SOCIALIST UNITY

and you dare say England are shit! Bring on Spain.

thanks to Richard for sending me this

by Mphutlane wa Bofelo , from Pambazuka

Luis Suárez’s so-called ‘hand of God’ save has once again brought into public discourse the extent to which competitive and highly commercialised sport – with its emphasis on winning at all costs – can be consistent with the principles of fairness, the ideal of sportsmen and sportswomen as positive role-models and the goal of using sports to promote values and ethics that build society.

Though the official mantra of the football world-body, FIFA is ‘fair-play’ and football has been dubbed ‘the beautiful game’, several on and off the pitch antics and shenanigans has led to some critics referring to soccer as ‘a gentlemen’s sport played by rogues’. In a world in which lack of ethics and values and decline of decent etiquette ravage all spheres of life, a game such as football which puts emphasis on self-discipline, team-spirit, sportsmanship and fairness could play a critical role with regard to the promotion of a society based on sound values.

The popularity and mass appeal of football and the iconic status of some of the footballers make it much positioned to play this critical role of entrenching positive societal values. One way by which the game can play a role in this is to make an honourable and sound moral character to be one of the benchmarks of a great footballer rather than attributing greatness only to guts and muscles. But is it possible to do this while at the same time promoting the notion that a goal by any means is laudable, as long as one is cunning or fortunate enough not to get a booking? What if the ‘any means’ becomes an undetected physical attack which might go to the extent of causing an injury that jeopardises the health and football career of a fellow footballer?

Just as Diego Maradona exclaimed that his goal against England on 22 June 1986 was scored with ‘a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God’, Suárez boasted: ‘I was sent off but in the end it was worth it. I did what I had to do.’ His coach, Oscar Tabarez also came to his defence: ‘The player reacted instinctively and was thrown out of the match.’ It is one thing to instinctively, deliberately commit a foul or break the rules in an impulsive move to score or save a goal, and another matter altogether to feel good and boast about it or justify it. Human decency requires that even if at the instinctive and impulsive level you did something underhand to win in a sports game you should at least show some remorse rather than justify and celebrate the fact that you deliberately flouted the roles in a game that is grounded on the notion of fair play.

Confessing about his hand of evil goal Maradona later said, ‘I was waiting for my team mates to embrace me, and no one came … I told them, “Come hug me, or the referee isn’t going to allow it”. In other words, his fellow players saw that he scored the goal with a hand and did not celebrate the goal, and he invited them to join in the deceit by celebrating with him what their eyes and conscience told them was not a legitimate goal. The message that our children who adore and worship footballers and other sports personalities get out of this is not only that the wrong means justifies the ends but also that it is cool to support the use of underhand methods by your colleagues, as long as the whole team benefit from it.

If this ‘winning at all cost’ and ‘end justifies the means’ logic and culture is exported to other areas of our lives – politics, sports, the arts, business etc – then we will be breeding the nation of shrewd, unscrupulous, charlatan and corrupt politicians, sportsmen, artists and businessmen; a society in which lying, vote-rigging, plagiarism, bribery and nepotism are the norm rather than an aberration. In fact we are already living in that society. This situation promises to be uglier if a senior person such as a coach is going to justify such a behaviour and practice from his players. Why do we bother to punish young boys who provide false ages to play in certain leagues or sportsmen and sportswomen who use steroids and various performance-enhancing drugs if we have already had public endorsement of a win at all cost, by any means, at whatever expense? As FIFA spokesperson Pekka Odriozola promises that the FIFA disciplinary committee will look into the incident and make a decision, it would seem that harmonising the ethos of competition, commercial gain, prestige and status-seeking with that of fairness, fellowship and honesty in commercial sport will remain a weighty challenge.

photo from South Africa’s Sunday Times

It is worth treating John Barnes comments about football being a socialist sport as more than a curiosity. As he said last week in an interview in the Evening Standard.

“Football is a socialist sport,” he explains. “Financially, some may receive more rewards than others but, from a footballing perspective, for 90 minutes, regardless of whether you are Lionel Messi or the substitute right-back for Argentina, you are all working to the same end.

