williams – Little Brown, 1996) that I read some years ago, and in particular, I believe, a misremembering of the following paragraphs, from Williams’ Prologue, which I quote here at some length because it’s good stuff: → Continue reading: Australia – a correction!!
Like me, Tim Blair has been pondering England’s amazingly bad performances against Australia – two down and three more humiliations to go. He suggests that something to do with better running between the wickets, or some such, might improve England’s chances. He may be right. I am in no mood to disagree with any Australian on matters cricketing just now. (See the corrective comment on this, setting me straight about Shane Warne, from Michael Jennings. Michael, when it comes to being an Englishman who is confused about Shane Warne, I am not alone.)
But may I humbly add a further suggestion as to why Australian cricket is now doing so well compared to English cricket, apart from the fact that Australians are, you know, Australians, while the English are merely English. → Continue reading: Cricket – the Anglo-Australian contrast
Samizdata, despite Antoine’s admonitions, has been getting very depressed and depressing lately, so time for some more sports news. It’s only a game, it doesn’t matter, no dead bodies or territory changing hands, good way to let off fascist steam, blah blah blah.
Too bad the English news isn’t that good there either. Oh well.
Anyway, cricket. (That’s the one of which an American once said to Brit interviewer and sports journo Michael Parkinson: “And they do all that on horseback?”) I wish I’d told you earlier in the year what I thought of the England batting, which is that it is a collective Graham Hick. Graham Hick was the Zimbabwean who never quite did as well as he should have as an England batsman, and who got lumbered with the soubriquet of “flat track bully”, that is, good against bad bowling, but bad against good bowling. During the last couple of years, England have been racking up big scores against second-rate test bowling attacks, with very few flops, and it was being said that this time, this time, the Ashes series in Australian this winter just might be different. I thought then that this was folly. How you murder second-raters says very little about how you’ll fare against the likes of McGrath, Gillespie and Warne.
As Warne said before the first test in Brisbane, England will hold their own if they are at their absolute best, but if they slip up Australia will be all over them and they’ll crumple. Too right mate. England had one good day at Brisbane, but in the end were humiliated. And now at Adelaide they started with a good batting day and duly held their own, but then they had two bad days and are heading for another crushing defeat.
I saw this coming half a year ago. I did. But how can I prove it? I can’t. I said it to Antoine, I think, but will he back me? Antoine? I doubt it. Maybe I imagined that I even said it.
So? What of it? Well, I can now see another disappointment being cobbled together by over-optimistic English sports commentators. England have just defeated New Zealand, Australia and now this afternoon South Africa at rugby, all at Twickenham (which incidentally is the town-stroke-suburb where Patrick Crozier lives), the English national stadium. The first two they only just squeaked past by the narrowest of margins. South Africa they did slaughter, but the South Africans played for an hour with only fourteen men. All three visiting teams were manifestly using these more than somewhat insignificant fixtures to test new men and new moves and new combinations. But never mind all that. Hurrah!! England are going to win the World Cup!!
I don’t believe a word of it. England always peak between World Cups. And someone in the Southern Hemisphere, usually Australia, peaks at the World Cup. France play badly but not badly enough in the early games, then play one dazzling game, then get knocked out, and a Southern Hemisphere team wins it. England always contrive to look tired at the World Cup, presumably because they always are tired. All that peaking when it doesn’t matter takes it out of you, I guess.
You read it here first.
I guess I’ll have to cheer myself up with some more politics.
I am now officially sick and tired of hearing about how the pending players’ strike is going to kill Major League Baseball. The general manager of the Cincinnati franchise took some heat for a statement in which he basically argued that a players’ strike would be the 9/11 of baseball. Dave Campbell of ESPN also invoked 9/11 in describing the consequences of a player strike. For you incurably hysterical types out there, let me offer the following words of reason:
Pro baseball will survive because it is played in a capitalist country.
As long as there are athletes who want to play, and entrepreneurs who are willing to organize it, professional baseball will exist in some form. There has not been a lack of either of these elements in the United States since the 1870s. Every time I have made this claim, among family, coworkers, students, etc., it has been met with howls of derision. The counter-arguments boil down to:
(1) what about the fans? the game is for the fans; what if the fans get fed up and leave? and:
(2) baseball has now gotten itself into problems that are unprecedented in its history, and it cannot possibly hope to survive, as the deck is stacked against it. Both these claims are lacking in merit, as we shall see.
