Samizdata

I ask for advice about what to say on the radio about Third World poverty. Nothing. I mention the USA soccer team and the emails flood in. Well, one did, from Radley Balko, whose email ends with @cato.org, which makes him something to do with the Cato Institute, which makes him someone with a back to be scratched.

Okay then. I said that our media are saying that the USA is ignoring the World Cup. Not so, says Bradley Balko. The USA’s media are ignoring the World Cup. But, says, Radley Balko, the USA’s people are paying it some definite attention.

I was at a bar in Arlington, VA this morning for the game. 2:30am on a Monday morning. Absolutely packed with soccer fans. As was the other bar up the street that stayed open for the game. This, and they weren’t even serving beer.

God bless Brad “John Malkovich” Friedel.

Radley Balko does a blog called The Agitator where he picks up on the rumours that the Portuguese tried to get the South Koreans to agree to a draw. I just heard from our TV that this rumour is all over our newspapers too. He also has pictures reinforcing the Malkovich/Friedel similarity. And he has things about civil liberties violations in the wake of 9/11, the crazinesses of the war on drugs, and such like. If you like personal-stroke-political-stroke-humorous, have a look at it.

Yes Brian, people in Croatia are very happy that our footballers have defeated Italy… the moment the match was over the streets were filled with people holding glasses of beer and bottles of loza, car horns were being blown and I could hear the crackle of guns being fired off into the air from all directions.

Like Perry said in his earlier article, modern societies do like to express their identities through sports… and of course the fact that historically Italy has a habit of invading us tends to make the significance of any ‘national’ clash on the football field take on a certain extra flavour just as the fact Britain and Argentina have fought a war against each other adds much the same spice. So just imagine how the English felt after defeating Argentina, then add the sound of rifles and pistols being fired off into the air and you should be able to picture the situation across Croatia!

… and of course guess who gets tricked into providing the logistics for the celebration party for my football mad friends this afternoon…

Soon Natalie Solent will be going: “Boys, enough already with the soccer, there’s a nuclear war about to start over Kashmir, new laws trashing what little remains of our email privacy, a vile British government to be overthrown, a bizarre British monarchy to be argued about, leftist websites to be denounced, Weighty Issues to be Addressed, etc. etc.” And emailers should be warned that even my fascination with soccer, in the USA or anywhere else, has its limits. Nevertheless, I found this from Rick Drasch most diverting:

There are regional considerations with soccer in the US. I grew up in Connecticut (where all towns are named after English towns or Indian words), and let me tell you that soccer is THE sport in southern New England. I have been playing soccer since I was 5. In school, we had no football team; our baseball team was a joke; but our high school soccer team is one of the best in the nation. The dominance of soccer extends throughout Connecticut into Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In high school, I personally did not know of a single football team in the state.

And there was me thinking that US soccer was all South American immigrants or maybe British immigrants, or else hired foreign guns.

As kids, we were genuinely interested (or at least tried to be) in what passed for a professional soccer team for our region, which I think were the Cosmos or some lame name like that. But games were rare and not advertised, and certainly not televised.

This must now be changing fast. You can now presumably get some kind of soccer from somewhere on the internet at any hour of the day or night if you know where to look. If not now then pretty soon.

I’m not sure of the reason why soccer dominates in that region; it’s not a monetary one. One theory I have is that it is a population issue. When you have 30 kids per class (of both genders), try and field a football team. If you actually manage to do it, you’ll still get killed. Nobody wants to watch your pipsqueak quarterback get terminated with extreme prejudice by a linebacker from a school in Jersey with 3000 students.

Or it could just be that it tain’t called “New” England for nothin’, gov.

I don’t think that Rick’s heart is really in that last bit, do you? – but the point about the physical danger of American football is surely a good one. With soccer, when you are severely outclassed, all that happens is that you get beaten 8-0, the way that Saudi Arabia was beaten 8-0 by Germany the other day. In general, I’ve heard it said, soccer is less likely to inflict severe long-term injury than American football, despite and in fact because of all that pain-preventing equipment that the footballers wear which enables them to carry right on jarring themselves to what eventually turns into an early and painful death. Hence the enthusiasm of those soccer mums.

To take my imagined Natalie Solent objection seriously, why blog on about sports like this? For the same reason that all newspapers have sports pages, I guess. It’s part of life, and a big one.

There are lots of reasons why we who love sports love sports. Here’s one that I haven’t seen mentioned lately, which is that with sport you do at least know what the hell happened. The daily bread of Samizdata is, let’s be honest, politics, or more loosely, “public issues”. But the trouble with “public issues” is that so often they aren’t. Simply finding out what the hell happened can take you all the time you have to spare.

Sport isn’t like that. The USA really did beat Portugal 3-2. It wasn’t 4-2, nor was it 2 all. It was 3-2 to the USA. It was 3-1 at half time, and at the end it was 3-2. I know it, and if you care, you know it. Way to go, USA!!

Well, imagine if we didn’t know, but only had lying press releases and evasive performances from the FIFA Press Secretary to go on, like at a summit conference.

“Mr Secretary can you tell us the score?”

“Gentlemen, I’m not able to reveal the exact score at this moment in time. This will, we now anticipate, be revealed rather more fully next Thursday, after the FIFA Results Subcommittee Meeting. What I can say is that this was a clean, honest and vigorous game, much enjoyed by all concerned.”

“Yes, but who won?”
“Is it true that two of the Portugal goals were own-goals?”
“Was anybody sent off?”
“Which of the USA goalkeepers played in the game?”
“Did Figo play?”
“How well did he play?”
“Did he score any goals?”

