Matt Syed; Cynic or Enlightened Realist? Olympic notes No1

Two years minus one day to go until the London Olympics and Simon Barnes is getting all misty-eyed in The Times 28/7/10. As he waxes lyrical about the Olympics and, ‘their unique tension, their unique meaning’, he tells us cynics to look elsewhere. I took his advice and turned to Matthew Syed’s column in the sports pages. What a welcome relief. It is not cynicism that Syed was offering but hard nosed realism. And as the London Olympic clock ticks away and the hyperbole become ever more intense we will all be in desperate need of some down to earth realism. Here is a sample of what Barnes might regard as cynicism but which I regard as a much needed breath of fresh air. That entire official marketing bumph from Sebastian Coe was starting to suffocate me.’

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How Did Sport Get So Big? by Tim De Lisle

In keeping with the title of this quarterly magazine, a cultural offshoot of the more well-known The Economist, Tim De Lisle has produced a highly intelligent essay on the new religion we commonly refer to as sport. De Lisle starts off by offering his readers a comparison between sporting coverage in 1966, the year of England’s lone international football triumph, and 2010 when sport is ubiquitous and all-powerful. For a taste of the comparison of what corporate global sport has now become compared to the low key affair of the 1966 World Cup, De Lisle writes:

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Ping Heathrow

Day One: It was Ibrahim’s ninth birthday and what a birthday he was having. His flight to Saudi Arabia had been delayed for a whopping 12 hours but he was not to be defeated. When we located the table at Heathrow’s Terminal 3 he was already in full flow. By the time we left three hours later, he was still playing and very much in control. That wasn’t so surprising given that he was already fluent in three languages: English, French and Arabic. During those three hours we taught him some basic shots and he proved to be a quick learner. By the time we left him, feet, arms and brain were all moving more or less in coordination. But more than that, he proved to be a natural born organiser.

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Who Are We? by Gary Younge

During any sporting event, especially international ones and particularly the really big ones like World Cups and Olympic Games, the question of conflicting allegiances can come into play. This is particularly true for those who might be considered immigrants or somehow not quite native, though it can affect every citizen if their ‘own’ team is eliminated and they need to redistribute their allegiances. A recent and painful example would be for England fans whose glorious, all conquering team were quickly ejected from the proceedings in South Africa just a few painful weeks ago. Who then do they rally around, if anyone, and what would be their inner logic?

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World Cup Journalism – Part 8

With the momentary pause in FIFA’s never-ending football road-show, come the journalistic legacy predictions. And they can only ever be predictions at this stage because we are dealing with such intangibles like the ‘national feel-good’ factor or the ‘nation building bonus’. Will the extravagant new infrastructure ever be fully used again? Probably not. Will the corporate world’s new found love of all things African translate into renewed investment in Africa and a fairer World trade system? Only time will tell, but don’t hold your breath. South Africa has extreme pockets of old colonial wealth and a seemingly intractable morass of colonial legacy problems that no one-off FIFA event can ever hope to touch and it would be totally naive to imagine otherwise.

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Ping London – St Pancras Ping

The grand opening of Ping London took place in the equally grand location of the newly refurbished St Pancras station and what a great occasion it was. Jointly organised by Sport England, Sing London, the participatory arts organisation, and the often staid English Table Tennis Association, it was anything but a staid affair. All the great and the beautiful of the table tennis world were there including at least two former England champions. They did their’ usual showpiece performances which the non-ping part of the audience lapped up, but the real buzz of the evening was taking place away from the show courts, the VIP’s and the cameras.

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Why England Lose

The title of this gem of a book is a little misleading. Only one pre-chapter specifically deals with the supposed English football sickness. The main substance of the book deals with sport in general and asks; what makes certain countries successful at sport? The methodology of K&S is to number crunch. By using hard statistics and pumping them into a complex mathematical computer programme they claim to be able to see a definite pattern as to why some countries do better than others, including dear old England. According to this method, England perform as expected and at times do rather better than expected.

