World Cup Media Angst

Garden City Pete   #18   08:21 am Jul 08 2010 

 Du Fresne: "The one thing that non-followers of football have difficulty understanding is the hysteria that surrounds the game. Fans no doubt put it down to passion, but to non- believers it simply looks like infantilism."

 Yep, Du Fresne, you're simply revealing the uptight public school/ military/ police/ country gent origins of rugby, that sport for thuggish public schoolboys which is in fact named after one of those awful English "Public Schools"- namely "Rugby School" the setting for "Tom Brown's School Days," a novel about sadistic public school bullies who like rugby. Actually, the Head of Rugby School encouraged rugby because he saw it as a way to control the large number of violent, brutish rich men's sons at his school. The joke is, these public school types are the people who colonized New Zealand at the time the public schools were drawing up their rugby codes, and so made sure rugby flourished here. As Celtic football supporter Billy Connolly would say, NZ was settled by a bunch of "uptight Protestants" - of which Du Fresne is clearly a direct heir!!! Sadly, they've long foisted their sad public school game on the urban masses here, so they've never felt the creative freedom and passion of the game of the urban masses worldwide- football. But as our cities grow and our identity becomes more international and fluid, so people are seizing on the "passion" of free expression football (soccer) provides...

Garden City Pete   #21   04:41 pm Jul 09 2010

 Am sure Billy Connolly would poke fun at both sects (though he's probably a little biased being from an Irish/Scottish Catholic background). Then again, the Protestant-Catholic thing has long ceased to be an issue when it comes to signing players at Celtic or Rangers in Glasgow. As for "football fans the world over sound the same when they sing" i.e. "tuneless": how could you possible know from this World Cup when the vuvuzelas unfortunately have drowned all the singing out? The only singing I could hear was during the England games (in patches) where it was ocassionally louder than the vuvuzelas and not too bad. British football (like rugby) crowds do often sing some nice hymns (along with sometimes witty, if coarse, topical chants). Check out some Pink Floyd tracks such as "Echoes" (samples Liverpool supporters at Anfield singing "You'll Never Walk Alone"). Dutch supporters often have some pretty useful brass band accompaniment. There's been plenty of singing talent amongst players and supporters in Europe over the years: don't forget opera star Placido Domingo was reserve goalkeeper at Real Madrid before his singing career took off (fellow football fanatics Carreras and Pavarotti were pretty useful vocally too...). German international from the 1990s Oliver Bierhoff was a trained opera singer. Rod Stewart flirted with a career as a professional player in his youth(then he just became a "player" in the wider sense of the word). Other celebrity football fanatics often found in crowds now or in the past who don't strike me as "hysterical" and have some cultural value: Burt Bacharach, Robert Duvall, Hugh Grant, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, Nick Hornby, Mick Jagger, Ray Davies, Ken Loach...