The World Cup: Why Football Is So Much More Than A Game
by Ian R Thorpe
2010-07-11
CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribute, non commercial, no derivs.
KEYWORDS: world cup, football, game, sport, international, television, satire, humour, humor
A MESSAGE FOR AMERICA - COME IN TO THE WORLD COMMUNITY
When my good friend Sheryl O, a New Yorker, visited Britain recently she was surprised by the way at a certain hour the streets of London or Glasgow would mysteriously empty, it became impossible to get a cab, diners were hustled out of restaurants and life came to a standstill. In places that had only a few minutes before been bustling with social and commercial activity, tumbleweed could be seen blowing through the streets propelled by the ghostly sound of a keening wind while a lone, distant churchbell tolled to a funereal tempo.
It was football time.
Sheryl learned by osmosis this weird phenomenon was not a peculiarly British ritual but a pandemic that afflicts the whole world apart from the United States for four weeks every four years. It was the time of the World Cup, the premier International Football Tournament (never soccer, to say soccer is to blaspheme and to say soccerball invites instant retribution) , the ritual that once every four years enables enmities and ancient vendettas to be put aside as the world celebrates the beautiful game that is the only thing capable of making us set aside the divisive forces of nationalism, religious difference, cultural rivalry and everything else that divides us.
It was not George W Bush that made the USA the outsider among developed regions, nor was it Bill Cinton, Ronal Reagan, Jimmy Carter or any other President. What made America mistrusted was its refusal to embrace football. American exceptionalism.
It is so much more than a game you see.
The great thing about football it it can be played anywhere by any group of any number who can lay hands on a round thing with a bit of bounce in it. Football is the grassroots activity from which very few are excluded. Women can play in fact there is a thriving womens' professional leagues in most European nations, wheelchair football is popular with the disabled and even little kids can get a good game going in the back yard.
I remember a few years ago a student visiting Britain from Tanzania was invited on television to talk about his impressions of the British was of life.
"What struck me" he told the interviewer, "was the children. They have so much and yet they are so unhappy. In my country people have nothing, we are lucky if we have enough to eat but the children are loved, cared for and kept safe by the whole village and so long as they have a ball, even a bursted ball, they will kick it around all day and be happy. Even the girls join in."
I knew what he meant. When I was a child, not that long ago, people had much less but in daylight hours there was always a game of football happening on the green. Things did not have to be so organised then, jackets and sweaters would do for goals, nobody kept score, the size of the teams could vary from two or three a side to twenty as people arrived and left. And nobody cared much who won.
Football has been diminished in recent decades by commercialisation, the involvement of entertainment corporations and the celebritification of the top players. Yet at its best, thanks to its grassroots origins, the game still has a certain poetry.
Commercialism has subverted some aspects of the beautiful game but it is hard to remove it from its roots and transplant it entirely in the entertainment industry. Changes to team names to make them more pzazzy and marketable have been greeted with hostility by fans. When a proposal was floated to change the name of United to Sheffield Blades (Sheffield is a steel and cutlery manufacturing centre) it was ridiculed even though the supporters, the paying customers, have always affectionately nicknamed their team The Blades.
"Don't mess with football traditions," was the message. The teams truly do not belong to the owners or the shareholders, not to the banks that underwrite their debts or hold mortgages on the stadium but to the community, to the supporters.
And in the world outside the USA we all support somebody, a major city team like Manchester United or Barcelona, our local lower league side or the Sunday School team your kids play for.
There was a time when even the players who turned out for the biggest teams had the kind of local connections the Sunday School League kids have now. A chronicler of this was sports writer and chatshow host Mike Parkinson. Parkinson's columns made a name of a player, Skinner Normanton, long after Skinner's playing days were over.
In Skinner's day typical players in his position, Centre Half, central defender it is called now, were big, artless and clumsy. Their job was to meet the heavy, rain-soaked leather ball squarely with their forehead when the opponents punted it upfield for their attackers to run onto. Centre Halves gave us the expression "he's a head the ball," meaning "he's a bit crazy. Skinner Normanton was not crazy nor was he big and clumsy. He was five feet five inches tall, of slender build and as uncompromising as one would expect a man who started life working the narrow seams of the South Yorkshire coalfield to be.
When Skinner had to face a hot shot attacker who stood six feet three one day a reporter asked him before the match "'Ee's six foot three Skinner lad, 'ows tha goin't' deal wi' 'im? " (They even have an uncompromising accent in South Yorkshire.)
Skinner's reply, so the story is told, was "We'll see what good six foot three does him when he's flat on his back and I'm stood on his chest."
Skinner Normanton was never a great player, he was a local hero to a generation of South Yorkshire schoolboys, but thanks to Mike Parkinson, his status as a local character and the near perfect scansion of a name once heard never forgotten, he endures in a way the modern, stereotypical players cannot.
Skinner Normanton was part of the romance of football. Every nation, every town and every team has its legends, local lads who worked in the mines or factories or on the land and began their footballing career kicking a bursted ball about on the village green, local park or a piece of waste ground. They are part of us all and we are all part of the game.
A former manager of Liverpool, one of our leading teams once summed it up perfectly. The late Bill Shankley (Shanks) was as passionate about the game as anybody had ever been and he stirred up the same passion in supporters of the team he managed. Some people did not like this and accused Shanks of encouraging tribalism and inciting violence. A television reporter interviewed him about this and asked, "Is it true as some people have Suggested Bill that football is a religion to you.?"
Liverpool is the most sectarian city in England but Shanks was too media savvy to walk into that particular minefield, he evaded.
The reporter rephrased the question: "Well would you say football is a matter of life and death to you?"
Errr ... no," said Shanks, "It's more important than that."
That is why in a couple of hours the world outside the USA will come to a halt as we are United by football. Tonight Spain and Holland will contest this tournament's final. USA which fields a very useful team made the last sixteen and Ghana carried the hopes of the African continent to the last eight. Both teams were loved as underdogs always are in football though being seen as underdogs must have been a strange experience for the USA players.
If you want to join with us, and you are very welcome, it is necessary to support one team or the other. I am wearing my orange t shirt, orange socks and orange guzzies for Holland on account of having had a great time when I worked for a few months in Amsterdam and my Grandad having been named William. You may wish to support Spain if you have ancestors named something like Gomez or Duarte, if Chilli Con Carne is your favourite food or if you once read Don Quixote. If any family members were named Van Ryn or De Kuypers, you like to go Dutch on dates or drink Dutch beer you have valid reasons for supporting Holland. But what the heck, you don't need a reason, be ruled by your heart.
Hopefully this will help Sheryl understand why she found herself completely alone in a city of eight million people.
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Welcome To Our World Cup
America's football (soccer if you must bu never soccerball, never ever, OK?) team is taking part in the World Cup again. Lets hope their gallant performances as underdogs, and their good natured sportsmanship are not treated with the same indifference as four years ago. After all, though a sports team alone cannot undo the damage done to America's international reputation by the Bush administration, its a start.
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