ten miles a minute totti

This week's Guardian Unlimited Football Weekly [Extra] is a marvellous listen. Fernando Duarte provides a great overview of the situation at the Zico-coached Fenerbahce, and has a gold star moment when he describes their gameplan as playing "with the knife between their teeth - like pirates." Bitter Hoops fan Kevin McCarra has a diatribe against Milan so ripe, it could come have come from a French guard in Monty Python & The Holy Grail.

Perhaps best of all, the podcasters indulge in a moment of unadulaterated contempt for Graeme Souness and Sky's coverage of the Real-Roma game. "If he was that good, he'd have gone to a big club long ago," Souness said about Francesco Totti last year, to an embarrassed Ruud Gullit. Last night, after Roma's victory, he was apparently heard to remark, "Totti? Was he even playing?"

If Souness was as lazy a player as he is a pundit I presume he'd never have had a job at Sky in the first place. Football is mired in incompetence, and nowhere more so than in its television coverage.

I suppose Totti is more susceptible to questions regarding his motives for staying on at Roma than the likes of del Piero & Maldini have been -- unlike them, his loyalty can be more easily interpreted as a lack of ambition. But there are players who are upholders of tradition, and there are those who are trailblazers. I think Maradona at Napoli is probably a much better comparison to make. At the very least, both players at the height of their influence have been abhorred, the way Maldini [understandably] and del Piero [much less so] have never been. Power and its exercise are delicate, delicate things, and I don't think anyone who has been the sort of symbol and galvanising force Totti has been to Roma has been able to do so without attracting considerable attention to their own flawed individualism. It takes all sorts: history is about the Agamemnons of the world, but there would be no poetry without Achilles.

Perhaps that's too whimsical [or old-fashioned]. Certainly, given how up close and in our faces our footballing idols are, I don't think his detractors are entirely to blame if he reminds them more of Brad Pitt flexing his entitlement muscles than an actual demigod. I think that, at the very least, without Totti's committment to Roma, they would not have two of Italy's most talented players nail their colours as firmly to the Giallorosso mast as they have now. de Rossi & Aquilani seem to be the future of the club, and without Totti and his tribal loyalty, they might never have had a reference point.

And I'm certainly hoping that Donadoni admits that playing a Roma-centric midfield in his first team at Euro 2008 might actually yield better results than his overreliance on the Ambro-Pirlo-Gattuso triad, as things stand. Then again, fragile as Pirlo looks, he doesn't seem to pull a muscle every time he turns over in his sleep, which is what poor 'berto does. He was as beautiful on Wednesday night, from what I saw of the highlights, as Andrea was not.

++

Good news for fans of the vintage Italy Offside - "wor" Martha - even she who taught me that bit of Geordie-speak - has established herself at Colpo di Testa, where she already has an excellent essay on Manuel Rui Costa up. Welcome back!

fenerbahce to moscow?

Hello. I'm gutted about Milan, but at least this way I won't have to worry about them collapsing on pitch for exhaustion. It could still happen, but nothing quite sets the pulse racing disturbingly like a night in Europe, and unless Inter smuggle Nesta & Kaladze in to their centre-back positions next week, giving them bad haircuts in the hope that no one will notice they're not from the right side of town, that's a kick the rossoneri's "DNA of Champions" is going to have to do without.

But Sevilla-Fenerbahce. What a pity one of those two had to go out, huh? Of course, there's always the argument to be made that a defensive display appalling enough to allow the final score over 210 minutes to stand at 5-5 is no great shakes, but come on. If an English side had been in a game like that we'd never be hearing the end of it in the international media.

Roma-Real in about six minutes. I see La Gazzetta says "tutta l'Italia" are behind i lupi. I just hope it makes a positive difference.

as the internet would say, LOL.

Eduardo's breaking ankle will be the nightmarish after-image this weekend leaves in the minds of most people. Here's hoping he recovers well and as rapidly as possible, and much the same to Adrian Mutu, whose injury this weekend in Fiorentina's game against Roma has come at a horrible moment for the Viola, who are in the UEFA Cup's last 16 and playing peek-a-boo at fourth spot in Serie A, whence Milan dislodged them last night, for the first time this year. May Everton be dazzled by the force of the Bobo, who becomes their #1 striking option now.

