Last Saturday morning, I switched on Fox Soccer Channel for the first of a series of World Cup qualifiers which the station, a veritable lifeline for football lovers in America, was broadcasting. A live feed from Tehran appeared on my screen. On the pitch, Iran was battling Saudi Arabia.

My two small boys dashed in and asked me - as they invariably do - "Who ya cheering for, Daddy?" I had to think about this one. They are too young for a lecture on Middle Eastern politics and I knew that if I said "neither," I'd get pressed as to why. When you're seven years old, you have to cheer for someone.

I thought for a few more seconds. I noted the electrified crowd. I studied the Iranian players, many of them groomed and pouting in the style of Manchester United's Ronaldo. It struck me that what seems banal and irritating in the context of the European game is positively subversive in this context. "Iran," I mumbled. Blank looks. "The white team," I clarified. On hearing that, my contrarian sons decided to go for the green team - the Saudis. Islam's civil war was now in our living room.

I've seen the Iranians play impressive football in the past, but on this occasion, the action off the field was more compelling. This being Iranian TV, every time the ball went out of play, even for a second, the cameras would sweep to the Presidential box, where Ahmadinejad and his unsmiling cronies sat looking thuggish and self-important. Whether or not you were actually in the stadium, there was no forgetting Mahmoud's presence in the house.

As Saudi Arabia snatched a 2-1 victory, I remembered the story of how Saddam Hussein's son Udai ordered the feet of the Iraqi national team to be whipped after they lost a vital match. Defeated in this crucial qualifier, Iran, which has played in the last three World Cup tournaments, has virtually no hope of going to the next one, next year in South Africa. For Ahmadinejad, revealing the nationalist lurking inside of the Islamist, this was little short of a disgrace.

I haven't heard, yet, of any Iranian players being dragged into the chamber of horrors that is Evin prison. Instead, Ahmadinejad focused his wrath on the Iranian coach, Ali Daei. No matter that Daei, as a player, enjoyed the same status in Iran as did Bobby Charlton in England or Roberto Baggio in Italy. Reported The Guardian:

Daei was fired as team coach after Iran lost 2-1 to Saudi Arabia in a vital World Cup qualifier at Tehran's Azadi stadium on Saturday. The match was witnessed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, who is said to have been instrumental in ousting him.

Ahmadinejad had hoped a victory would bring him political capital before the presidential poll in June. The desire to score a propaganda coup even prompted the president's fans to credit him when Iran took a 1-0 lead. But the euphoria evaporated in the last 12 minutes and Daei's fate was sealed as a mass mobile phone text to Ahmadinejad's supporters went out, reading: "Due to the importance of national public opinion to Dr Ahmadinejad, Ali Daei has been forced out."

Ironically, as Daei was falling upon the mullah's sword, Israel's World Cup bid was also being decided. Playing Greece in Ramat Gan on Saturday night, the Israelis managed a disappointing 1-1 tie. They played another match against Greece the following Wednesday, one they absolutely had to win; they lost 2-1 after conceding a penalty to the Greeks late in the second half.

The worlds tyrannies will have their representatives at the 2010 World Cup. Football being the most global of sports, it necessarily encompasses those countries which hold their leaders accountable and those countries which have their leaders imposed on them. Judging by current form, both North Korea and Saudi Arabia have good reason to believe that they will be flying to South Africa.

But we will be denied the spectacle of Iran and Israel playing - and perhaps being drawn against each other - in the most glorious contest which world sport has to offer. In some ways, that will come as a disappointment to those campaigning for the exclusion of Israel from global competitions, especially as South Africa has become fertile soil for such braying mob politics. You could say that, in the end, it was not the politicians who decided their joint fate, but the players themselves. As Ali Daei might tell you, there is an inherent fairness in football which is absent from politics.

Except that football is not so pure. Missing in the coverage of Israel's dashed World Cup hopes - the Israeli press was utterly scornful of the national team and its coach, Dror Kashtan, with Yossi Sarid practically frothing at the mouth - was a reminder of why Israel was playing Greece in the first place. Being located in Asia, Israel should be playing in the Asian qualifying group. However, most of the states in that group refuse to play against a country they don't recognize.