“The teams which embrace the socialist ideology rather than having superstars, are the teams that are successful. Or if there are superstars they don’t perceive themselves to be that. That’s why I use Messi as an example. As much as he’s a superstar he respects his team-mates and their collective efforts.”

It is the same with Brazil, the country against whom the 79-times capped winger scored his most memorable England goal in the Maracana Stadium in 1984. Dunga’s team moved up a gear last night as they destroyed Chile 3-0 and it is their collective approach that appeals to Barnes.

“Players from other nations when they play for their country are once again a socialist entity, all pulling in the same direction,” he tells me from a dressing room at Supersport’s studios where he is an expert analyst on the World Cup. “The most important thing for every Brazilian player is to play for Brazil.

“It doesn’t matter if he plays for Milan or Manchester United. A Brazilian who puts on that yellow shirt feels the same as the man next to him in that yellow shirt. They have a humility to the shirt. It is not the same for those who wear the Three Lions.”

The problem England have is that the corporate giant that is the Premier League rules all to the detriment of the national team.

“The Premier League has taken over the importance, prestige and kudos of the game,” Barnes says.

“Therefore, these players are superstars regardless of whether they play well for England or not. If England go out in the first round they will go back to their clubs, earn their money and everybody in England will be telling them, ‘You’re great’. An England failure leads to a blame game: Capello and his strictness, the pitch, the ball. Or that we need to get more players in to support Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard.

“We’ve had Gerrard, Joe Cole, Lampard and David Beckham for years and years and they’ve not done anything, not gone anywhere. But we still persist with the lament: ‘Why can’t we win with all these individuals?’”

For Barnes, the answer is simple.Whether Capello remains in charge or not, England have to start playing as a team and lose the tag of the Golden Generation.

“How often do we hear that? The Golden Generation comes from the fact that in England the Premier League has created a monster,” he says. “They have produced these players who are fine in club football winning the Champions League. But they have also generated an illusion that we are the best in the world, which we are not. The Premier League is the biggest and the best league in the world, so we think we should win the World Cup. But we shouldn’t.

“We have empowered our players so much that they are superstars at their clubs. Too many have been put on pedestals and treated as untouchable.

There are several aspects to this. One of which is that several players who are superstars in their own clubs may have difficulty in simply being one of a collective. Has Germany benefited by Michael Ballack being out of the team, and some of their squad being relatively middle-rank players, who had few caps for their country at the start of this tournament?

The lack off collective spirit in the England team is a product of the values and ethos of the wider national popular culture. Britain for the last 25 years has more and more embraced the soulless pursuit of bling, shopping, commodified sex and shallow celebrity. The Premier League footballers are the aristocracy of this tabloid worship. Britain is a country where the belief in the collective values of solidarity have been weakened, and replaced by the false baubles and spun confectionary of the travelling circus.

Now you could argue that club football is more important than internationals, and that the players have seen through the illusion of patriotism, and this is a good thing. But this would be a mistake, because the indifference of players and club managements to England is not on the basis of preferring another and better collective, but on the basis of selfishness and individualism. That is not admirable and should not be celebrated: playing for England is playing for other people.

Millions of people do identify with the national England team, and expect it to exemplify their own understanding of what is admirable and collective about Englishness. It is not a victory for the human spirit to learn from John Terry and Frank Lampard that there is no collective; there is no commonwealth, there are just individuals pursuing their own selfish careers. This is the triumph of Thatcherism, there is no society, there is no country, there is no team, there is no England. There is just personal fame and fortune.

Being conscious of nation, and the ideological and moral expectations of the national political culture is for most people an important framing experience for their personal morality and belief. If team spirit, solidarity and collectivity are seen as part of our national culture, then the selfish individualism of capitalism can be presented as somehow unpatriotic and against the common good; while left wing aspirations for a caring society based upon cooperation can be reinforced as being a natural part of our national culture.

There needs to be a debate about whether England is best represented by the gilded popinjays who sparkle in the firmament of the Premier League like tinsel catching the light of a dying flame. Is this fools’ parade of conceited underachievers a mirror of what our nation has now become? Do they reflect back at us the England of Jade Goody, of X-Factor, of Russell Brand, James Corden and Jonathan Ross?

Holland’s first game in the 1974 World Cup, when they first revealed their brand of “Total Football”