CATEGORY: Global POLEMICS

Dear Gordon Brown

I acknowledge your bland response to the Olympic Legacy e-petition. I doubt you would be surprised to hear that the response has not been enthusiastically received. Might I humbly offer some simple suggestions on how the UK might substantially increase its financial contribution to both elite and community sports, not to mention the health, education and the housing programmes. Firstly, have you ever considered not engaging in illegal and futile foreign wars whose usual purpose is to secure cheap oil supplies for your partner in crime, the US of A. You would be shocked at the extra revenues that would be left in the exchequer, but then again you will know this perfectly well having been the Chancellor of the Exchequer throughout two of these wars.

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A Festival of Olympic Elitism

With the exception of the state sponsored Chinese competitors, can you imagine any of the Olympic athletes competing at the winter games in Vancouver being from anywhere other than a privileged background? I’m happy to be proven wrong but the sort of lifestyle required to be slogging up and down ski slopes and the like just does not seem to chime with the day to day grind of working class life. And if the odd proletarian competitor did slip through the net, you can rest assured they are even more unlikely to be among the medal winners.

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Londongrad: The Inside Story of the Oligarchs by Mark Hollingsworth & Stewart Lansley

Londongrad is a jaw dropping read. If it was wrapped up into a James Bond film you would pass it off as unbelievable fiction just a bit of fun. But this is not fiction, this is the real thing and it certainly is not fun; Russian gangster capitalism spilling out onto the streets of London, complete with lethal poisonings, exploding helicopters and shadowy KGB/FSB units tracking down oligarchs that refuse to play ball with the Russian government. When they are not betraying or killing each other in deadly feuds, they are buying exclusive London real estate just as fast as it comes onto the market.

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Bring Back the Hard Bats

A slightly surreal interview with Barry Hearn appeared in The Guardian recently (5/01/10 Anna Kessel) which caught my imagination not just for what he had to say about sports promotion but also for the sheer energy and enthusiasm of the man. Hearn started out an East London chancer, the son of a bus driver and a born optimist. He made his mark in the 1980’s promoting snooker players before moving on to boxing where he represented such notables as Chris Eubank and Naseem Hamad. His portfolio then expanded to include darts which, as chairman of the Professional Darts Corporation, he oversaw a remarkable renaissance in the fortunes of that sport. Read More…

The Curious Case of Matthew Syed

Matt Syed is most definitely becoming a positive force in sports journalism. From right in the belly of the beast, Syed is regularly producing thought provoking editorials which, along with the long established excellence of Simon Barnes, now makes The Times the most thoughtful sports pages on offer. This is a painful admission given my hostility to all things emanating from the Murdoch empire, but does create an interesting anomaly, even something approaching a paradox. In an empire dedicated to its own capitalist expansion, Murdoch has allowed a dissenting voice.

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Boom and Bust in Dubai

If there was ever any doubt that the fortunes of professional sport were increasingly tied in to the general fortunes of the world economy, last week’s financial news from Dubai should settle those doubts once and for all. ‘Dubai’s attempt to become a financial and entertainment metropolis, with a special emphasis on hosting elite sporting events took a dramatic backward step as news of the state owned leisure company, Dubai World pleaded for a ‘repayment holiday’ on its $80 billion debt package.

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Why Matthew Syed is Wrong

Matthew Syed has produced a beautifully crafted article on the global dimensions of football, the so called, the beautiful game, but in the process has made a fundamental mistake. Syed writes, When future historians look back at the age of globalisation, it is not the Americanisation of the planets culture that will amaze them most, nor the pervading presence of brands such as Coca Cola and Nike. No, it is the global conquest of football. Well I could imagine a certain school of historians peddling that line, but more grounded observers will quickly come to the conclusion that football, like sugary soft-drinks and over-priced, slave labour produced sportswear, have been driven by multinationals for their own avaricious ends. Football, footballers and indeed, all things sporting, have become commodities to be bought and sold to the highest bidder. Read More…