Were Israel allowed to play in its own region, its chances of qualification would be virtually assured. Europe, where it is forced to play, is a much tougher prospect. Those disappointed that they won't now be greeting the Israeli team with banners denouncing "Zionist apartheid" will probably take some comfort from the fact that while Iran was denied by the ball alone, when it comes to Israel, the boycott was the opposing team's twelfth man.

Hello Semites and anti-Semites! (Is that like matter and antimatter? Kind of, except instead of totally and mutually annihilating each other they seem to have maintained an antagonistic, yet symbiotic relationship for centuries, deathless and regenerating, occupying the others mind and heart, like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. I talk about Harry Potter a lot, don’t I? I think it’s because it makes me sound younger.)

Sorry! Wandered off there for a second. You see, I’m in Amsterdam.

Yes, that Amsterdam, where last weekend I had the singular experience of watching You Don’t Mess With the Zohan in a theater full of Dutch people—Dutch, except for the dozen or so Germans parked behind us, loudly expressing their befuddlement at every cry of “Disco Disco,” and at Lainie Kazan, naked and resplendent, throwing her arms around Adam Sandler and cooing, “Oh honey! You are good at everything that you do,” before she dunks her hunk of pound cake in his coffee and shoves it in her mouth. Were they really allowed to laugh at this?

The New Jew Revolution--this reflexive self-mockery, the transformation of our own stereotypes and internalized self-loathing into something like pride--hasn’t quite gotten here yet. This can make for some intriguing exchanges. When one Dutch woman, somewhat haughtily, asked me why I hadn’t changed my last name upon marriage to Mr. Abramowitz, “subsuming my identity like most American women,” I replied:

“Well, I guess I could feed you a bunch of lines about having already established my professional identity and not wanting to go through all the paperwork, but honestly? I just wasn’t prepared for my name to sound that Jewish.”

She looked at me with undisguised shock. I know it’s difficult to detect irony when you’re not speaking in your first language, and standing just blocks away from the train station that processed the transports to Westerbork, I really should have known better. But before I could tell her I was kidding, she jumped in.

“But your last name is Shukert. That is a already a Jewish name.”

“Kind of,” I said. “In America it’s sort of neutral. In Nebraska, where I grew up, it’s just kind of German.”

“Well,” she said. “In Holland, it’s very, very Jewish.”

Ah! The ghosts of the past!

Continue reading...

It's not only Europeans whose ethnic and national rivalries are inflamed on the soccerLebanon Soccer: vs. Indonesia, April 2007 field. The BBC reports that at a World Cup qualifying match in Riyadh between Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, the Syrian national anthem was somehow played in place of the Lebanese anthem. According to the Beeb, some of the Lebanese "were visibly angry" about the mix-up. I don't get it. So Syria has undermined the sovereignty of Lebanon for decades, laid hegemonic claim to it, instigated and exacerbated bloody internecine conflicts, and (allegedly) murdered the prime minister. Do people really hold grudges over that sort of thing?

More broadly, what's the significance of the switcheroo? Does the Saudi Football federation now recognize Syrian soccer's claims on the Lebanese team's equipment? Or (gasp) is the Assad regime's reach as far as some hyperventilators fear? If it's any consolation to the Lebanese, they and the Syrians will probably all be introduced at international sporting events by the Hezbollah anthem before too long. And when they get the chance to play Syria next, they can fire themselves up with Phil Bennett's infamous pep talk to the Wales rugby team just before a match against England in 1977:

Look what these bastards have done to Wales. They've taken our coal, our water, our steel. They buy our homes and live in them for a fortnight every year. What have they given us? Absolutely nothing. We've been exploited, raped, controlled and punished by the English — and that's who you are playing this afternoon.

And of course, if Lebanon beats Syria at soccer, that settles everything, right? So hang in there!