If it weren't for these, this weekend might have gone down as the funniest one all season. Juventus lost to Reggina on a soft penalty. They're writing letters to FIGC about it this morning. It's unbelievable. A season in B has apparently done nothing to dent a sense of entitlement that would -- how to find the words for it? -- that would put Milan to shame.

Football Italia reports that
Ahead of Tuesday evening’s derby, city rivals Torino have reacted with little sympathy to Juventus’ complaints.

“Poor Juve, having to be treated like everyone else,” a statement from supporters group Toro Club reads.

They really are calcio royalty -- the prurient interest and perverse pride that so many fans take in supporting them is matched only by the resentment and derision harboured by others. I forget who wrote a novel I once read about Queen Elizabeth being forced to re-locate to a suburban housing project after a disastrous Parlimentary election. Perhaps in time Juve's Cadetti season will take on a similarly absurd quality.

Then, of course, there's Marco Borriello, best known for his profile shots in Milan's annual D&G calendar and the Incident With The Ointment [Paolo Bandini's weekly Italia roundup in the Guardian recounts it today]. Bundled off in disgrace to Genoa at the end of last season by a fastidious Milan, he now sits at the top of the capocannoniere lists of the season. Chris has video links.

And over in Spain, Arjen Robben noticed there was something badly wrong about the goal he scored.



Tim Stannard squees. I think it's Sergio Ramos who truly brings the picture to life.

[Thanks to Martha for the pic. I'm so glad you're watching football other than Newcastle these days, bb. *ducks*]

you ask, he answers

I.

Yesterday I renewed my British Council Library membership and celebrated by checking out, among other things, the December 2007 edition of FourFourTwo. Football experts will know that this is British football's matey, laddish monthly chronicle. Those with good memories will instantly recall, too, that this particular edition bears an alarming picture of a smiling Arsène Wenger who, the inner pages will reveal, is in fact a (money) plant on the part of Nike and one of their new coaching initiatives.

We can look at Arsène Lupin instead.

I am a big fan of the 'Arsène knows' maxim, mostly because of its powers to offend non-Gooners. I admire Wenger and his teams. I think he is intelligent and eloquent, much like Sir Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourinho are, in their own distinct ways. [I swear that is not a backhanded compliment.] In the absence of patriarchal club owners who run their teams as they would their families or their shady businesses, people like Ferguson and Wenger must necessarily occupy the centre of attention in English football's corporate power structures.

As a cultural outsider who is, to all intents and purposes, an Anglophile, Wenger's perspective is valued to an immoderate degree by his adoring populace, and others besides. His opinions are worthy of attention, even when he is being disingenuous, and he is that very often. I suspect it may have given more than one outraged football fan a moment's pause when, contrary to the reservations of practically every club bigwig who was asked their opinion about the 39th Game issue, Wenger actually claimed he thought it would be a good idea. Flabbergasting, from a man who one would assume to have thought of the physical wear-and-tear, the mathematical integrity of the league, and every other good argument against the proposal long before the rest of us had. Might he have seen something there that we were missing? His reasoning appeared simple to a fault: he said he thought fans in other countries deserved a chance to see their teams in action.

In this interview with FourFourTwo, presumably conducted at least two months before the Scudamore storm broke, Wenger was asked the inevitable question about the un-Englishness of his teams, and he said, wisely, that he would fight against every notion of a quota. Then he was asked, by a reader from Birmingham, about whether he thought football had lost its moral compass. His answer was:

Football has a worldwide responsibility because every big game in the Premier League is watched by 500 to 700 milllion people - sometimes a billion people. Imagine a kid sitting in India or in South Africa watching Wayne Rooney or Fabregas - the kind of influence these people have in the world is highly important. Also, I believe that in our countries that have such a history of war, multi-cultural teams can show a harmonious way to live and achieve things together. Sport has a responsibility on that front. [...]