Launch of Website

Sport, as in life, is riddled with contradictions, the most basic being that between the joy of participation and the individual human desire to win. As sport has become increasingly professionalized that desire to win has been bound up with the prospect of great wealth. But with great wealth comes ugly greed. Barely a week goes by without a new case of cheating hitting the headlines. Bloodgate, Crashgate, the drug takers, the match fixers and the professional divers; the list is endless. Corruption appears to permeate every aspect of modern professional sport, yet our addiction to sport seems to know no bounds. Its as if we are all hooked onto a giant soap opera whose purpose is to blind us from the bleaker realities of daily life.

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The BNP and Sport

This week the BNP were themselves a type of sport whereby the political class argued bitterly over whether to allow this nasty little fascist grouping to have prime time TV exposure or whether a blanket ban should starve them of publicity. Nobody is quite clear who won that game. Was it victory to the BNP, who claim to have had their best ever recruiting week in their miserable little history, or was it a comprehensive win for the forces of light over the forces of darkness. The next general election will help decide that one, What is certain, is that nobody from our respectable political classes is owning up to being responsible for the one million people being on the housing waiting list or the millions of young people who have been denied the chance of an apprenticeship or any type of meaningful work.

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Football Old Farts

We’ve seen where it leads in the financial world. ‘Light touch regulation’, the catch phrase for the Blair/Brown Labour administration for the past twelve years, has seen the so called Masters of the Universe plunder us mere mortals for all they could, and in the process very nearly bringing the entire rotten edifice crashing to the ground. Hundreds of millions of workers around the globe have lost their livelihoods because of the unrestrained greed of the corporate banking sector and in Britain, as elsewhere; public services will be squeezed in order to pay for the gigantic public bailouts.

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Cheating Neanderthals

In the space of just a couple of weeks three articles appeared in the press devoted entirely to the subject of cheating. I should add as a point of clarification, that we are talking both sport and the company boardrooms; the inner citadels of the banking world and the committee rooms of parliament. In short, humans seem to be genetically programmed to lie and cheat if it means we can get one step ahead of our competitors. ‘Social morality, individual conscience and the rule of law are in there somewhere, but they invariably seem to play second fiddle when status and fortune are on the table. Read More…

Chelsea Child Poachers

The headlines say it all. ‘Beware Child Poachers’, screams the Daily Mail. The day before the same paper was content with the single word, ‘Thieves!’. An excellent piece by Des Kelly with the heading, ‘English Prints All Over Stolen Goods.’ The Sun ran with the same single word headline as The Mail and then followed it up with, ‘Justice At Last – You’ve had this coming to you Chelsea.’ The Times kept up the pressure with the headline, ‘Big Game Poachers Prey on Youth’, while The Observer ran with two stories entitled, ‘Cash Cow Turns Rustlers’ and an in-depth article about the Chelsea Youth team under the banner; ‘The Tainted Team’.

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Come On – Be A Sport, Linda Whitney, London Evening Standard

It was a particularly dispiriting article that I’m sure had the opposite intention. Linda Whitney had set out to show how sport is growing as an industry and consequently so are the number and range of jobs involved in sport. Whitney talks about receptionists, catering and leisure centre instructors starting at around 13,000 and then working your way up the ladder to managerial positions in marketing or design on 50,000 plus. It all sounds very enticing. Whitney then explains, The sports world is becoming more professionalized, so employers are willing to take on candidates from other sectors providing they have the right skills.

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Lord of the Rings, Andrew Anthony

This was not the first and it definitely will not be the last, but Andrew Anthony has produced a thought provoking assessment of Lord Sebastian Newbold Coe, Knight of the British Empire, twice Olympic 1,5000m winner, former Tory MP and advisor to William Hague, and current Chairman of the London Organising Committee of the 2012 Olympic Games. That’s quite a title. Anthony’s article is good because it throws up all the usual ambiguities and paradoxes surrounding not just the London Olympics but all modern Olympic jamborees.