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World Cup Journalism – Part 7

Post-mortems on Team England’s early demise from the World Cup are a dime a dozen. Every TV pundit, newspaper sports writer and resident pub expert have got it summed up. Interestingly both the BBC and Channel 4 dragged in Matthew Syed, author or recently published, ‘Bounce: How Champions Are Made’, to try to offer their viewers some enlightenment, but all Syed could do was say how complex and unfathomable it all was, but could offer nothing that you hadn’t already heard from your next door neighbour. And, in an act of great marketing astuteness, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski have got their analysis, ‘Why England Lose’ flying off the bookshelves.

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The End of Overeating by David Kessler

I suppose Dr Kessler will be rather pleased with the timing of the NICE report which chimes perfectly with the contents of his latest text, ‘The End of Overeating’. This is a clear an indictment of the food industry as you will find, and a clear scientific explanation as to the obesity time-bomb we are witnessing across the planet. In the face of powerful industry lobbying, governments have been profoundly weak in tackling the problem, but research such as Kessler’s will make it ever harder for governments to look the other way. After hundreds of thousands of deaths at the hands of the big tobacco, governments were forced to act. Sooner, rather than later, the food industry will need to be brought to heal, possibly by the threat of class action style litigation.

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World Cup Journalism – Part 6

I still don’t believe it. It’s got to be one of those media April Fools jokes, except that it late June. It simply beggars belief that this is a genuinely kosher article. Yet it gets full page prominence in The Guardian 21/6/10 so I can only assume that Marina Hyde is on to something that we should all better know about. The blunt truth seems to be that FIFA has its own courts and these courts have the power to try and convict for any manner of misdemeanours relating to anything vaguely connected to their World Cup. I’m reading Hyde’s article for the forth time and I still can’t quite believe what I’m reading. Read More…

African Soccerscapes by Peter Alegi

Peter Alegi has produced an academic but highly readable and highly topical account of African football, past and present, which spreads a great deal of light on what we are witnessing in South Africa today. Divided into six easy bite size chapters, Alegi, a professor of African history at Michigan University, offers his readers a comprehensive account of African football from the roots of the British Empire through the period of the anti-colonial struggle and beyond into national independence and finally to the age of corporate globalisation. Alegi’s research has as much relevance to European football as it does to African, the two continents being inextricably linked through lingering colonial ties and present day corporate greed.

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World Cup Journalism – Part 5

Two curiously contradictory pieces appeared in this week’s press, the one heralding a new found African unity between African nations, the other highlighting simmering tensions within South Africa between the majority black population and the sizable minority coloured population. That these two contradictory processes should occur is no real surprise but what is surprising is that they should surface right in middle of the World Cup action. One might have expected the local and national tensions to pan out in the opposite way.

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World Cup Journalism – Part 4

A great contender for best World Cup article must go to Paul Vallely writing in The Independent 11/6/10. Under the heading, ‘A Big Day for Football. A Giant Leap for a Continent’, Vallely produces a jaw droppingly optimistic account of Africa’s future economic prospects and in so doing, totally wipes away decades of western media stereotypes of Africa as a basket-case continent. He barely mentions football yet his article gets to the very heart of South Africa 2010. Vallely sets out his stall immediately with this wonderfully upbeat and provocative assessment:

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World Cup Journalism – Part 2

They say it is the Beautiful Game. You wouldn’t be jumping to agreement with that assessment if you read Donald McRae’s interview with the Cameroon’s captain, Samuel Eto’o. (The Guardian 8/6/10) Apart from his leading role for the Cameroon, winning the Olympic Gold in 2000 and the African Cup of Nations twice, Eto’o has also picked up no less than three Champions League medals, two with Barcelona and one this season with Inter Milan, not to mention three African Player of the Year Awards. On that account it might be fairly said that Eto’o is at the very pinnacle of the game both from a European and African perspective and his views should be taken most seriously.