I'm not certain whether he's lying about this, or about his discomfort with the idea of managing England because he "wouldn't know which anthem to sing" if his team ever played France [an opinion he repeats in this interview]. I get the feeling he is completely sincere about both. He is contemptuous of international football. '...because they destroyed it,' he says. 'Take Russia: once it was one country and now it's 21. Yugoslavia was one and now is six. As a result the level has dropped. Then you add countries like Andorra, Faroe Islands and San Marino and suddenly three games out of four are of no interest.'

Perhaps he believes himself incapable of the collective anti-nationalist meritocracy he seems to envision for the sporting world, but holds out hope for his charges and for all the kiddums in India and South Africa losing every sense of place and time as they watch Rooney and Fabregas being one-size-fits-all idols. He makes a clear distinction between what he perceives as 'big' and 'small' concerns - one presumes it's perfectly alright for coaches of San Marino or Kazakhstan to be of a different nationality, since they're not big enough to be awkward about their nationhood, anyway. There is a practical sense in his making this distinction, as far as the coach issue goes: countries trying to develop their football culture will feel justified in adopting ways and workers from already-established countries in a way that the big guns might not. But this isn't what Wenger is advocating - in spite of fearing his own nationalism, he seems unwilling to tolerate it in others.
There is a certain kind of libertarianism that believes that the breakdown of social controls will allow for new, less unjust ways for entities to relate to each other. I don’t think it applies successfully in sport. Wenger opposes the nationalism that creates divisions in sport, but he does it without considering the other sources of power that divide people. Money, for one. Does falling on the right side of that particular divide allow him to ignore it entirely? Is it, in fact, possible to see the glorious rise of a fandom sans frontiers without seeing how very imbalanced it would be?
I find this so frankly ridiculous a thought, the idea that the EPL going to the ends of the world to play their 39th game is "for the fans," that when Wenger came out and said just that, I did a double-take, and walked myself back through his proclamations, trying to find evidence that he is Ligue 1 counterintelligence of some order. It's an appealing sort of notion, but if it isn't the case, then I'm going to hope that everyone who says 'Arsène Knows' does so with at least a tinge of irony.

II.

Does he know, however, to beat Milan? I believe he does. I believe that Arsène does know enough to take on the entire establishment that is propping up this particular Milan team - laboratories, tactical traditions, at least a century of collective European experience on the pitch, it's absurd to to suggest that there's anything so simple as a one-on-one coach-off at work here - but it appears, more than any other tie in this round so far, to come down to the uncertainties of the night.

Inter, on the other hand (where my face is currently resting, dejected). Are unspeakable.

III.

Following on the last post about Paolo Maldini: the Telegraph did not stop there. Henry Winter, writing the day after the game at the Emirates, said

Paolo Maldini was particularly magnificent, embodying Milan's refusal to yield a centimetre.

Even in the cynical world of modern football, an opponent's brilliance can be respected. Even a man whose job it is to destroy can be saluted. At half-time, Maldini was embraced by Emmanuel Adebayor, the Arsenal striker he was paid to frustrate. At the final whistle, the great Italian defender was applauded from the field by Arsenal's admiring supporters. Maldini responded with a smile of appreciation and a brief wave before disappearing down the tunnel.

Even at 39 [...] Maldini looked like he had just stepped from the catwalk at Milan fashion week.

I'm glad he's getting his adulation from a crowd that generally finds it convenient to hate Italian football, but this is just suspicious. Does no one have anything to say against him?

... I'm a little afraid of the answer to that. Ruud Gullit has a 'My Perfect XI' at the back of the FourFourTwo, and predictably, over a third come from il grande Milan: Rijkaard at central midfield, Baresi at centre-back (Gullit plays a flat back four), Marco 'the man' van Basten in front, and Maldini at left-back. "Position for position one of the greatest players ever," he says about him.

About van Basten he says, "He was also a vicious player. If defenders tried to kick him, he would kick them back. He knew how to look after himself on the pitch." Small comfort for a man whose career was hacked away by the time he was 28? But oddly true to life, even for someone who has only ever known him as a YouTube superhero and the really unpleasant man who manages Holland.

Gullit's pick to play up front along side van Basten? van Basten's new boss, Johann Cruyff. There is a very funny novel in there somewhere. I'm sure of it.

IV.

