Estadounidenses Can't Write About Football

Leaving aside my compatriots' forgivable tendency to refer to the beautiful game as "soccer" (which is after all derived from "association football," I use it for tags here myself), most of us fundamentally don't seem to get how to write about it. This was made evident by Chris Ryan's well-meaning but naive account of the recent Champions League final on Grantland.com, an amusing contender to the sublime Run of Play's title as the best sports and culture blog around.

The first few errors aren't as toe-curlingly grievous as those who refer to the "EPL" or worse "BPL" but nonetheless a few bear mention. First, Chicharito nickname means "Little Green Pea" on account of his green eyes, not "Pea." A subtle difference but a venial since nonetheless. Second, the immigration official Ryan meets tells him he believes: "Barcelona is going to win." Fine in American English, but in the British Isles a collective noun is treated as a plural. I sniff fabulism, especially since our intrepid correspondent bothers to refer in the following paragraph to "Indian takeaways" as opposed to "take-out places" as they'd be known Stateside. Third, speaking as a current English teacher and former lawyer and journalist, I feel compelled to point out that the demonym for the people of Catalonia (or technically Catalunya) and their language is Catalan. (Though it's to Ryan's credit he distinguishes it from Spanish, or rather Castilian.)

However, it's this phrase that got my goat (and no I haven't abandoned the Arsenal and morphed into some retrograde Citeh fan yearning for the bad old days and Shaun Goater): "I'm talking about being around fans who seem to breathe in the sport, who follow their teams all over England and all over Europe, who are so passionate about their clubs, they are moved to song." Has he ever been to an actual football match or even Nevada Smith's? If I even have to explain this to you, this post will make little sense.

France Disrespects Its Hamsters

Sometimes, life imitates art. This is one of those times. Apparently the French, not content to simply use hamster as an ugly slur for insulting foreigners, have been driving the endearing little rodents of house and home. Fortunately, the European Court of Justice has seen fit to protect what The New York Times calls "a 10-inch citizen of France." Now that our little furry friend counts as a citoyen I expect the next step is for him to have his reputation protected from hateful skits like this by law, much as a somewhat larger countryman has.

Are You Serious...

Barcelona just released, or maybe I just became aware, of their jersey for the 2011-2012 season. For a club that prides itself on being more than a club and for bravely standing up to Franco's regime in opposition to a certain outfit from Madrid, the sponsorship of both Nike and the Qatar Foundation is a bit interesting. Neither exactly trips from the tongue when one thinks of human rights and the gold or yellow thread definitely isn't too subtle in suggesting the nature of their relationship with Calviola's crew is. (I was going to say "conjunto" but wanted to avoid offending the cules by using the language of Cervantes.) On the plus side, the jersey is delightfully effeminate and with those lovely stripes I think it would do nicely as a nightshirt for you... or perhaps a friend with whom you're interested in sharing a bed.

Bad Teacher

No, I don't mean the execrable movie that's soon to besmirch screens nationwide, nor do I mean the "I have tenure and I don't care" types whom education reformers try to pit against younger members of the profession. (On the pretext of caring about the students but more usually based upon attention to the bottom line.) Rather, I'm referring to the disturbing tendency I've noted among colleagues to dislike some of the core texts we teach. This baffles me.
Why I applaud anyone with a clean criminal record willing to enter the teaching profession and realize there's nothing more wonderful than working with kids and contributing to their growth, I fail to understand why people who hate literature teach English.

Calviola

It has long been known that Josep Guadiola “Calviola” and Zinedine Zidane, also bald, have been on the Qatar FA’s payroll for quite some time under that oh so murky title of “World Cup Ambassadors”

This week’s news that the artist formerly known as Diego Maradona agreed to manage a club in the U.A.E. has returned the spotlight to this stratum of the footballing world. Back when Calviola plied his trade for a club in Qatar along with Batistuta, Effenberg, Ronald de Boer and assorted over the hill footballers nobody paid them any mind. I guess they figured what I figured, namely that they want to squeeze a couple more petrodollars out of their waning careers. Amen to that and hallelujah.

