Mother Russia Woos FIFA

Two very contradictory articles appeared in The Guardian 10/9/10 concerning Russia and its future prospects. The first was a Guardian Editorial 10/9/10 outlining both the grim economic prospects of post-Soviet Russia and also the autocratic nature of its power structures. On the economic front the editorial reads: “Russia itself is languishing. Its economy contracted by nearly 8% last year, its worst annual economic performance since 1994, and – despite being so dependent on the ‘stuff’ it is producing less oil now than the Soviet Union did in the 1970’s. Russia’s economy has shrunk twice in the last decade, and deindustrialisation is making itself felt in Russia’s mono-cities – those reliant on a single industry.”

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The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

I first came across Jacobson the writer at his launch of his ‘Mighty Walzer’, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in 1950’s Manchester with hard-bat table tennis as a constant backdrop to a young life emerging from the Jewish Diaspora of that city. I remember it as a cracking tale which definitely deserves a second reading and an accompanying review for this blog. At the launch of the book, in the basement of his then publishers, Random House, a number of table tennis tables were set up (that’s where I came into things) so that the publishing agents could indulge themselves in copious quantise of free booze and a game or two of ping.

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Liverpool For Sale

It was Des Kelly in The Mail 9/8/10 who for me, came closest to hitting the proverbial nail on the head, with respect to prospective new owners for Liverpool FC. In a blistering broadside of a heading, Get real, we sold our soul to Chinese ages ago, Kelly dismisses those who bemoan that another sporting jewel in the crown is up for sale to the highest foreign bidder. Kelly correctly argues that the sale of British sporting assets is already well advanced. The Premier League is merely a plaything, like a giant game of Risk, where America, China, Russia, and the Arabian oil powers move their pieces around and use sport to promote their image, boost commerce and shift huge sums across international borders.

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Marina Hyde takes off the gloves: Olympic Notes No 2

Praise be to the sporting gods. It is not only Matthew Syed and myself who have had a gut-full of Olympic hype. Marina Hyde writing in the back pages of The Guardian 26/08/10 gets right down to her bare knuckles and lays one fair and square on the nose of the IOC, while landing a sharp kick to the FIFA groin whiles she’s at it. I send her my hearty congratulations. Just cast your eyes over her opening salvo to get a taste of what she has in store. Is there a more titanic rivalry in modern sport than that between Fifa and the International Olympic Committee, whose efforts to be considered the most repulsive organisation in world sport dwarf all other contests?

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Gold for Somalia

When Mo Farah won gold at the European Championships yesterday it was far more than just another excellent athletics performance from the British athletics squad. To understand the importance of Farah’s victory, one has to consider the place that the Somalian community currently occupy in the British socio-economic system – rock bottom. Even the much maligned Bangladeshi community, through sheer length of tenure, has a higher social standing in our so called multi-cultural, tolerant Britain.

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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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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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Ping London – The revolution begins

In 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks captured the Post Office, the railway station, the armaments depot, the Winter Palace and other strategic points. In no time at all St Petersburg was in the hands of the Reds with barely a drop of blood being spilt. Ninety-three years later, Ping London is using a similar strategy. Key London institutions are, for four weeks over this summer, falling to the power of ping and an impatient army of table tennis enthusiasts of all ages and abilities. St Pancras Station, the O2 arena, Tate Modern, Westfield’s, the British Library (once home to Karl Marx), Canary Wharf, Covent Garden and Heathrow Airport have all succumbed to the ping army.

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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 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 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 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…