All this talk of defenders and hair [for we talk not of defenders without talking of their hair] and Ursus' comments have made me want to write about Alessandro Nesta. Count this as prior warning, Martha.

V.

I still need a job. Recently discovered: Mills & Boon have an India branch. Could I write pulp romance? We have been reading a slew of their ghastly novellas of late. Like Baldrick hoping to marry into the aristocracy, I could look into bringing the system down from the inside.

a very long engagement

Tributes in the form of verbal fellatio are already being offered to Paolo Maldini. Yes, again. We can only presume that this is in the wake of his impending ejection from his European hunting grounds -- if Milan live to progress to the quarter-finals of this year's Champions' League no doubt there will be another round of articles, and then another, and then, on the slim chance of his arriving at Moscow, a final glorious barrage of attention.

So what kind of man is this who can dispossess Diego Maradona and force Zinedine Zidane to seek refuge on the other side of the park? Maldini shrugs his shoulders as if to say: "Just doing my job." His acceptance speech after winning World Soccer magazine's player of the year award in 1996 went something like: "What, me? I'm a defender."

Most women would risk their long-term relationships for half an hour with him. He's impossibly good-looking, even by Italian standards; he's captain of the world club champions; a euro-billionaire and a male model. If pushed, he'll host your disco.

Okay, so I'd better get *my* sentimental tribute piece in before it's too late.

The accompanying photograph to the Telegraph piece carries the caption: "Paolo Maldini has won everything in his playing career." I have always found this a very imperfect truth when describing this man among men. My first acquaintance with Paolo Maldini was at France '98 [I have memories of '94, but they are dim, and mostly of Maradona's drug bust and the slumped shoulders of Roberto Baggio] and that, and subsequent re-acquaintances, always ended in almost comic disaster: that penalty shootout, Trezeguet's golden goal, Byron Moreno, 4-0 at the Riazor. Paolo Maldini is the only man in that elite class of legends, peopled by the likes of Maradona and Beckenbauer, who can honestly claim to have lost at least as much, and as dramatically, as he has won. It's one of the reasons I like him unreservedly. He calls to mind the 'If you can face triumph and disaster/and treat those two impostors just the same' line that is one of If's better moments. Perhaps not as deserving of the plaudit as someone like Franco Baresi, since he is and always has been the child of fortune, but deserving enough.

Maradona, in his autobiography, said Maldini was too pretty to be a footballer, which I think says some very interesting things about Maradona. But I, too, have always thought that Paolo is one of the nicest-looking men we are likely to come upon in our lifetimes. Which is why it amused me when the Telegraph article made apparently innocent reference to "that trademark central parting." Fans of the inimitable James Richardson and his quips about Cesare Maldini will know why this is such sweet sorrow. I prefer the windblown curls of his late twenties myself, but the style appears, like the bandieri of Italian football, to be an anachronism.



Going back to pretending that football doesn't exist for the next little while now. It's been an unpleasant couple of weeks, even by Milan's low standards for the season, and I admit that the Milan-Arsenal tie is now giving me a clammy forehead and shaking hands. I have taken to sublimating this with neurotic Inter-baiting.

PS. How exactly does one 'host a disco' in this day and age? Do you rent out the strobe lights or something? The lycra costumes? The shady drugs? Is there money in it? I will need a job in a couple of months.

[Found the picture I was looking for - thanks, Neko.]

aargh

Wow. More English football. How thrilled I am not.

Hopefully by 2011 Internet penetration in India will have reached the stage where streaming and webcasting are widely supportable, and an entire underbelly of rebels can switch off ESPN for good. And watch the Copa Libertadores. Or the African Cup of Nations. Or go out in the sunshine and watch something, anything else. (Which I missed the chance to do a bare couple of weeks ago - I slept through the Mohun Bagan-East Bengal derby, and a Baichung brace, at that. I suck - as do East Bengal, sadly.)

This is why my first thought on hearing that England hadn't qualified for Euro 2008 was paranoid fear that the sporting networks in their wisdom would assume that us dollar signs in Manchester United tee-shirts would not in fact need to watch the tournament at all. One could argue that a Euro-centric tournament once every four years is enough, certainly. But there will be so much hell to pay if I don't get to see Donadoni and van Basten shake hands on the touchline.

