Womans World Cup

There is still an awful lot to decry concerning the state and status of women across the globe. One half of the human population still seems to take a sadistic pleasure in degrading the other half. Whichever way we look, east or west, north or south, the material and social outcomes for women is considerably below that of their male counterparts. Women are on the receiving end when it comes to equal pay, equality in education and employment, and perhaps most telling, their general status in society. In the east women are still battling to rid themselves of the chains of feudal bondage.

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English Table Tennis Snuggles up to Dirty Oil

Yesterday I was innocently surfing the English Schools Table Tennis Website when I was most surprised to learn that a new sponsor by the name of Heritage Oil is now sponsoring one of ESTTA’s premier events. I assumed that In an age when many companies and public institutions are starting to disinvest from fossil fuels, an organisation like ESSTA would have nothing to do with global oil. It seems however that ESTTA is heading in entirely the opposite direction. My curiosity was further tweeked as I did a little more surfing, and low and behold it transpires that Table Tennis England, the governing body of table tennis, is also in bed with Heritage Oil.

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FIFA: Corruption is in its DNA

Some years ago, I had the unsettling experience of listening to a radical Scottish academic outline his thesis on democracy. Selection by lot rather than democratic election was the way forward. Elections, explained the good professor, always favoured the better situated, the most articulate and of course the most wealthy. I didn’t take a position either way at the time, but there was no doubt that his subversive thesis had lodged itself somewhere in my muddled consciousness.

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FC United revel in their rebel blueprint, David Conn, The Guardian

A few years back I blogged on the creation of FC United of Manchester, musing on the revolutionary potential of such an audacious development. A few years hence and I’m proud to announce that that potential is starting to materialise. And it is fitting that in the very week that FIFA looks set to implode under the strain of systemic graft and corruption, it is truly inspiring to see this community based venture bringing back some integrity into the sporting arena. But it is more than community integrity that is at stake.

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Money and greed has ruined the beautiful game, Justin Cartwright, Evening Standard

Confucius say, ‘Big sum of money on top of table, big corruption under table.’ He didn’t say this of course, but he may well have had he been around in the early years of the 21st century. There are billions of corporate dollars sloshing around the so called ‘beautiful game’, so it should surprise nobody that FIFA, the governing body of the game is mired in systemic corruption. We see it in every facet of our globalised corporate world; banking, arms sales, corporate manoeuvrings and political lobbying. Why should we expect globalised sport to be any different?

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Black and Blue by Paul Canoville

There are so many powerfully tragic angles to pursue in Paul Canoville’s autobiographical, Black and Blue, it is hard to know where to start. The racism he experienced and eventually overcame as a professional footballer at Chelsea, the career ending injury he received at Reading, his drug addiction to crack-cocaine that he now hopefully has under control, the fight against cancer which is at least in remission, or the inner torment concerning the parental love that he always craved but never received and the eleven children he fathered with ten different women as a distorted form of compensation for the missing affection.

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Table Tennis – A Love Letter

Tennis on a nine by five table
Ping pong by its colloquial name
The second most played sport in the world
The Victorians would be amazed by its fame.

It began as an aristocratic English pastime
Now the Chinese totally dominate the game.
It is as physically demanding as tennis
But cerebral like chess all the same.

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Olympic Legacy – Going, Going, Gone – part 2

They said it would inspire a generation
To run and to jump and to swim.
They promised it would motivate our youngsters
And the fight against obesity would begin.

But the statistics tell a very different story
Of a nation getting fatter by the day.
Gove abolished the school-sports partnerships
And now the children have nowhere to play.

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Ping Pong and learned helplessness

I have written before how table tennis involves you being just a few feet away from your opponent. This means that body language is far more telling in this game that it would be in many others. These days, whenever I face a player who regularly beats me, I push that to one side and concentrate on winning the game at hand. However, I often come across players whom I regularly beat. Sometimes they shrug their shoulders as if to say, ‘here we go again’, resigned to the fact that they are not going to win. Of course, this mentality virtually guarantees that they will lose again.

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Success versus winning in sport

I have been meaning to write about the sporting concept of ‘winning’ for a while. However, as I tried to establish some concrete approach to this, ‘a unified theory of winning things’ if you will, it became clear that instead of winning I was actually thinking about ‘success’. Winning is often beyond us, whereas ‘success’ is always a possibility.

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Football Has Got Too Big For Its Fancy Coloured Boots by Martin Kettle

A reasonable article by Kettle that even has the courage to mention old Charlie Marx and the notion of ‘false consciousness’. Well done Mr Kettle. And his summation of Premier League football is right on the button. Kettle writes that the charge sheet against modern football is not difficult to draw up. Too much money. Too many mercenaries. Too little motivation. Too few roots. Not enough skill or nurture. No moral compass. That’s about as comprehensive a summation as is required. Whole books have been written providing statistics and anecdotes to flesh out the argument and to compare and contrast with a so called golden age of community based clubs. But Kettle doesn’t do that. Instead he makes comparisons with other sports which he imagines are somehow more wholesome.

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World Cup Deliberations

Eight million children sniffing glue on the street
Selling their young bodies for something to eat
Offering sex like a slice of cheap meat
It’s child prostitution in the Brazilian heat

Then it’s back to the glue for a Sao Paulo treat
Where the cops show no mercy on their merciless beat
With their dreams of Selecao but still nothing to eat
Death on their faces and a ball at their feet.