We live in a different world these days. Since Ad-Man Sep and his cronies sold the World Cup to Qatar any movement in that section of FIFA causes many a ripple. This brings us back to Maradona. He’s clearly doing this for the money. Reports say he and his crew will get thrown 5 Million USD. I’m not privy to this information, but I assume all living expenses will be taken care of. I certainly wouldn’t turn down that deal. Hell, if I found out a friend turned down such a deal, I would have him water boarded.

Maradona is getting a lot of heat in Argentina and abroad for taking the Sheikh’s money. Why aren’t Calviola and Zidane getting the same heat? They’ve surely banked more than 5 Million USD in their under the Sheikh’s tutelage. The answer to this question is that Calviola and Zidane aren’t degenerates and Diego, well, let’s just let that thought linger.

I’m convinced that the powers that be at the Qatar FA are going to keep throwing money all over the world as 2022 gets closer. That shouldn’t surprise any of us rubes. I’m frankly surprised it took Maradona this long to get in on the action. The real question is how long it will take for Maradona to get embroiled in a scandal of biblical proportions down there. Qatar isn’t exactly known for enforcing lax drug and alcohol consumption laws.


This rant was brought to you by Chori.

You Should Meet The Poor, They're Awfully Nice

It recently came to my attention, via this New York Time article, that most people involved in the "reform" of public schools didn't attend them. This is not the least bit surprising, illustrating as it does the relative lack of social mobility in the United States, but also the implicit suggestion that the people who make the rules (or rather their children) are necessarily those who have to live by them.

A more interesting question might be which of them actually send their progeny to the schools they're busy, "reforming" since even this unexceptionable gentleman appears unwilling to trust his children to a New York City public school that he's not managing personally. I suspect the number is that high, since even in the most elite of New York City public schools, class size are still close (or at times apparently in excess of) the contractual maximum of 34. As an educator, this is perhaps the most essential issue; no matter how smart and motivated students are, if you're teaching 5 classes with 34 students versus 4 classes of 15 students (the typical sizes for private and public schools in New York City), the amount of time you can devote to assisting them respectively will vary enormously. And as any parent, teacher, or child (or lover) would tell you, it's getting attention that matters most.

Franqui Not Tranqui

I once had a first (and last) date with a woman who claimed to support both Real Madrid and Barcelona. Such a statement is as ignorant and illogical as an Estadounidense evincing affection for both the Red Sox and Yankees would be apposite - if everyone in the world actually cared about baseball, and the teams were respectively associated with progressivism and Tea Partyism AND these loyalties were born out of a bitter Civil War followed by three and a half decades of oppression.

I'm not going to tell that whole story here when there's Phil Ball's Morbo to do the job more coherently. But suffice it to say, at least in the minds of their supporters, Real Madrid and Barcelona represent the centralizing illiberal tradition going back to Felipe II (at least) and more liberal decentralizing tendencies respectively. Of course it's really far more complex than that, since like the Yankees and Red Sox, the two sides are both more like one another than anyone else in their league, namely due to their vast resources gained both "legitimately" (via television deals that cement their duopoly) and through a dodgy web of loans that could run afoul of UEFA's much-anticipated Financial Fair Play rules.

Nevertheless, there are some differences between them, and not just because Barca has outperformed Los Merengues of late both domestically and even more so in Europe. The most compelling of these, to my mind, is that Madrid's Ultra Sur remains a cesspit of fascism, whereas Barca banned its own crazies, the Boixos Nois, a group most famously responsible for chucking a pig's head at Luis Figo. While I'm not a fan of exclusivist nationalism (if you're wondering, that's where the whole "Més que un club" line comes from, these are the same folks who'd prefer you to speak English as opposed to the language of Cervantes in Spain's second largest city), it's a damn sight better than fascism.

So while I'm not going to join a penya anytime soon, especially since Barca delights in putting my beloved Arsenal to the sword in the Champions League, not to mention making bedroom eyes towards Captain Cesc, I'd much prefer to see them win today than Mourinho's minions.