Poland: Still a bit pissed about the war Saturday saw the kick-off of the European Football Championships in Basel. The tournament for Europe’s top 16 football (you call it 'soccer') nations is being co-hosted this year by Switzerland and Austria, neither of which is a noted hotbed of footballing passion, but feelings have nonetheless been running high for the past few days. That has little to do with the placid Alpine fans, and more to do with Sunday’s match between old rivals Germany and Poland.

In the run-up to the game, the Polish tabloid Super Express devoted its back page to a gruesome depiction of the Polish coach holding the severed heads of Joachim Löw and Michael Ballack, the German trainer and captain respectively, beside the headline “Leo, give us their heads!” A minor diplomatic incident ensued, with the situation defused only by an in-person apology from the Polish coach to the two decapitated Germans. “This is shit,” exclaimed Leo Beenhakker angrily. “Here one sees what sick people there are in this world.” Though the match itself was unremarkable, rival fans clashed afterwards, with some 150 detained; it is reported today that some of the German fans were heard singing Nazi and anti-Semitic chants.

Polish antagonism towards their neighbors has shown little sign of abating with the passage of time; last year, the then Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, caused outrage when he suggested that Poland’s voting rights in European Union institutions, weighted according to population, be rebalanced to take account of the millions killed by the Germans during the war. But in a continent which has largely banished conflict as a means of settling grievances, football is often the continuation of war by other means. Local rivalries exist in all sports everywhere, but Europeans are particularly good at using them as an excuse to dredge up old grudges.

Holland Brought It: to germany in 1988 Perhaps the most famous of these is the rivalry between Holland and, yes, Germany. When the Germans hosted these championships 20 years ago, the Dutch convoys came across the border singing "In 1940 they came, in 1988 we came" (it's catchier in Dutch, apparently). Two years ago, the fans traveled back across to Germany for the World Cup clad in WWII-style orange plastic helmets. The atmosphere is reasonably light-hearted these days, but there is no mistaking the undercurrents running beneath the surface.

Other match-ups are more hostile. Games between Greece and Turkey, or Serbia and Croatia, have in recent years seen major clashes between supporters. Armenia and Azerbaijan took it one stage further; their two qualifying matches for this competition were simply canceled amidst childish wrangling over venues. As for Israel, they clock up the air miles competing in the European football set-up, rather than against their Arab neighbors.

But, just as football fans can use the sport to express hostility, it can also serve as a vehicle for more positive nationalist sentiments. In the Gorbachev era, for example, with Soviet republics beginning to scent independence, fans used local club sides as proxies for the national teams that were still some years off. And so supporters of Ararat Yerevan, say, would look forward to games against "Georgia" or "Lithuania," not Dinamo Tbilisi or Žalgiris Vilnius, and chant the name of their opponents’ home republic in solidarity.

In some parts of Europe, club teams remain a focus for regional or national pride. Barcelona is still sentimentally seen as a substitute for a Catalan national side (despite being stuffed with foreign players), AEK Athens historically draw their support from the descendants of the displaced Greeks of Asia Minor, Glasgow Celtic "represent" Scotland’s Irish Catholic community. As for my own country, it has been seriously argued that devolution of government from Westminster to Edinburgh was delayed by two decades due to the timing of a referendum on the issue just months after Scotland's shattering failure at the 1978 World Cup.

Arc de Triomphe: after france's world cup win in 1998 But we who follow the sport with maniacal devotion (I'm typing this with one eye on the France-Romania match in the corner of my screen) do have a tendency to exaggerate its powers. The most remarked example of football as vehicle for social cohesion from recent years is probably France’s World Cup-winning team of 1998, whose members comprised a veritable rainbow of races and immigrant backgrounds; Armenian, Basque, Senegalese and Caribbean. The crowds celebrated in the Champs-Élysées under a giant picture of the great Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, illuminated in red, white and blue under the slogan "Zidane Président." The chattering classes in France loved it.