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International Football – A note about soccer and success

I have found myself growing increasingly frustrated and disinterested in club soccer because of a conviction that it’s a sport ultimately decided by money. Nevertheless I still find the big international competitions fascinating. It turns out that at club level, statistics seem to indicate that football is indeed, decided by budget. There is a strong statistical correlation between a club’s wage bill and its final league position. Over the last decade, teams across Europe, have only deviated by plus or minus 2 places from their wage bill.

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Why Ping Pong has Soul

While recently watching a very powerful and moving documentary made by Clark Carlisle, Chairman of the PFA and ex top flight professional Footballer, ‘Football’s Secret Suicide’, it struck me just how different the world of football is from the world I am part of, Table Tennis.Young footballers are being hot-housed at youth academies with no back up plan for life, if and when they become one of the 99% that don’t make it. Increasingly you hear of stories of depressed, bankrupt, alcoholic, gambling Premier League Football stars and ex-stars who can’t cope with the drop off in terms of money, fame and status after a short lived £100,000 a week career.

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Sochi Winter Olympics

With the Winter Olympics looming up in the calendar, I’ve been trying to sort out some contradictory thoughts on Russia. It’s not easy. But there again, it never was. Pre 1914 there is a rough consensus that Russia was an imperial power with an autocratic feudal system of government governing over a vast, backward hinterland but with a rapidly expanding capitalist economy in the metropolitan centres of Moscow and St Petersburg. Then came two revolutions right on top of each other. Things got really messy then.’ A war-mongering liberal democratic government quickly being supplanted by a Marxist revolutionary government. But was it Marxist?

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Australian Open – Climate Change Stops Play

Just how many warnings do we need? Just how much evidence is enough? And how long will the climate change deniers, wined and dined by the fossil fuel industry, hold sway? We are now regularly experiencing the worst storms, the hottest and driest summers, the wettest and coldest winters and the most extreme weather patterns ever recorded. Murderous floods and droughts are the new norm. Even the polar ice caps are melting in protest at what we humans are doing to the planet. Will it get even worse? Yes it will, because we continue to burn highly polluting fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate as if nothing detrimental is happening. It’s as if we are all in a collective denial.

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John Barnes – Passionate, Articulate But Undialectical

John Barnes, writing in The Guardian 5/11/13, argues that one-off high profile racist incidents in football grounds ought not to be of concern, it’s deep seated racism in society that we need to focus on. The other stuff is just a distraction. Here is Barnes in his own words: Tackling racism is a long and complicated process but one thing’s for sure; it cannot be solved by banning a player or closing part of a stadium. The problem is wider than that and if football really cared, those involved in the game, players in particular, would worry less about one off incidents like what happened to Toure and more about what is going on around them. Perceptions need to change and for that to happen, education needs to be pushed as the only way forward. Read More…

Twin Ambitions by Mo Farah

Quite an absorbing read though to be honest, in a rather predictably and superficial way. Behind the exceptional athletic achievement of Mo Farah’s story, there are at least three important sub-plots, but each one of them is dealt with in only the most cursory of ways. A pity. Like all highly successful athletes, you suspect there is a rather special, unique and complex human being at work, but the agents, the ghost writers and the sponsors are keen not to allow that person too much oxygen. Anyone that can dedicate that much focused energy to an all-consuming single endeavour is, by definition, a bit special and worthy of our attention. Most of us get distracted along the way, but to Farah’s credit, he just keeps on getting better and better.

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Commonwealth Games

I’ve always had a little bit of a soft spot for the Commonwealth Games because, from the very parochial point of view of English table tennis, here is a realistic chance to be amongst the medal winners, whereas in the World Championships or Olympic Games, England doesn’t have a hope in hell. China has a monopoly in that respect. Having said that, even the Commonwealths are becoming an increasingly insurmountable hurdle for England, as former Chinese national stars fan out across the globe turning up in places as far a-field as Canada, Australia and Ireland, not to mention closer to home in Malaysia, Singapore and Honk Kong.

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Slave labour in Qatar

FIFA has excelled itself. Not content to take Qatari kickbacks in return for handing the resource rich Sheiks the 2022 World Cup, they are now embroiled in a bleak controversy which has seen the death of hundreds of Nepalese and Indian labourers as they toil in subhuman conditions on Qatari infrastructure projects. Forty Nepalese guest workers have died in the past two months alone. Denied even the most basic of human rights, these desperate workers have had their passports confiscated to prevent them leaving the country. Wages are routinely withheld and overtime in fifty degree heat is mandatory. Even fresh water is rationed. The catalogue of abuse, uncovered by a Guardian investigation, is staggering. It amounts to slave labour and guess what, FIFA feigns shock and disbelief at the Guardian findings. Read More…

Red or Dead by David Peace

This extraordinary work operates on two majestic levels; firstly, a microscopic examination of the footballing life of Liverpool Football Club under the stewardship of a one Mr Bill Shankly focusing on Shankly’s obsession with hard work, his obsession with success and his obsession with the people of Liverpool and… Secondly, David Peace has produced a towering exploration of a footballing world long since gone, a world where celebrity and bucket loads of corporate cash have tainted the once deeply cherished leisure pursuit of thousands of working class communities. Red or Dead might even be considered a lament for the fading dream of British socialism and all that that dream conjures up. Read More…