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Britain’s Tennis Superbrats

This dispiriting article detailing the bullying culture on the junior tennis circuit would make an excellent appendix to Joe Humphries, Foul Play ( see book reviews ). Just to give you a flavour of the piece Pearson laments, We are at the Lawn Tennis Association junior tennis tour, where cheating and rows have become so commonplace that the former British No 1, Annabel Croft, has withdrawn her 15 year-old daughter from the tour and the former world No 5, Jo Durie, has said she wouldn’t be surprised if someone was knifed at a tournament. Read More…

Kelly is a true Brit

After decades of the incessant drip drip drip of Daily Mail little england bile, it was a wonderful surprise to cast my eye across Patrick Collins headline, Ignore this vile abuse, Kelly is a true Brit. And when I got round to reading the article it was every bit as cheering as the headline itself. The vile abuse that Collins refers to derived from a one Andrew Brons, a leading light in the British National Party, who we learn, chalked up nearly 10% of the vote in the Yorkshire and Humber Region, thus earning this arch racist Europhobe a lucrative seat as an MEP.

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Tony Blair’s Sporting intervention: The Gimmick goes International

From the man who gave us an illegal war in Iraq under the patently false pretext of ridding that country of weapons of mass destruction and resulting in an estimated half a million Iraqi deaths, comes ‘Beyond Sport’, one of those slick Tony Blair initiatives for, ‘promoting sport as a tool for social development and conflict resolution.’ The audacious hypocrisy of the man! With his neo-con mates in the Bush regime he turned the brutal but secular Iraq into an international base for Islamic fundamentalists and in true Anglo Saxon form, sought to rule the resources of the country by turning Shia against Sunni, community against community, Iraqi against Iraqi.

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Has football now lost touch with reality? James Olley, Evening Standard

Three cheers for the London Evening Standard. I never thought I’d find myself writing that, but finally a mainstream newspaper has dared to say what most sane people already surely think. £80 million for one footballer when vast sectors of the world’s population are hovering on the edge of subsistence is surely a football obscenity too far. James Olley explains, These almost incomprehensible figures have understandably prompted widespread condemnation at a time when fans are being asked to pay more than ever before to see their team against a turbulent backdrop of the current global financial crisis.

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Barcelona FCF

A very useful piece by David Conn, explores the structural differences, real and imagined, between Manchester United Football Club and Barcelona. As the two giants of world football strut out onto the world stage to slug out the UEFA Champions League Final, the apparent difference will be plain for the whole world to see. The Catalan club will be proudly wearing the Unicef name emblazoned on the front of its shirts, a symbol of moral standing, while United will have the AIG logo, the ultimate symbol of reckless financial speculation, a company now existing only thanks to a massive US Government bailout. Read More…

More Than Just A Game: Football v Apartheid by Chuck Korr and Marvin Close

The promotion on the front cover boasts, The most important football story ever told. Not only was I mesmerised by this story from the very start, but by the story’s end I seriously began to wonder if this book was a genuine contender for the title. The story is amazing enough in itself. The South African prisoners on Robben Island, a place made famous by Nelson Mandela’s thirty year imprisonment, organise firstly a football league and later an entire prison Olympics in the face of the most severe brutality meted out by the Apartheid prison authorities.

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Olympic Legacy – What a Joke!

I started day-dreaming about the legacy idea way back in the year 1999 when the then Blair Government was pontificating about a Millennium legacy. I dreamed of a National walking and cycling track that linked all the major population centres with all our wonderful national parks and our delightful seaside towns. Capital outlay would be minimal. Local job creation would be considerable and it would send all the right messages for the twenty first century; environmentally friendly, individually healthy, community orientated and spiritually uplifting. Instead we got the vacuous Corporate Dome, corporately sponsored, individually mind numbing, community dumbing and spiritually alienating.

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