Only Jean Marie Le Pen and his National Front chose to strike a sour note: "France cannot recognize itself in the national side," he griped. "Maybe the coach exaggerated the proportion of players of color, and should have been a bit more careful." Le Pen's casual racism seemed out of step with the time, but four years later he was in a runoff for the Presidency against Jacque Chirac, and few would say that Zidane's iconic image has done much for relations between "native" French and the country's large Muslim population. Perhaps sport serves as a focus for national pride when other outlets aren't available; maybe it's a safety valve that allows us to mock our enemies without (usually, at least) fighting them in the streets; maybe it can hold up a mirror to our society and help up see ourselves as others see us. Maybe it can even change that society for the better. But hang on; in the corner of my screen, it looks as if the French team of 2008 may finally be stuttering into life, so let's wrap this up.

The actual football game between Germany and Poland? It passed off without incident. The Germans won, as the Germans usually do. Appropriately, both goals were scored by striker Lukas Podolski, who was born in Poland and left when he was a child. He did not celebrate.

This week we tip our hats to Soccer for his/her insightful analysis of the Israeli YES HDTV ad that I wrote about on Monday.

Is the Bottle Dance: not something we can mock?
Soccer wrote:

I think it is brilliant: The commercial is saying that if we do what the Chareidim dont allow, we will have fun, (as we watch chareidim having fun being against it)!

And then later wrote:

Tamar, crazy but I was also in BJ this shabbos! Dont forget what I thought was another terrific point that Rabbi Feldman made: which was the fact that the chareidim, arguably passionate, committed and religiously devoted people, have somehow become seen as a caricature of themselves. There was no concern that YES would be seen as insensitive, irreverant, politically incorrect, andti-traditional, or anything else other than creative, humurous, and original. The chareidim have lost such credibility that those who would never parody blacks, Ethiopians, homosexuals, housewives, or environmentalists can parody chareidim with impunity. Doing so will sell more televisions.

This is a really nice look at the levels that this commercial is using to parody the Charedi community.

I think it’s a shame that Charedim have lost such credibility, but I think it happened as a result of their overboard reactions to anything that they find problematic. It’s simply not an effective way of running a community, and it of course affects whether or not the rest of the world is able to take the Charedi community seriously.

Anyway, it’s interesting to think about how it’s somehow acceptable for an Israeli company to mock Haredi rabbis, but if this commercial was running in Germany or in the States, I doubt we’d find it amusing. More likely, we’d be offended.

   This is a post about English soccer – but before all you Americans scroll down to something else, let may say it is also about identity and globalisation, capitalism and the decline of the nation-state.    

OK, still here? Right, England has entered one of its periodic crises after the national soccer team failed to qualify for next summer’s European Championships. The qualification process ensures that the top 16 nations in Europe gather together in Switzerland and Austria next year for a big tournament which is second only to the World Cup in terms of interest and status. England, who invented ‘Association Football’ aren’t among those 16 after finishing behind Croatia and Russia and on the same points as that powerhouse of European soccer –Israel. (I don’t need to explain to you why Israel have  play in Europe rather than in competition with the other Middle Easter countries which they would almost certainly win).    

 It is 41 years since the England team last won a prize – the 1966 World Cup - which was the only time the tournament was held in England. Unlike most major powers in the game, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Italy etc, England have never actually won away from home turf. But, we invented the game, we have the ‘greatest league in the world’ and most English people really believe they, their clubs, their players and their fans, represent the genuine, authentic heart and soul of the game. 

There is no way of comparing this trauma to anything in US sports – if I must try and tempt you with an analogy – imagine that baseball really went global, there was a World Series befitting of the title and the US didn’t even make the play-offs, finishing behind Honduras and South Korea after losing to Venezuela.       

No country in Europe likes their soccer team to not qualify for the Euro finals but in England, the failure provokes deep reactions which tell us a great deal about the tortured sense of identity in the country.      

 First of there is the sense of entitlement that is lost by actual competition – the English assume their place is at the top table for reasons of tradition and history. But unlike bodies such as the United Nations and The Commonwealth, European soccer is based purely on merit and not on heritage. No-one is silly enough to suggest England should qualify automatically (as they do for the UN Security Council) so the response is a vicious search for blame. As usual, and as in most sports, the coach is the first scapegoat. Steve McLaren was sacked before his bosses had even digested their bacon sandwiches the morning after the defeat to Croatia. Then there are the search for the ‘deeper causes’ of the defeat and here the deep pains of English identity start to emerge.    

