English Fans’ Euro 2008 Alternatives Expose Racism

Another English writer has remarked on how much more enjoyable Euro 2008 – and soccer as a whole – is when you are not cheering on your own nation’s team, when you can be more objective about the tournament and the sport. This time it is no mere journalist but, surprisingly, the novelist A. S. Byatt. “I wondered whether Euro 2008 would be exciting or gripping with no national team to support,” she writes in The Guardian. ”It has, in fact, been infinitely more pleasurable, more varied, and more interesting. This has caused me to think about the emotions that go into ’supporting’ a team. … But when you look closely at ’supporting’ it is a weird emotion and bears only a tangential relation to admiration of skills and courage in players.”

But Byatt, when she notes that “I myself tend instinctively to substitute northern European teams if there is no English interest,” also brings up an issue that she does not get around to addressing. Perhaps it simply slipped her mind, or the editors snipped it. But I’m surprised that no one else has addressed or even simply made note of how, in the many columns and press contests devoted to whom the English fan should support in lieu of England, the choices offered or suggested were usually race-based. Rarely was a southern European or even Slavic country chosen or suggested, as if it were presumed natural that the English fan could see his way clear to ”identifying with” only those countries that are racially closest to his own – Holland, of course, seeming to come closest to the ideal choice.

The Value of True Reporting in Sports

In the Manchester Guardian, Duncan Castles offers an example of something that is in short supply in sportswriting – true, post-mortem reporting at the level of individual games. How was Germany, until then lacklustre, able to pull its act together, move into high gear and viciously upset talent-laden Portugal at Euro 2008? One suspected that something unexpected and mysterious, a sinister coup of sorts, had occurred. But the usual commentators and supposed pundits were in no way enlightening about it, as they usually are not, with all their opinion-mongering and makeshift pseudo-expertise. With Castles, true reporting comes to our rescue: He goes behind the scenes and gets the scoop from coup leader Michael Ballack, who speaks about his private meeting with other players, his protracted strategy session with the Joachim Low, the secret rehearsal the day before the game. (No doubt Ballack is going to be one great manager when he retires from play.) Now I would like to hear the Portuguese side of the story. Why did they fail to anticipate German preparedness? Why did Scolari not have any tricks up his sleeve? Or even a thinking leader on the field, good not only with his feet but on his feet? Why would he even go so far as to announce that he did not, and to let the Germans know whom he would be fielding and in what formation? Why was Portugal not better prepared to defend the deadly deadball plays and to counter Schweinsteinger’s threat, which was old news to Scolari? Why was he rather too sportingly embracing Ballack (whom he had repeatedly praised before the game) after this shock defeat of the Portuguese team? And what of Russia’s snuffing out of Holland’s orange fire? How did treacherous Guus Hiddink engineer that? Reuters had coach Marco van Basten denying his team’s loss had anything to do with his deciding to rest his best players the game before (something which, notably, Scolari also did, for the game against Switzerland.) But van Basten was not asked to advance his own theory of what occurred. Yet these are upheavals of historical significance to the sport, so they ought to be thoroughly and intelligently reported. Why have we never found out why, last year, Manchester United played so badly, so strangely heavy-legged, against A. C. Milan in their second game in the Champions League? These are the stories most worth reporting in the football pages, stories that can serve to illuminate the workings of the sport. Yet, because they are also stories that require actual leg work, they mostly go unwritten, their absence camouflaged from readers by the proliferation of the cheap, thumbsuck blather of columnists and bloggers who know little more than the average TV-watching fan.