“One at a time please. Yes madam.”

“Can you tell us what colour shirts the two teams were wearing?”

“Why yes I can ma’am, the USA’s players were wearing….”

Etc.

World Cup Finals would be so vitally important that, as with Bilderberg meetings, it would be permanently denied that they ever happened. As for them ever telling us what the score was and who won, forget it.

But mercifully, sport is not like that. It has its intricacies and secret dramas and concealed scandals, but the basic story is out there for us all to see. Sport is egalitarian not only in who gets to play it and how likely they are to get hurt, but also in who gets to talk about it in a reasonably well informed manner. Answer: everybody who wants to! No wonder so many people prefer sports talk to politics talk.

And if we libertarians want to get our voices heard and our memes circulated in human as opposed merely to libertarian or more generally political company, then those of us who are inclined to join in with this sports talk should do so.

Bring on the Argies.

More from the Lemley family of California, in answer to an earlier question I posted:

My youngest daughter (5) plays soccer, and my oldest (8) doesn’t. (My oldest is more of a bookworm.) My youngest played her first year last year, liked it, and she’s going to play again next year. (The leagues play in the fall.) It’s pretty low-key, like “here’s the ball, and you go this way … not that way, this way.” She has fun with it, and we play in the backyard from time to time. The hope for her, and most girls her age, is that they have fun with the game and keep playing for as long as possible.

What this little report illustrates is why “soccer” has done so well. It’s simple. You just need a ball and a willingness to have fun kicking it this way and that. This is not a capital intensive game. You can practice it anywhere, and wear just about anything while you’re doing it. Hence the legendary successes that can be achieved by countries who are failing at virtually everything else. Argentina’s economy is a global embarrassment just now, yet they are among the favourites to win the World Cup. And hence football’s capacity to spread. “Soccer” is catching on in the USA, even as the more unwieldy and expensive “American” version of football (which is more like our rugby) fails to ignite over here or in mainland Europe, except as a way to entertain US expats.

By the way, the USA ladies team are the world champions, no less. (I heard a Channel Five commentator on US baseball mention this last night.) And in general, it seems that, like Russ’s daughter, most of the Americans who get interested in soccer get interested in playing soccer. Over here “football fever” has tended to mean millions of couch potatoes or travelling fans who merely watch soccer, a numerical fact reflected in the TV adverts which have in recent years become sodden with a truly depressing worship of football fandom. Hurrah, say these adverts, for the “real” fans, who waste their entire lives getting worked up about the results of games in which they do not play, and who might on the basis of this mania be persuaded to buy this or that beer or snackfood and thus sink even further into bloated immobility. Now I like to watch football myself, but please don’t tell me that this is the most profound thing I do. Happily it seems that my sense of being insulted and patronised rather than befriended by these adverts may be quite widely shared, and that this era of British football watching emotional excess may be fading. Most of the adverts in this genre that I most hate were actually on TV a few years ago rather than right now, and meanwhile “ITV Digital” has discovered that there are limits after all to the televised football appetites of Britain. But how much more pleasing it would be if “football fever” meant Britain’s football clubs each having a dozen amateur and youth teams playing every weekend.

What’s the betting that some time during the next two decades the USA wins the World Cup? And what’s the betting that when they do, most of the USA hardly notices?

Russ Lemley of Torrance, CA, and more to the point USA, emails this charming vignette of the family life of a Samizdata reader, thus:

I was probably one of 30 people (maybe that’s too high) on the west coast of the US who saw any portion of the US-Portugal game live. The game started at 2 am LA time. I got to bed last night kinda late, so I didn’t get up until 3, at just about the beginning of the second half. I actually waited a minute before turning on the TV because I was afraid to see the score. When I turned it on and saw the score was USA 3, Portugal 1, I got lightheaded and almost fainted. Then I kicked myself (figuratively) for missing the first half!

The second half I was on pins and needles. (Soccer (er – football) is boring – bah! I’m a baseball nut, and even I fall asleep watching pitching duels sometimes. Even with one own goal, that second half drove me nuts!) Although the US was playing defense to hold their lead, they held up very well considering their opponent. When the game was over, I was so ecstatic that I could hardly contain myself. But I had to. Do you know how hard it is to jump and down in elation without waking up your wife and two daughters at 3:46 am? I figured it out, and hopefully this will be good practice for the US games against Korea and Poland.

Bring on Italy!!!

Maybe not all our readers quite get what a result this was, and how good Portugal are. Luis Figo is Portuguese, and he is one of the most highly regarded players in the world. Or try this, from our good friend The Guardian, from this morning’s sports section:

In Group D the US look to be one of those teams that are always at the World Cup but never contribute much. Anything but a defeat against Portugal would be a major shock.

I’ve feel as if I’ve been reading for ever about the USA’s “soccer mums”, mostly in connection with which way they would vote. My attitude was: vote how you want ladies, where’s the soccer? I have my answer. And I’m told the US ladies soccer team is pretty good, yes? Russ, do your daughters play soccer by any chance?

Well would you ever? It seems that one of those little no-hope teams from somewhere in the north-of-Brazil region has just beaten Portugal 3-2. This is the biggest drama since Senegal beat World Cup holders France in the opening game, a result already noted here. I’ve been looking for another team to support when England get bounced out by Argentina on Friday. (Ireland are, even as I blog this, being disposed of by Germany.) I may just have found it.