One of the most popular ‘root causes’ identified this time around has been foreign players in English football. The Premier League (EPL to those Americans who take an interest) is packed with players from all over the globe and none of the elite teams are coached by Englishmen. Liverpool is owned by Americans and coached by a Spaniard. Chelsea is owned by a Russian and coached by an Israeli. The argument goes that because there are so many foreign players in England – English boys don’t get a chance. The argument is utter nonsense for several reasons - primarily because England had similar disappointments in the seventies and eighties when there were hardly any non-British players in the top league.   

Nonetheless, the argument is based on an essential truth – the ability of England’s Premier League to market itself globally, in a similar fashion to the NBA , has generated a huge amount of income which the clubs have invested in buying up foreign players. The result is a championship which is based on the core values of modern globalized capitalism – it is deregulated, internationalised and the team with the most money available usually wins. Imagine an NFL where a previously unheard of Russian billionaire could buy up, say, the Cleveland Browns, purchase Tom Brady and half the current New England Patriots team along with the best players from all the other teams and win the Superbowl easily every, single, year. You can’t do that in American sports because of the regulations – the draft, the salary cap, the rules on ownership etc  – it is a curious state of affairs but compared to the laissez-faire capitalism of English soccer, American sports are almost socialistic.

The English are pretty happy with this state of affairs for their league – they are sports fans, they support their teams in a tribalistic fashion and so no-one amongst Chelsea’s supporters ever complains about a loss of identity given their club is in Russian hands and they only have a couple of English players in their starting line-up – if the Blues win, the Blues fans are happy. The  problem comes when you get to international competition between nation states where the rules are very different. You can’t trade your citizenship, the coach of the national team can’t buy anyone and it doesn’t matter how much money your organization has – selection is restricted to people who are citizens of the country. National team soccer is the last survivor of the old amateur values – you play for honour and pride – not money. You represent your country and not your employers. You are expecting to give your all for glory and not for the next big contract deal.    

And this is where the global success of the English soccer brand falls down – the results show that the players aren’t really good enough or they haven’t been coached well enough and the normal rules of the market – buy some better players – don’t apply.    

So the England players are blamed for not caring enough and the system is criticised for being out-dated – and there are some valid arguments that I shan’t trouble you with here about what precisely, technically is the problem with homegrown English footballers.     

But the big picture is that soccer, like other sports, is transforming itself and globalizing itself in a way which leaves the old nation state framework looking increasingly like a sideshow. On a week to week basis fans, owners and coaches don’t care about nationality – they want results and entertainment. Most of the time, the English enjoy the chance to watch top international performers either in the Premier League or the Europe-wide Champions League. The pangs of pain only come when cash no longer can talk – when soccer enters a timewarp and we go back to an era when the rules are different. The pain is enhanced because the English like to think they represent the old values of the game when in fact they epitomize the modern transformation of the sport into a global entertainment and marketing industry.   

There are no signs that the trends will change – if anything they are likely to intensify -  and so the English will slowly have to get used to the fact their national team is mediocre but they have the most marketable professional league in the world. And in this respect England will become more American.    

There are no nation-state battles in American football or pro baseball and the Olympic competition in basketball and hockey is a sideshow for anyone who seriously follows the NBA or NHL. Americans are lucky in that so few countries play baseball or football – they can simply enjoy the NFL and MLB without worrying about what the rest of the world is doing. The English are going to have to learn to do that -  not to care about nation-state competition – and that won’t be easy for a people who remain attached to tradition while being at the vanguard of tradition-smashing global, capitalized sport.

 

Trouble in the Brit blogosphere. A number of leading blogs have been taken down due to the threat of legal action by an Uzbek billionaire who claims he was being libelled.

