Where would we be without white sporting administrators crashing through middle age dispensing fag packet wisdom? The answer to the world’s problems? Why, more football of course.
Maybe we should organise World Cups in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and other death zones every week until the fighting ends, poverty is erased, hopelessness and despair sent packing and impoverished citizens swap lethal migrations across land and sea for a ticket to the match and a half-and-half scarf.
Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s migrant death theory in the Mediterranean as a justification for a biennial World Cup matched for ignorance and complacent stupidity Middlesex cricket chairman Mike O’Farrell’s submissions to a government select committee on the failure of black and Asian Britons to take up bat and ball.
Since 2014 more than 23,000 migrant deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean, the vast majority of those lost coming from Africa, which damns Infantino’s infantile whimsy even more since the Africa Cup of Nations takes place biennially. If there is a kernel of truth in Infantino’s wild supposition it is the need to provide Africans and other migrants with a reason to stay put rather than risk all in pursuit of a better life beyond their borders. The suggestion that football might be it is the stupendously silly bit.
In the wealthy European countries targeted by migrants, football, or more broadly sport, represents one pillar of advanced liberal culture, taking place as it does in societies that are notionally free of want, pain, hunger, exploitation and disease.
These are places where people have time to devote to leisure, where flowers line civic spaces, where children gambol in parks, where lovers of any orientation kiss in public, where music is played in great concert halls, art hangs on walls, theatre and cinema thrive. Yet even in paradise all is not as it seems.
Enter Mike O’Farrell, who in his dim and clumsy contribution to the racism in cricket debate revealed the nature of the problem, namely many of those responsible for running the game are so far removed from the lived experience of people who don’t look like them they fall victim to harmful stereotyping.
O’Farrell’s view that black people prefer football and those with Asian heritage tend to prioritise education is the recidivist bunkum of the troglodyte, made more pernicious by the faux sensitivity with which it is rolled out. O’Farrell later scrambled an apology when his baseless sociology lit up the internet. He had not intended to offend, he said, and was mortified that he had. This is the problem. Well-meaning idiots are still idiots and do immense harm.
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If you can't wait for 2021 to end, that's ok - 2022 has all this for us to look forward to23 December, 2021As the Ashes pasting revealed, English cricket has a problem. Yet the quality of the players is but a trifle in this context. It is precisely the closed attitudes and crass prejudices exposed at Yorkshire by Azeem Rafiq and revealed by O’Farrell’s shallow thinking that are holding back the game.
Quite how Infantino is serving the interests of football with a biennial World Cup agenda recast as a welfare scheme for the regeneration of Africa is a mystery too, unless of course he aims to use the proceeds from the naked cash grab to relocate the machinery of Fifa from the opulence of Switzerland to the heart of the African continent.
How about Juba, the capital of South Sudan, where violent crime and kidnapping are commonplace, day and night? A redistribution of Fifa’s £2bn World Cup profits, which would double with Infantino’s biennial stunt, would help remove some of the conditions that lead Juba’s citizens to seek such dangerous solutions to the problems of life.
If not there then maybe Tripoli in Libya, the epicentre of the migrant trade, a country that saw 21,000 flee its borders for Italy in the first half of 2021 alone. Let Infantino pitch up here and see how two-yearly instalments of Messi vs Ronaldo, Mbappe vs Neymar heals the wounds of civil war.
Or better still, leave the thinking to serious people, not profiteers disguised as missionaries.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3sebpj5
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