[ni'k]

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/la...eader-comments


Who cares about a bunch of misogynist jocks tossing a ball around? Football is commidified nationalism that excludes more than half the population.



Much as I hate to disagree with Gary Younge, I can't get on board with his utopian vision of the upcoming World Cup evoking a "collective sense of latent English identity . . . infused with positive energy".
I despise the World Cup. I will not be supporting England, nor any other team.
I refuse to get excited about some wealthy misogynist jocks tossing a ball around in the name of patriotism and product endorsement. Mistrust of team sport as a fulcrum of social organisation comes naturally to me. I'm a proud, card-carrying member of the sensitive, wheezy, malco-ordinated phalanx of the population for whom the word "football" still evokes painful memories of organised sadism and unspecified locker-room peril.
I'm a humourless, paranoid, liberal, feminist pansy who would prefer to spend the summer sitting in dark rooms, contemplating the future of the British left and smoking myself into an early grave.
The fact remains, however, that there are more pressing things to worry about over the soccer season than the state of Frank Lampard's admittedly shapely calves. This country is in crisis. Young people are in crisis, poor people are in crisis, unemployment stands at 2.5 million, the Labour movement is still leaderless and directionless, and there's a brutal train of Tory public service cuts coming over the hill.
In short, the left has more important things to do than draw up worthy charts determining which Fifa team is worth supporting on the basis of global development indicators.The British left has an uneasy relationship with international sport.
Liberal alarm bells can't help but start ringing when a bunch of overpaid PE teachers get together to orchestrate a month of corporate-sponsored quasi-xenophobia; however, as soon as World Cup fever rolls around, members of the otherwise uninterested bourgeois left feel obliged to muster at least a sniffle of enthusiasm, sensing that not to do so is somehow elitist.
This is a misplaced notion: football is no longer the people's sport. Just look at the brutal contempt that the police reserve for fans, or count the number of working-class Britons who can afford to attend home matches, much less the festivities in South Africa. Then there's the uncomfortable fact that the World Cup is only and always about men.
Younge is right to celebrate that race is no longer an impediment to his young niece's and nephew's vision of football as a world "in which they have a reasonable chance of succeeding" -- but unfortunately, his niece can forget about it. Even if she were to make it to the big leagues, she would be forbidden to play in the World Cup: the women's league, held separately next year, garners barely a fraction of the media coverage devoted to proper football, where the only significant female figures are footballers' wives.
In South Africa itself, women players are lucky if they are merely dismissed -- barely two years ago, Eudy Simelane, star of the South African women's team, was raped and murdered for the crime of being a lesbian.
There is something suspect about a people's sport that violently excludes more than half the people, and boozy, borderline misogynist pseudo-nationalism is the last thing Britain needs to help foster a badly-needed sense of community. George Orwell observed in 1941 that "in England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the 'Rule Britannia' stuff, is done by small minorities . . . The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious."
Britain itself is a shuffling, gloriously dissipated nation that also includes many people from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. By contrast, the kitsch, horn-honking vision of English identity associated with World Cup-EnglandTM is too easily co-opted by big business in an effort to get us to spend money on booze, branded sportswear and chocolate bars emblazoned with the England flag. B&Q, which expects to make a loss over the season, have even released a range of garden gnomes wearing the England strip, which rather sums up the twee consumer desperation of World Cup season.
Marketing strategists clearly envision the people of England drinking and shopping the summer away, safe in the knowledge that national pride is being guarded by a regiment of xenophobic pottery goblins. This cheery commoditised nationalism runs unnervingly close to the uglier face of engineered "English pride".
Of course, not everyone who displays an England flag is a fascist, but a few of the flags in circulation will undoubtedly be re-used at the upcoming EDL rally in East London, which plans to process through the same streets where Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts marched in 1936.
As football season begins, England flags are once more emerging like a welter of giant sticking plasters where social injury is keenest, in areas where the coming cuts will be deepest.
Meanwhile, the left still has no coherent response to Britain's bricolage of troubles. The problem with football as commodified nationalism is that it leaves the left wing entirely undefended.
The tacky, tribalistic, red-and-white bandage of cheesy national sentiment is already stifling the healing power of political expediency, and as the people gear up to root for EnglandTM, the left's best chance to re-organise and re-energise is deflating like a ruptured football, smashed against a wall by idiot children.