Alisher Usmanov recently bought shares in Arsenal football club, one of the top four teams in the English Premiership, and is looking to extend his shareholding. It's been alleged in several quarters that if they choose to dine with this guy, ‘the Gunners’ should be supping with a very long spoon. The Guardian takes up the story:

Schillings, the lawyers acting for Usmanov, have been in touch with several independent Arsenal supporters' websites and blogs warning them to remove postings referring to allegations made against him by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan.

Usmanov was jailed under the old Soviet regime but says that he was a political prisoner who was then freed and granted a full pardon once Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as president. Schillings have warned the websites that repetition of Murray's allegations were regarded as "false, indefensible and grossly defamatory".

It appears that m'learned friends' intervention has had the desired effect. Murray edited his posting, but insisted that his allegations were true and that he would take his chances in court. He hasn't been given the chance. Rather than suing him for libel, as is Usmanov's right, his lawyers went directly to the webhosts. And in the face of a flurry of threatening letters from Schillings, the webhosting company caved.

A number of ‘offending’ blogs have had the plug pulled, including Tim Ireland’s Bloggerheads and Craig Murray himself. Both of them had published comments about Usmanov which prompted him to reach for the phone to his lackeys at Schillings. Worse, and particularly stupidly, a whole network of unrelated political sites hosted on the same server have also been taken down, among them prominent Tory MP and London Mayoral frontrunner Boris Johnson, none of whom were involved in any way.

More from DavidT at Harry's Place:

Bloggers cannot operate if they are bullied by rich plaintiffs. Defamation law in the United Kingdom is both farcical and unfair, and is in desperate need of fundamental reform. Errors on blogs can easily be remedied: particularly where they permit open commenting (a libel risk in itself) which allows postings to be criticised, facts corrected, and arguments opposed. I know what it is like to be at the receiving end of a well funded threat of defamation proceedings, and it is no fun at all. It is outrageous that the law of defamation should be used to break bloggers: like butterflies upon wheels.

That's entirely right. This ugly development demonstrates that blogs are vulnerable to big bullies with bigger sticks. We can't defend ourselves the way a magazine or newspaper can. There's no legal budget for us to dip into. And let's be clear on this point; these blogs are down not because Usmanov has been libelled, but because he says he's been libelled, and has a room full of paid monkeys sitting at typewriters firing off theatening letters to that effect.

In the US you have a First Amendment right to free speech. This has the effect, among other things, of making it rather harder to bully the little guy into silence. In Britain we have no such protection. As most of us use US-based blog platforms such as Google-owned Blogger, it’s unlikely that a thug like Usmanov would succeed in shutting us down if he didn’t like what we were writing (he could still sue us for libel, of course, but that’s a slightly different matter). But if a foreign businessman can have a whole network of blogs taken down in their entirety with just the threat of legal action, we're all in trouble. Next time, who's to say it won't be a politician? And then where does that leave us?

But Usmanov's problems are far from over. US sports blogger David Warner sums up Schillings' problem nicely:

It appears Schillings has fallen victim to something our pals at Techdirt like to call "The Streisand Effect." Back in 2003, Barbra Streisand sued a photographer in an attempt to remove an aerial photo of her California home from the Internet, despite the fact that the photo was part of a publicly funded coastline erosion study and wasn't even labeled as her home. As a result, photos of her house were published all over the web within days.

[...] for all their claims that Murray is libeling their client, Schillings has not actually sued Murray for libel. They have told anyone who will listen that Murray's book, Murder at Samarkand, is defamatory against Usmanov, but it's been out for more than a year, and they have never taken any legal action against Murray. Instead, they seem more focused on getting any mention of Murray and his allegations against Usmanov removed from the web -- and as the Streisand Effect teaches us, that's pretty much impossible.

If Murray's goal was to make Usmanov look like a thug, then mission accomplished.

I knew nothing about Alisher Usmanov this time yesterday; a rich businessman trying to increase his stake in a football club. So what? They're ten a penny, if you'll pardon the phrase.