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World Cup Journalism – Part 3

It screamed out of the front page of this morning’s Telegraph 10/6/10, ‘England United: How Football Draws Us Together.’ I just couldn’t resist. I grabbed my copy, rushed home and I wasn’t disappointed. All the usual cliches about dear old England, with barely a hint of journalistic reflection. All that was missing was an accompanying feature on the Dunkirk spirit. And would you believe it, turn two pages and there it was; a full page feature on ‘The Battle of Britain: 70 years on’. Some things never change in The Torygraph. Read More…

World Cup Journalism – Part 1

Like the profit that FIFA and its corporate sponsors will accrue, journalistic words on or about the forthcoming World Cup will be measured in the millions, if not the tens of millions. But who will lift the trophy for the most inspired, socially penetrating journalism is yet to be determined, though the Guardian’s four part series by Owen Gibson and David Smith along with Anna Kessel’s excellent piece in the G2 3/6/10 must be among the front-runners. The paradox facing all serious journalism concerning the South African World Cup is simple: can the much heralded advantages of Africa hosting its first World Cup out-play the obscenity of directing billions of pounds worth of scarce resources into building brand new stadia and related infrastructure when so many South Africans are still living in such dire poverty.

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Corruption Is A Threat That Sport Must Take Seriously, an Interview with Nic Coward

I was sitting in a cafe just off the Hammersmith Broadway a couple of days ago, enjoying a pot of tea and perusing the Evening Standard, the highlight of which was an interview in the sports pages with a bloke called Nic Coward, who it turns out has been acting chief executive on two occasions for the Football Association and who is now chief exec of the British Horse Racing Authority. Under the title, ‘Corruption Is A Threat That Sport Must Take Seriously’, the interviewer, the Standard’s Mihir Bose, drew out some well made if not predictable points about match fixing, doping and illegal and outright criminal betting right across the sporting spectrum. No sport seems to be immune and no country seems to be above the fray. Read More…

Pele: The Autobiography by Pocket Books

While the global financial speculators have been busy at their dirty work distorting and undermining global currencies, which themselves are on the brink of ruination due to the mountains of debt accumulated by successive governments, I thought I would indulge in a little light escapism. The impending bankruptcies haunting the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) not to forget dear old Blighty, do not make for pleasant day-dreaming, so a few days off to read Pele’s autobiography seemed in order. In a lovely fairytale of a story, written with humility if not a little naivety, I was able to fill in many gaps in Pele’s life, a life that has touched most people of my generation no matter what their country of origin.

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Ping – The People’s Sport

Try as they might, efforts over the past twenty years to promote football as the universal people’s sport, have always rung a little hollow to me. Maybe if we consider football as the people’s spectator sport, the case becomes a lot more convincing. But in terms of grassroots participation, ping pong, or table tennis as the European enthusiasts prefer, gets the vote every time. Just witness what happens when you set up a couple of tables in a public place and leave a some bats and balls seductively lying around. In no time at all the tables are full and a queue is forming to be next on.

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Where’s the joined up thinking: Election time in Britain – Nick Harris

It’s election time in Britain and Nick Harris has done a dour and somewhat predictable job in The Independent 22/4/10 in interviewing the three likely contenders for Sports Minister. Perhaps things might have been enlivened a little had he included some questions and answers from the Green and socialist left but that is not the British way. Stick to the status quo of the middle ground, which in reality is not the middle at all, but decidedly to the right; i.e., all three main stream parties, Liberal, Labour and Tory, have adopted the thatcherite, neo-liberal belief that the market is always right.

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We can see right through the Glazers

Today, on the 28th day of February, 2010, a significant historical event will take place, the full repercussions of which, only time will tell. But make no mistake, history is in the making. Today, at Wembley Stadium, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Manchester United football supporters will make a highly visual protest at the corporate play-thing their once proud community football club has become. Across the globe, football fans will witness the first substantial attempt by fellow football fans, to wrest back the ownership of their club from the cold, corporate world of global finance.

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