Samizdata

To be a bit more serious about it, and having thought about it some more, I think that my fellow Brian (Linse) is probably right to talk about “soccer”, and that I should stop calling it “football”. In fact I think we should all stop calling anything “football”, without qualification, unless the context makes it entirely clear which variety we’re talking about. There are just so many different varieties. American, “Association” (soccer!), Gaelic, Australian Rules, rugby (union and league), and many, many more I’m sure. Soccer/football is, I now accept, one of those conundra that require that English – English English, I mean – be spoken differently, by the English, in order for us to make sense elsewhere in the Anglosphere.

In Germany, they call soccer “fussball” with the “ss” being done as a Germanic squiggle, a word I smile at. And in the noted American TV sitcom Friends, what we here call “table football” is called “foozeball” (guess spelling). What’s that about? ( I don’t mean: horrid Americans bleah!!! I mean: what’s it about? Why “fooze”? Is it some weird USA-German thing?)

Christopher Pellerito‘s comments earlier today about the relative dullness of the soccer that Americans get to see make a lot of sense. Here in Europe we note big differences in the national styles of the different national soccer leagues. The Italian league is shown regularly on British TV, on Channel 4, but I – and many others I talk to – can’t stand it. It’s too slow. It’s like watching a cross between soccer and armchair philosophy. Hugely skilful, and no doubt hugely diverting to play, but not, for me at least, any fun to watch.

The British Premier League has recently gone from muddy cloggers to world class with the arrival in Britain of a mass of foreign players. A big moment in recent British social history, never mind sporting history, came recently when a British premier league club – I think it was David Carr’s Chelsea – fielded a team for a Premier League game with no English players, or even British ones. I rather think we have the European Union to thank for this. The Premier League has always been fast and furious. Now it’s also very skilful.

However, the ultimate in pace and skill may be the Spanish League, if that wondrous Real-Barca game was anything to go by, which maybe it isn’t.

Interesting thing about France, though. They undoubtedly have the best soccer team in the world just now. Zinedine Zidane (who scored a very clever goal for Real against Barca on Tuesday) is probably most people’s current pick as the best soccer player in the world. But, their league is financially rather feeble, and French clubs seldom figure in the later stages of the European Champions League. I think this may be an African thing. Much of the French team these days consists of players of francophone African origin. And African men, I rather think, and in contrast to white couch potatoes like me, love to play but don’t get nearly so excited about just watching. And the original French French have never been that keen on merely watching soccer, compared say, to the British, the Germans, the Spanish or the Italians. Which is why there are so many superb Afro-French soccer players now playing in Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, especially in Britain, and especially for Arsenal (the top London club, on course to win this year’s Premier League title).

Brian Linse may also be pleased to know that I also like to watch American football – cheerleaders, million dollar one-off adverts and all – and bitterly regret that Britain’s Channel 5 TV, which has extensive and often live and uncut American football coverage right up until the Superbowl, has stopped showing the Superbowl itself live, on account of Sky TV (Rupert Murdoch’s British and European satellite TV operation) having bought that. C5 only shows a few highlights a day later. The good news, for a cheapskate like me who doesn’t like paying for pay TV, is that Sky, having given “ITV Digital” such a roasting recently, is cutting back on its sports spending in the manner of a victorious army easing back on its ammunition budget. The England home games in the Six Nations rugby have lately only been shown in full on Sky. But now the Six Nations is reverting to being shown in its entirety, live and uncut, by the BBC, for which hurrah! And maybe C5 will also get the entire as-it-happens Superbowl back. If so, double hurrah.

Brian Linse says, among all the other things he said on Monday 22nd, that football (or “soccer” as he calls it) is boring. He proposes a number of USA-type “reforms” to rescue it from its current state of total global obscurity.

Personally I thought that the highlights I watched last night of Real Madrid’s 0-2 first leg victory over Barcelona in Barcelona – an amazing result for Real, which virtually guarantees their place in the European Champions League final in Glasgow, against either Manchester United or Bayer Leverkusen – were about as good as sport can get without my own team being involved and winning gloriously.

But if you agree with the (Ain’t No – pah!!) Bad Dude, probably because you are also an American, or perhaps because you think that blogging and politics and whatnot are more important than “soccer”, then go to Soccernet Europe (the “soccer” disease is spreading I’m afraid) to find out how boring football is when Stefan Effenberg is involved.