DONADONI: van Basten. It's been ages.
VAN BASTEN: You can say that again, er. ...Costacurta, wasn't it?




Almost makes you wish Capello was in on the party.

belonging, or not

+ Steven Wells writes a piece about presidential candidates and football that excites me greatly in its disparaging, contemptuous and altogether callous dismissal of the football writing of Franklin Foer. The continuing attempts at satirising Foer descend into waffliness [after all, at some point of time you would like to get over the Foer joke and go into why Hillary Clinton couldn't be anything but a Man United fan] but the article, on the whole, demonstrates why those who did not read Foer's book, "How Soccer Football Explains The World," are missing out on rich opportunities for mockery. I will not go into overlong detail here, except to say in Franklin's favour that he is at least slightly more readable than Jonathan.

+ Yesterday, I wrote about my distaste for the gratuitous flag-waving that accompanied India's cricket victory at Perth. I failed to clarify that I have no feelings whatsoever for the Indian flag, within or 'out a sporting context. This was partly due to the fact that I was sleepy, and partly because, functional democracy or no, India still is a place where you can get into serious trouble -- with the police and the court and everything. I am not kidding, guys. -- for 'disrespecting' the flag in any way, shape or form, and I got a little paranoid. That's right. The flag. Disrespecting the freaking flag. Tonight I feel ashamed enough of my miniscule act of cravenness to come right out and admit that the Indian flag could die tomorrow and take no part of my selfhood with it.

+ I'm not even particularly community-oriented, not in any way that's not meritocratic and possibly somewhat elitist. I would protest very much if someone tried to get me to commit to an institution for the sole purpose of demonstrating a sense of belonging to it. But I do realise the importance of acknowledging a need to belong. Like Gandhianism, and happy endings, the truly positive and truly liberal group identity is a Platonic ideal that improves our worldview for cherishing it. Whether identifying as one Barcelona* fan among many is a step forward in this direction or not [and if you're Joan Laporta reading this, please be advised that I am not optimistic about the chances] is, for the moment, an ineffable question. But it is a question whose parameters are constantly evolving, and nowhere have I seen this expressed better than Brian's subtly-wrought, richly poetic musing on identity and alienation here. Highly, highly recommended reading.


* - I say Barcelona because Franklin Foer, a self-confessed Barca man, devotes an entire chapter in his book to describing how the club is demonstrative of the excellence of nationalism, which, in spite of anything Martha Nussbaum wants you to believe, is actually the way forward for humanity. It is not the most annoying thing I have ever read -- he does one on Iran and football liberating women towards the end -- but it's a bit like having a pig's head thrown at you when you're trying to take a corner.

+ I forgot to mention earlier. I contributed a piece on tolerance and marketing in football, partly re-worked from this post, to Pitch Invasion, the seminal football website of our time. If you don't already read PI [...probably just you then, Mom], you must anon.

+ Finally, a link that has nothing to do with football, but everything to do with life, love and literature: Dario Fo's Nobel acceptance speech, which the roommate discovered I hadn't read yet, and amended speedily.

cricket: truthiness will out

After a couple of truly beautiful weeks of cricket which allowed us to forget how disgusted we are with the institutions and (some of) the people who run, play and watch the game, it is only proper that we report the whimper that rounds of the series of bangs rocketing about the test at Sydney and the now infamous race row: A court of law has overturned the ban on Harbhajan Singh for his alleged racist remarks. In the face of a dearth of admissible evidence this will appear, to the armchair legal eagles among us, a sensible sort of conclusion to reach. The Guardian's Andy Bull believes otherwise.

While there is no clear explanation of what has happened in this case, the sport will continue to consume itself with accusations and suspicions that something far more Machiavellian in scope has transpired behind the closed doors and among the murky corridors of the ICC. The ongoing, irritating stone-throwing between the baser elements of fans, officials, players and journalists on either side of the sub-continent power bloc v the Anglo-Australian power bloc divide will run on unabated. This is not going to help the sport to be comfortable with its own evolution.