If you look at MLB’s attendance history (which of course I did), you will see that there is NO evidence that past strikes have had a long-term impact on baseball attendance. None. In 1972, a strike cut about ten games off the front of the season. Attendance per game dipped in 1972 — but attendance was higher in 1973 than it was in 1971, and has not since fallen below 1973 levels. A similar pattern emerged around the longer 1981 strike — attendance was higher in 1982 than in 1980, and grew from 1982 into the 1990s.
In 1994, the players again struck, this time in August, and the season came to an abrupt end. This time, it looks like baseball paid a price — attendance in 1993 peaked at 30,979 fans per game, and has not risen to that level since the strike. But 1993 is a poor year to use as a baseline, because two new teams joined the National League that year, and first-year expansion teams draw exceptionally well. One of those teams, the Colorado Rockies, set an attendance record that still stands. If you use 1992 as the baseline, or just throw those expansion teams’ totals out of the league average for 1993, baseball had fully recovered its attendance base within about two seasons of the end of the strike.
But let’s suppose the doomsayers are right, and baseball loses half its fan base. Let’s say MLB attendance falls from 30,000 per game to 15,000 per game as a result of the pending strike. Can we put that into some historical context?
There used to be a time that insufferable sportswriters called the “golden era” in MLB history. Roughly defined as the years 1947-57, these are the seasons that sportswriters like Roger Kahn, in hushed and reverent tones, describe as the greatest ever. Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle played during part or all of The Golden Era. Baseball was the only well-established pro sport. Baseball was The National Pastime, a huge part of our popular culture. Right?
Well, guess what? The average major league paid attendance during The Golden Era was 14,010 per game. Yes, baseball is in danger, the doomsayers tell us, of having its attendance fall all the way back to … essentially what it was during The Golden Era, when baseball was allegedly pure as the driven snow and beloved by all Americans.
What about those organized labor problems? Look, these issues are as old as baseball. The threat of the union striking is nothing compared to what players used to do when they didn’t like the way the owners treated them — they used to FORM RIVAL LEAGUES! The Federal League, to name just one, played in 1914-15; future Hall of Famers like Eddie Plank, Chief Bender, Joe Tinker and Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown defected to the upstart league. The Federal League didn’t last, but it was a major wakeup call for the AL and NL. The AL itself started as a rebel league too, except that it survived. If the pampered players of today had the cojones to pull off something like THAT, the owners would have a lot more to fear than they do in Donald Fehr, the morose players’ union chairman.
So rest easy, fans. Baseball is here to stay. How do I know this? Because capitalism is alive and well.
What a superb showing by British shooter Mick Gault. He keeps winning at the Commonwealth Games in spite of having to do all his training in Switzerland.
The reason he has to train in another country is that Britain took a giant lurch towards becoming a police state in 1997 by outlawing all handguns (not to mention seeing firearms crimes soar since then).
Responding to my praise for golf, Steven Gallaher (of I don’t know where, but his email has “us” at the end of it, so I’m guessing somewhere in the USA) says this:
On the other hand, my observation of the golfers I get paired with on those occasions when I go to the course alone is that most do not care to suffer the consequences of their actions, and so they don’t. Lies are improved and mulligans are taken. Short puts are never attempted; they are assumed to be made. Per-hole score is capped in one way or another (often twice par).
Which presumably means that you don’t score yourself as having taken any more than eight shots on a par four hole, even if you actually took eighteen. I don’t know what a mulligan is, but it sounds equally sneaky. This all reminds me of the stories about Bill Clinton’s dubious self-scoring habits as a golfer.
Perhaps our approach to golf is a reflection of our approach to life. If so, what does that say about our culture?
As usual, Steven, the news about our culture is not good. We’re all doomed, doomed. According to reliable eyewitness accounts, Western Civilisation has been in headlong and uninterrupted decline at least since the time of the ancient Sumerians, i.e. ever since anyone has ever kept reliable eyewitness accounts of anything. Either that, or you play all your golf in Arkansas.
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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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