Effenberg is currently out of the Bayern Munich line-up for having (a) “long been a controversial figure” and now (b) for saying in a recent interview that unemployment benefit should be cut, and then refusing to take it back.

(My thanks to Antoine Clarke for pointing me to this story.)

It’s important for us libertarians to celebrate the fun that free people have and the good that they do, and not just to bitch about politics.

Natalija Radic is handling pornography very capably, I’m sure we’d all agree. Dale Amon and I have done stuff about music. Science and technology have been celebrated here, by both David Carr and Perry de Havilland.

But sport is one of life’s great pleasures, both to do and to watch others doing. Yet sport has here mostly been complained about, by David again, picking on a sport he doesn’t like.

Last weekend’s sport was, for me, mostly good, but it started badly. I awoke on Saturday to learn from my Ceefax that England had just been slaughtered in a one-day cricket game by New Zealand. Was this an omen? At Twickenham later in the day, England were to play Ireland at rugby and experts were tipping England to win heavily. But Ireland killed Wales two weeks back, and the last time heavily-tipped England played Ireland, Ireland won. Might they sneak it again? No worries. England routed Ireland with a huge first half display (31-6) and went on to win 45-11 despite appearing to lose interest with half an hour still to go.

With this win England went top of the world rugby rankings, jumping ahead of … New Zealand! I can remember when England couldn’t lose at cricket to New Zealand in their worst nightmares, and couldn’t win at rugby against New Zealand in their wildest dreams. The New Zealand rugby team, remember, is no mere gaggle of sporty blokes who happen to like a bit of rough-and-tumble on a Saturday afternoon. This is the mighty All Blacks, the very definition of New Zealand nationhood and manhood. And now England are better than them. But worse at cricket. Strange times.

Chelsea, the club which plays the sport (football) which David Carr does like to watch, were meanwhile beating Depressing Northern Town Who Used To Be Far Better 3-1 in the sixth round of the FA Cup, and on Sunday my Tottenham Hotspur beat Post-Industrial Wasteland Rovers 4-0. Chelsea and Spurs were then drawn against each other in the quarter-finals. I’ll keep you posted about that, and perhaps David will too.

On a more serious note, I’m struck by the parallels between what David was objecting to about the Olympics and what Natalija’s opponents were saying about pornography. Both were opposing the thing in question because of what it looked like, and what it might lead to. Porn is sometimes faked up to look like something truly nasty – non-consenting sexual aggression – and hence might lead to that truly nasty thing for real. And sport often looks like Nazis being nasty, so what might that lead to?

But isn’t the point of sport that it takes a whole facet of the human psyche (especially the male human psyche) and sucks it into a morally neutral cul-de-sac with no real-world consequences? Those athletes marching through the stadium with their flags and anthems, or those fans baying in hideous, collectivist unison may be behaving a lot like Nazis, but they are not in fact Nazis. Sports fans like me talk about people getting “slaughtered”, “routed” or “murdered” (see above), but that’s only metaphorical. No actual countries are going to be invaded. No Jews are going to be gassed. Okay, sport plays with psychological fire, and sometimes it gets out of hand. In South America, footballers miss crucial World Cup penalties and get murdered by crazed fans. In Britain, unpleasant political collectivists spend their lives trying to turn the pseudo-mayhem of football into the real thing. But the real-world mayhem that results is nothing compared to the horrors of big-time political collectivism, in those miserable parts of the world where such stuff still matters.

In the fantasies of collectivist politicians, huge crowds shouting in huge stadiums only shout in their honour. Such persons must hear the roars in a British football stadium with something close to despair. They slog away at organising their silly political meetings and party rallies, and at most a few hundred political hacks and obsessives show up. Yet thousands turn out for a dreary, lower division football game. The biggest crowd in Europe in recent years was in Paris, but it wasn’t for any politician; it was when France won the World Cup.

I believe that in Iran not long ago, the government made a collective, collectivist fool of itself by trying and failing to stop an international football match. Too much collective adoration of something that wasn’t them or their boring and annoying opinions, you see. Sport only gets political if the politicians take against its essentially non-political nature, or try to use it by pretending that the crowds are really theirs. Wise politicians, even collectivist ones, leave well alone. At least, they say to themselves, the crowds aren’t shouting against us. (Might that be why some libertarians also dislike sport? Big crowds expressing hostility to the wrong things?)