Someone was always going to be shafted by the outcome of this appeal. Had Justice Hansen decided to let the original decision to ban Harbjahan Singh stand, Singh would have been the victim of a trial that would seem unfair in any democratic court of law. If the appeal overturned Mike Procter's verdict, it would put Procter's credentials, already shaky after his famously inept handling of the Darrell Hair affair, in some jeopardy.

I'll admit to being disappointed at the Guardian's knee-jerk reaction to this development, but given the self-righteous frenzy of imagined vindication that is likely to be breaking out around India's news channels right now [and how glad I am that I don't have a telly around at the moment] I suppose it strikes a reasonable balance.

It's been a bad month to be an old-fashioned, repressed codger of a cricket fan. If the appalling lack of civility on display in the Syndey test was not enough, the sight of Harbhajan Singh, banned for the match in Perth, jumping on to the field waving the Indian flag in celebration (after a victory that left most of us witless with joy, admittedly) was detestable in its own special way.



Cricket is a sport played, at the highest level, by roughly fifteen nations, all of whom, at some point of time or other, have been in unhealthy imperial relationships with each other. Nationalism becomes more unpleasant than usual in this atmosphere. And while there's an amount of jingoistic grandstanding permissible in an all-or-nothing knockout tournament like a World Cup, it's a bit ludicrous to come out and unfurl your national colours after a game whose result is the exception to a long and unflattering rule. India has lost a lot more matches in Australia than it has won, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the national flag was sullied by those defeats, any more than it acquired some kind of miraculous sheen by a win like this. I can't think of a single Indian in whom the mawkish, manipulative sight of that flag inspired a pride or joy more intense than what it felt like to see this.

Did a 19-year-old from Delhi, slim as a girl and strong as a boy, end an era? You had to have been watching to appreciate the full extent of Ishant Sharma's murderous Saturday-morning spell to Ricky Ponting. This was Ponting as not seen before, a Ponting without reply. If the Australian captain is not his country's second-best batsman of all time, at the very least he is among the top five. For more than an hour Sharma picked him apart until he cut him open.

[Alright, maybe the English got a bit more excited about someone, anyone, being able to stand up to Oz than they should have -- here's hoping poor Ishant Sharma's teenage friends don't read the Telegraph, or he'll never hear the end of 'slim as a girl, strong as a boy' jokes -- but the cricket at Perth was its own reward.]

race, guilt and silence

I.

Martha asked, on the Italy Offside blog, about why racism in calcio is not met with more stringent measures.

There are some very good responses to her post, and if you have a thought, I hope you'll contribute to the discussion. I have removed to the fastness of the Angry Nunnery thinking,as you sometimes will, about the why of her why-not question. To me the problem of racism in Italian football is agonising because it seems, from this distance, to be so possible to deal with. Lilian Thuram once spoke, in an interview, of his experience playing for Parma around the turn of the century.

'It was at a Parma-Milan match,' he says, 'when our Parma fans were chanting racist slogans against Ibrahim Ba and George Weah [both Milan players] that I thought how sick this was. The press officer tried to stop me, but I went to see the fans at our training ground and told them what I thought. The next week there was an apologetic banner at the match saying, "Thuram, respect us please!"

Of course, times have changed since then, and ignorance and naivete have never been poorer excuses for bad behaviour than they are ten years on, but I don't feel like the example of Thuram goes amiss. As urbane lefties and football fans, we all know that racism can come from anywhere, and yet the average racial abuser in the imagination of an average liberal footie enthusiast has a particular profile; he is white, male, often young, usually unemployed, or disenfranchised in some way [and usually, especially if you're from outside Italy, in a Lazio jersey. Poor Lazio]. The sort of guy who feels safe in a mob. Who will duck and cower if you confront him. Accurate? Maybe, maybe not. Has anyone ever tried a confrontation, though? Not from behind a desk or a truncheon, but face-to-face, like Lilian Thuram with his home crowd?