Today, I know that he's a [snip! - Jewcy lawyers], a fat [snip! - Jewcy lawyers] who was imprisoned for [snip! - Jewcy lawyers] and even, it is whispered among his fellow Uzbeks, the perpetrator of a particularly vicious [snip! - Jewcy lawyers]. And this is all directly because his decision to legal up, and his lawyers' decision to bring out the elephant guns, led me to find out what all the fuss was about in the first place.

Letters are being written to the football authorities, questions asked in Parliament, and the original allegations are spreading through the internet like wildfire. Google his name and see what I mean. Tomorrow it'll probably be in some of the national papers. The stench around this guy's name continues to grow. Hundreds of Arsenal fans who yesterday only knew about his deep pockets are now going to start wondering if this is a fit and proper person to involve himself in the running of their famous old club. This may yet backfire horribly for old Alisher.

The website of Schillings, Usmanov’s lawyers, has a page boasting a case study in how to neutralise "the internet attacker". Oops.

Iraq reached their first Asian Cup final on Wednesday night, beating South Korea 4-3 on penalties in a pulsating semi-final that ended goalless after extra time.

Noor Sabri was Iraq's hero when he saved Korea's fourth spot-kick from Yeom Ki-hun. After Ahmed Menajed had made it 4-3 to the West Asians, Korean Kim Jung-woo hit the post to send the Iraqi players into raptures.

This won't mean much to many Jewcy readers, but believe me, for the Iraqi people (who are, on the whole, big soccer fans) this is a very big deal indeed. From Reuters:

Iraq goalkeeper Noor Sabri saved Korea's fourth spot-kick and was named man of the match.

"I would like to congratulate all my people in Iraq for this great victory," he said. "We know the current situation in Iraq and the difficulties.

"We know we are struggling inside Iraq and we have to struggle on the field," Noor added. "This is a very modest thing we can give to our people."

No-one needs reminding of the myriad ways in which Iraq is screwed up right now, but sport is one small area in which we can all agree that things have most definitely improved since the old days.

The Iraqi football team - I'm switching to the sport's proper name, I've pandered enough - and the country's Olympic Committee were both run by the delightful Uday Hussein from 1986 until 2003, and his stewardship was pretty brutal. If Iraq lost - as they often did - players and athletes could expect to be beaten on the soles of their feet, locked up for days, have their heads shaved and even have the honour of Uday coming by their cells to urinate on them. When Iraq failed to qualify for USA '94, indeed, the players were forced to kick a concrete ball around as punishment. (If I were being flippant, I might wish that Scottish players were presented with the same incentives.) 

They'll play either Japan or Saudi Arabia in the final on Sunday, and will be underdogs no matter what. Ivica Osim's Japanese side could certainly tell these pampered post-Saddam Iraqis a thing or two about the perils of underperforming; after they opened their tournament with a miserable 1-1 draw with minnows Qatar, the Bosnian coach let fly with a dressing-room tirade that apparently reduced his translator to tears.

Who'd be a professional sportsman?

Almost all of my friends are glued to their television sets during March because of the NCAA tournament, and I always feel like a freak because I just can’t make myself care about who’s going to be this year’s Cinderella. Also, the alliteration irritates me. Sweet sixteen, elite eight, final four… amazingly annoying. I like sports and competition (I adore the Olympics), but I don’t follow any one team with the devotion and fervor of most of my friends.
Yossi Benayoun and Friends: the faith of thousands rests in their hands...
I also find it somewhat creepy how intense some people can get about their fandom. I know a number of families who are shomer Shabbat except when they have tickets to the game. Or, they’re shomer Shabbat, but when the game is going to be on they put the TV on a timer. I mean, I’m all about loyalty, but do you really put the Cubs and God on an even keel?

Once a friend of mine explained his devotion to a baseball team to me by equating watching a game with praying. He said when he watches the field, and is holding out for a run and then it happens, it feels like his prayers have been answered in a way that never happens when he’s at shul. Now, I can see how it might be more fulfilling in that way because you can see immediate results, but of course it wasn’t his little, “Oh please God let there be a hit!” that made the bat make contact with the ball. It was years of batting practice and good coaching.

