For a while there was a time in my life when everybody I knew was having babies. It was a time when many potentially enjoyable social interactions were interrupted by a pink noisy thing which had the ability to propel bodily fluids out of every hole in its body like a water cannon at a football match.
It was a time when no statement a parent made concluded decisively, because the baby would emit a loud noise, or bowel movement, or drool, and that would immediately require the full and concentrated focus of its parents’ attention.
It was the endless and brainless doting by parents on a thing which contributes about as much to society as toothpaste does to building construction. The conviction that their baby, which looks and acts like everyone else’s baby, is somehow special, highly unique and more skilled than all the other babies. If I had heard, just once, “Oh look, Christopher is filing our income tax again, how cute.” Rather than, “Oh look Christopher connected his toe to his forehead with a single string of snot, how cute,” I would have been impressed. Needless to say, I never was.
It was also after a long time of this that I realized it wasn’t the babies that bothered me, it was the parents.
I’ve had a similar epiphany about football. It’s not the sport that annoys me, it’s the hardcore fans.
It took me a while to get to this place. At first — as with dealing with new parents — I had a hard time liking the game because I have an allergic reaction to anything that anyone tries to force down my throat. It was expected of me to like football. But, with all the wildly missed passes, the failure to put a relatively small ball in a hole larger than many of its fans’ apartments, and most of all, the drama associated with players flopping around on the ground like hormonal teenagers re-enacting the battle of Dunkirk, liking the sport was pretty much untenable.
But like a mediocre song, heard over and over again, I started to get into it. The currency I was trading in, here, was that I like all sports, and football is definitely a sport. Looked at microscopically – individual ball handling, strategic formations, the ability to keep the ball out of a hole larger than many of its fans’ apartments — there is an unbelievable amount of skill, athleticism and endurance going on… beneath the mosquito-near-your-ear sound of 45,000 vuvuzelas being blown at the same time.
According to a documentary Stadiums of Hate by the BBC, this year, in Poland and the Ukraine, you may not hear vuvuzelas, but you will hear the white supremacist screeching, and anti-Semitic/-black/-homosexual (take your pick) gesticulating and hollering of people that have somehow equated football to nationalism and intolerance.
It’s definitely a documentary with an agenda. And that agenda is — as Jonathon Orstein, the Director of the Jewish Community Centre in Krakow, and interviewee for the documentary puts it —“sensationalist.” In the same June 2012 letter to The Economist he said that he was, “profoundly disturbed by this unethical form of journalism.”
Which may be so. The BBC saw a story that was relevant, would attract viewership, could be sensationalized, and went for it. You could accuse the BBC of unbalanced and poor reporting till the cows come home — or until the racist goose-steps, as it were —but you can’t deny that this sport, unlike other sports, and regardless of where it’s played, has this darker, sinister and ultra-extreme element.
Maybe it’s inevitable. Football tends to spawn high-end nationalism from its fans, and the Eurocup, if nothing else, is a game of nation against nation. The thing is, I’ve never seen a case where extreme nationalism resulted in something good. Exclusionary, ‘us vs. them’ attitudes tends to squeeze off your worldview like a sphincter that keeps most of the human waste on the inside.
The fact that extra police and security need to be imported to protect fans from each other, players from fans and, bizarrely, police from fans, is mind boggling.
The New York Times wrote, “The police and security presence at Donbass Arena was heavy in the wake of concerns expressed beforehand by English officials and the families of some players about possible racist treatment in the host countries of Ukraine and Poland.” The Times did not mention the fact that “Donbass Arena” could easily be misread as “Dumbass Arena”.
Police are at these matches to prevent things like the 74 dead in February 2012 in Egypt. The 30 fans injured in Belgium in 2011. The fan shot dead in France in 2006. And the myriad of other deaths, injuries, racial slurs, attacks, vandalism and social unrest which occurs in the shadow of a single football match anywhere in the world.
Do I need to repeat that the hardcore fan is a miniscule minority in term of the millions that love the sport? It’s true. I was in Holland in 2010 when they lost the final against Spain. When the game ended everyone just went home. The only real injury was to the pillows that many Dutch fans were biting that night in bed.
However, The New York Times reported that, “Last week, black players from the Netherlands reported that fans made monkey chants during a team practice in Krakow, Poland.” The irony being, of course, that the monkeys weren’t on the pitch, they were in the stands. Monkeys that seem to be drawn to football, like flies to. . . well, whatever monkeys throw at each other.
I’ve only seen this kind of blind, irrational hatred from one other group: Parents who think you don’t like their baby.
arindehoog 