I feel that an initiative for change needs to be sustained with emotion and spontaneity, rather than as an institutionalised campaign. We know now that stadium violence in Italy is linked to a deep frustration with the failure of social institutions, and to me, a socety in which offenders are traditionally suspicious of their government, their media, and their footballing establishment is not one in which the stadium ban, the fine, the police clampdown, and the multicoloured wristband, can achieve much more than isolated success. Perhaps this is equally true of England, home of the anti-racism advertising industry, as it is anywhere else. But over the last decade, what the campaigning in England has achieved is the provision of a space in the media where issues of racism and discrimination can and will be foregrounded repeatedly. In November, Juventus fans smuggled a banner into their game against Inter which called Zlatan Ibrahimovic a foul gypsy. The offenders were dealt with near instantly, and the incident reported faithfully and in measured tones by papers like La Gazzetta.

All this can be countenanced; but can you imagine an incident of similar proportions, involving a player of similar stature, meeting with anything like silence in the Premiership? An equivalent in terms of high-profility would be to imagine Arsenal fans racially abusing Cristiano Ronaldo at the Emirates. Young Cristiano is not given to dignified silence on most days, but even were he so, do you imagine a day would have passed before the media, the FA and the club insisted on his lodging a vocal protest? And yet, apart from a short statement by Javier Zanetti in the post-match conference, the Juve case received no personal attention from anyone. To the best of my knowledge, Zlatan's own response to this demeaning abuse is yet to be recorded.

Which is fine; the man has the right to stay quiet, or simply decide that he doesn't give a damn, if that's what it is. The FIGC seems to be doing a better job than in previous years of making sure such incidents do not go unpunished. But the ossification of the chain of incidents into the Isolated Racist Behaviour and the They Are Not Real Football Fans [and therefore not our responsibility?] matched set of administrative platitudes, served up with a We Have It Under Control assurance, is not what Italian football needs. It needs leadership and conviction. It needs its footballers to march up to the sidelines and demand what the fuck fans think they're doing. It requires, instead of corporate social responsibility-fulfilling TV spots, the sight of a football team -- or perhaps both football teams -- refusing to continue a match until an abusive chant is silenced. In a world where the institution is the enemy, something like popular revolution is still possible. One Marco Zoro may have been a lone voice in a storm. But four or five, acting with intent, will do much better.

II.

I would also like to talk about guilt and how its absence plays a large part in attitudes to racism in sport. I am thinking of this, not just in relation to England [and Italy], but to India and our knee-jerk defensiveness at having Harbhajan Singh accused of racist abuse during the last Test at Sydney. We live in an incredibly divided society, and almost all of us suffer from a lack of privilege to various extents. But you would be hard-pressed to find too many of us to sympathise with Andrew Symonds for being allegedly trodden, however briefly, under the jackboot of racial oppression. Part of this may have to do with the sheer ludicrousness of said jackboot belonging to a man several shades darker than he. But I also think that our discourse about race and colour, in this country, has absolutely no place in it for guilt. Indian society is casually referred to as among the most racist in the world, but there is almost no way to put the matter in perspective against the backdrop of our recent history, one in which even the most privileged Indians, until sixty years ago, were enslaved by Empire. I think liberal attitudes in England about racial discrimination have been informed incredibly heavily by the weight of their part in this history, which accounts for both the backlash against immigrants [and the immigration phenomenon itself, in the first place] and the development of racial sensitivity. Perhaps a similar path can be traced down the history of the United States.

It's really frustrating to some people that this sort of thing puts them in a Catch-22 situation. As I said in my last post, not only do they have to deal with racism -- a problem with which their own relationship is unique -- but also with racial sensitivity, in a framework that is dictated to them by people on practically the opposite end of the spectrum. I resent this. If anyone asked me whether I detected a smack of real racism in the backlash against Harbhajan and the BCCI's bumbling attempts to bully the international cricket fraternity into placing him above suspicion, I would say, having first clarified that I think the BCCI are criminally stupid and that Bhajji, if he did call Symonds a monkey, deserves no softening of blows, that I did.

I will go out on a limb and say that perhaps football in Italy grapples with some of the same problems in its own mediation with race issues. I mulled in an earlier post over how hooliganism in Italy is in not comparable to the English situation of old, and how pointless it is for the English-led international media to tar Roman ultras and the protagonists of Hillsborough and Heysel with the same brush. It's the same with the issue of racism. Italy is not a post-Colonial nation, but it is a country with enough experience on being at the receiving end of racism and discrimination against its emigrant populations to retain, perhaps, some of the confusion and victim-mentality of the mindset in India. It is an absolute truth to say that there are no excuses for racism. But it's much, much easier for some people to say it than others, and it's counter-productive to ignore that.