Most sports fans know that sport is only sport. They go mad, scream at each other, smash into each other (if they’re playing), … and then meet up for a drink afterwards. It may look nasty for the duration, but it’s only a bit of fun, to be wallowed in when your team wins and shrugged off as only a game when they lose. We’re just blowing off steam. It’s not real. Well, it is real. In fact it’s great. It’s great fun. But only, in the end, that.

Which is exactly the libertarian defence of pornography. That too only has a tiny few nasty real-world consequences. Mostly that too is just fun.

With sport as with porn, we libertarians should draw our lines carefully. On the one hand, there is that which merely looks evil, might lead to evil, might evoke memories of evil, might lead people down the path towards evil, and which is perhaps therefore in some sense morally evil now. We can argue about the nuances of all that, but no one should be sent to prison if they lose such arguments. And then there’s that which is uncontroversially, aggressively, definitely evil, now, which should be prevented or failing that be punished, either by the law or by force of arms.

I refuse to end on that grim note. To end instead with some more consequence-free fun and to ram home just how much fun sport can be, let me tell you what my sporting highlight of the weekend ended up being. It happened not in a rugby game, or a football or cricket game, but in David’s accursed Winter Sports. The however-many-metres-it-was five blokes’ skating race. Four blokes were racing in a bunch for the medals. Bloke five, an Australian, was way behind. Then, just as they were all about to flash over the winning line, blokes one, two, three and four all collided with each other in a crazy, slip-sliding tangle. Bloke five, being far enough behind to skate around it all, but not too far behind, won. The silver and bronze medallists got their gongs by sliding over the line horizontally. David would surely have enjoyed that and maybe he did.

Despite my best efforts to filter out the Olympics, the bru-haha about the Skating Gold Medal has managed to show up as a blip on my radar screen. If I have got this straight, a Russian pair was awarded the Gold and a Canadian pair the silver only that seems to have outraged the whole world for some reason (there is a war on, you know) so a gaggle of IOC apparatchicks went into a furious round of secret investigations and deals were made in various smoke-free rooms and, voila, now the Canadians have the Gold medal instead. Apparently the judges got it all wrong

Which leads me to a question: how does anybody know?

First of all, skating is not a sport. It is a hobby; a genteel pastime, especially when it’s called ‘Ice Dance’ which is skating for homosexuals

Secondly, how does anybody know who ‘won’? In football, Team A scores more goals then Team B. Simple. Team A has won. In Boxing, Fighter A is parading around the ring holding a belt while Fighter B is being carried out feet first. Fighter A has won. In swimming, Swimmer A makes his way across the pool quicker then Swimmer B. No arguments; Swimmer A has won

Now skating: Couple A does some circles, triple salkos and pirhouettes. Couple B does some circles, triple salkos and pihouettes. And the winner is…??????

Ah, those famous lines from the Stealer’s Wheel. Brendan Nyhan over on American Prospect drew my attention to the fact that Ted Kennedy was not the only one making a total ass of himself over the meaning of a game of American football.

Now there was a time when Rush Limbaugh was actually witty and insightful, hell I went to see his show live once in New York some years back. Yet after listening to his radio remarks (available via the Brendan Nyhan article linked above) I am forced to the conclusion that Rush has finally completed his journey from right wing punditry’s doyen to its doofus. I guess the bailiffs must have come calling and repossessed that ‘talent on loan from God’.

Limbaugh contends that because the Patriots Football Team market themselves to ‘the soccer mom’s season ticket base’ as a team rather than by emphasising the individual players, then the Patriots are in fact ‘socialist’. Never mind that it is just a capitalist marketing ploy and never mind that socialism is a political system in which the means of production, including labour, are controlled by the state (unlike a voluntary football team of millionaire players).

And so there we have it: Rush Limbaugh and Edward Kennedy in agreement as to what the Patriots Football Team actually represents. Two of a kind: a brotherhood of absurdity, spouting fallacies that must surely reduce anyone who actually knows what the word socialist really means to either stunned silence or embarrassed laughter.