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my comments - this article is great but she didn't go far enough. she should have said "IF YOU LIKE THIS SHIT YOU ARE A FUCKING MORON AND I HOPE YOUR ENJOYMENT IS RUINED." i'm hoping england loose as soon as possible so less of this crap is in my face all the time. discuss why she is right about everything.


also you know, i don't actually mind playing football, in a park with some friends. thats actually quite fun. as long as the people playing are doing it for purpose of having some fun, not shouting and being competitive. i'm actually not bad at it, but its always the worst players who go apeshit and wear team clothing and play it every saturday and talk about it like its got something to do with them. these guys always suck at playing it. if you watch it there is something wrong with you, and you need to find a better use of your time.

[!@#$%!]

2nd half is about to start yo, get off the internet & go watch

[knox]

I like the world cup.

[ni'k]

Originally Posted by symballs

2nd half is about to start yo, get off the internet & go watch

why must you piss on my dreams?

i just want everyone else to feel as bad as possible about liking football.

don't try and take that away from me.

[knox]

don't worry, nik. England is not going to win.

[ni'k]

oh yeah i know. i know. haha.

[demonrail666]

Don't worry ni'k, it'll all be over in a few weeks. The working classes will soon return to their 'proper' role: reciting Mayakovsky on the factory floor.

[ni'k]

its an insult to the working class.

use your 55 a week jobseekers to drown your discontent in tesco value carbs, booze and meat in front of a screen while multi millionaire wankers prance about like peacocks trying to procure the attention of sponsors and sports chat show contracts.

seriously tho, i find the suggestion that the working class are just miserable and have nothing in their lives and so these bullshit spectacles provide the only glimmer of joy to be a bit patronising. the working class have NOTHING to do with the world cup, they are excluded from it, but encouraged to have some sort of mad romantic attachment to the whole thing. its an excuse to make money off them. yet you accuse me of having some sort of condescended ideal of how they are supposed to behave. is it not the other way round?

PROLIER THAN THOU.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

Don't worry ni'k, it'll all be over in a few weeks. The working classes will soon return to their 'proper' role: reciting Mayakovsky on the factory floor.

i snorted, but my keyboard was spared

[Adolfo]

football is a disgrace to humanity

[GeneticKiss]

Traditional football is just hockey in the grass. American football is it's own unique sport (but some fans are just as much assholes).

[!@#$%!]

note to self: avoid naming kids after hitler

[knox]

thats mean.

[ni'k]

no, its the epitome of his devastating wit.

[Lurker]

Originally Posted by GeneticKiss

Traditional football is just hockey in the grass. American football is it's own unique sport (but some fans are just as much assholes).

American football is just rugby with shoulder pads.

[ni'k]

all sports are just sports and thats why they suck.

END OF THREAD.

[the ikara cult]

I remember when i was 17 or 18 i wrote an essay about team sports being a safe, healthy way for men to vent our tribal tendencies. No matter how much we may pretend, its an instinct that exists in all of us

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by ni'k

its an insult to the working class.

No, I'll tell you what's an insult to the working class, so-called Marxists like Penny Red writing on behalf of a class she appears to have no real understanding of or empathy with. Had she decided to step outside of her 'dark room' and actually met a few of her beloved working class people, she'd realise that for every picture in the media of some moron brandishing a George flag, there are thousands of others who can enjoy supporting their national team without having to buy into the jingoism. Penny Red should stop reading the Sun and actually meet some of the people she's writing about.

[the ikara cult]

the thing about football now is its the most classless sport around. Thats why we cant relate to players anymore, theyre millionnaires, and half of them came from nice, comfortable backgrounds.

Id say the most "working class" sport around in the UK today is Boxing. Its still the sport of the individual, and as people become more cynical towards a group of superstars who behave like idiots and with a such a false sheen of respectability when they pull on a national shirt, theyre going to turn to individuals who dont claim to represent anyone but themselves, even if they are unlikeable in some way.

How can anyone really care about John Terry? or Steven Gerrard? Or Ashley Cole?

[Lurker]

Seriously, that article is just like the Daily Mail but on the other end of the bigotry spectrum.

EDIT