That dormancy of the guilt of privilege is why I think force of personality will succeed, in the sporting arena, even if change takes time to percolate through society itself. Part of the reason the Bhajji-Symonds fracas put so many backs up among us is that we were, of course, convinced that in the final reckoning, it came down to the word of two brown men against the representatives of a white team, and the white guys won out. One of those brown men was Sachin Tendulkar, who categorically stated that Harbhajan was not guilty of racial abuse. We were all enraged by the cricketing system's implication that Tendulkar would tell anything but the truth. But imagine if, in a different situation, Sachin Tendulkar had made it a matter of principle to say the opposite. There would be a few people who would be outraged at the thought of India's icon going against his own people to snitch on his teammate. But most of us, perhaps, would have found it easier to accept the lack of excuses afforded to us.

If Alessandro del Piero had made it a matter of principle to take a moment out of the Derby dell' Italia to protest a racist banner, perhaps it would have been easier to set the ball rolling.

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I hope this wasn't too upsetting to read, if you have come to the end of it; I do not usually go to footie blogs expecting to find wrung-out spins on postcolonialism in my reading matter,especially when they're written mostly in qualifying clauses instead of actual sentences. But it was either this or something on Milan finally winning a game at home, and sorry, but no. I can't find anything to say about Pato. The loss is no doubt all mine, but nothing in the world has yet induced me to find seventeen year old boys remotely interesting. So I will just say RONIE IS BACK, BITCHES! in presumptuous glee, and leave the rest to the imagination.

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bollyline link central

AMAZING. A sport in which left-arm unorthodox deliveries are still blithely called 'Chinamen,' a sport with such unfocused, disparate locuses of power and privilege [the brown people have the money, the white people have the aspirational value], and not only the debate on racism, but also the mechanisms of dealing with that racism, are all the same, same, same.

I wish I could imagine how this whole thing would have turned out if Harbhajan, on being bullied about sexual preferences, or aspersions on the virtue of his female family members, had held back his attempt at ironic racism, and just gone ahead and headbutted Symonds. No excuses about evidence, no wriggle room, no justifications. He’d have really earned his three-match ban for that. I would have been shocked and disapproving, and Gandhian India would lie exposed in its hypocrisy and unable to excuse itself. And everyone, everyone who has gathered these last few days across the world to use this incident to make point and counterpoint about sportsman spirit and bad captaincy, would have had a moment of absolutely cathartic satisfaction. Because on his good days, Ricky Ponting makes Marco Materazzi look like the angel he likes to proclaim he is.

Amazing.

On to links:

Peter Roebuck's stirring call for Ricky Ponting to be removed from captaincy, the day after the test, in a morning column for the Sydney Morning Herald that will no doubt occupy central position in the body of journalism that has collected around the issue.

Greg Baum took a more measured view in the same edition, asking both sides to just grow the hell up and move on.

Australia now cares as much about how they win as winning itself. Well, after three consecutive World Cups, it's about time.

The Harbhajan ban: a cross cultural view. [Someone on Google Groups dissects it with a deft sociological scalpel. NB: I haven't read the whole thing yet.]

Harbhajan is the victim here. It's nice how all these Aussies [and Poms] are standing up for the kid, but let's not forget that he is an annoying man who, while certainly innocent to my mind until more evidence of his racist remarks is provided, is more than capable of being quite an unpleasant fuck.

Just ban sledging altogether says Tim de Lisle in Cricinfo. Sledging always walks a fine line, Simon Barnes in The Times reminds us. Point taken. Banning something to make life simpler, though, is a little silly.

Dileep Premachandran on the uniformity of the Indian reaction. Nice. Some righteous self-hating anger. I feel it too. We are the equivalent of the average Daily-Mailer England fans when it comes to cricket in this country. Dileep also wrote an earlier blog on the Aussies' behaviour losing them friends.

[to be added to...]