I bring all this up because a number of my English friends are up in arms about the England versus Israel soccer game tomorrow afternoon. The winner advances towards qualifying for the European Cup. A reform rabbi named Jonathan Romain is on the record saying that British Jews should feel fine supporting England. But in the standard Jewish newspaper in the UK, the Jewish Chronicle, Conservative Rabbi Jeremy Gordon of St. Albans, debates the merits of the various options and declares for Israel.

For a lot of people this is a real conflict of sports and religion in a way that they haven’t ever felt before. It’s kind of amusing, since the outcome rests on a 26-year-old from Dimona named Yossi Benayoun. Luckily, the game isn’t on Shabbat. That would be too much for anyone to take.

The richest Russian, 2nd richest person in the UK, and 11th richest person in the world (worth an estimated $19.8 Billion) walks into a Israeli dive restaurant for hummus and runs up a $450 tab.

Luckily, Pini Zahavi, the soccer agent, was on hand to lend the money to Roman Abramovich. What would the Chelesa soccer team owner do without his right-hand man?

New OrderIn 24 Hour Party People, Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) has the following exchange with a music journalist:

"How do you respond to charges that Joy Division are a neo-Nazi band?"
"Are you not aware of situationalism? Postmodernism? Haven't you heard of the free play of signs and signifiers?"

But it wasn't so much the naming of the post-punk quartet after a squad of female sex slaves in Nazi concentration camps, or giving dun-colored uniforms worn by a cropped and hard-featured Ian Curtis on stage in Manchester in the late seventies, that evokes ominous politics as much as "World in Motion" by Joy Division's successor band, the no less provocatively titled New Order (minus Curtis, who committed suicide.)

The song was commissioned by the Football Association in 1990 to celebrate English patriotism -- if not quite populist nationalism -- for the World Cup, which was staged in Italy that year. You may recall some of the media hiccups over German ruffians nostalgic for the Hitler-hosted Olympics in last summer's World Cup. The allusions to the Allied/Axis conflict replaying itself all over again through sport were even more nail-bitingly made in 1990.

The English team was actually sequestered on the island of Sardinia -- home to the most feral species of boar, mind you -- due to the fear that heavy boozing and drug-use would make them violent. Italian counter-terrorism forces were actually enlisted to monitor the Anglo strikers, with the full consent of the Conservative Minister of Sport back in London who fretted that his countrymen, whose clubs had been banned in 1985 from competing in European games after the notorious 'Heysel disaster' in Brussels, were to once more become pariahs and personas non grata on the continent.

The climate was ripe for an "incident." Margaret Thatcher's regressive poll tax had galvanized class antagonism at home; the twilight of Soviet dominion signaled at least one loss of postwar English purpose abroad; and the first rattles of the strange death of Tory England were beginning to be felt -- all combining to create a frisson in English society, especially in the working-class industrial Midland cities of Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

The Union Jack and soccer hooliganism are more or less bywords for the BNP-style neo-fascism that's still quite visible and smellable in Albion. It was good of a band juggling enough complicated iconography as it was to insist on keeping the sports anthem -- which became a veritable national anthem -- all about love. Here is Barney Sumner, lead singer of New Order:

At one stage, the Football Association came to us and made it clear that the song really had to distance itself from hooliganism. Hence our line, 'Love's got the world in motion.' It's an anti-hooligan song. There's a deliberate ambiguity about the words which don't have to refer to football. I think you're right when you say that pop and football culture are nearer than they've been in years. And from our point of view, there's been a football element in our fans for about the last six years. Even so, there was no way I could have written the lyrics. I really couldn't write a football lyric.

Here's the chorus of "World in Motion":

Love's got the world in motion
and I know what we can do;
love's got the world in motion
and I can't believe it's true.

There's also an anti-hooliganism rap midway through the tune. The video is extremely low-grade and camp, but that's far better than something a po-faced Leni Riefenstahl might have come up with.

For more on "World in Motion" and the 1990 World Cup, check out this learned essay on the New Order website.