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.

What’s Wrong With Showboating?

In a live report in the Manchester Guardian, the writer condemns a scissor-kick cross from Quaresma in Euro 2008 as ‘an unecessary bit of skill.’ More casual fans tend to love showiness in an athlete, drawn as they are to the spectacle of the sport; but the most hardcore fans can be hostile to it. They perceive a threat in it: although spectacle helps any sport succeed, too much of it and the sport can die, turning into sheer spectacle, something akin to professional wrestling or the Harlem Globetrotters.

Intelligence in Sports Writing

Even in sports writing you can sometimes denote a sign of intelligence. Most English writers assigned to cover the Portugal-Switzerland game in the first round of Euro ‘08 just phoned it in, making no attempt to sound interested. How do you make a good story out of a game that doesn’t mean much to either team? Henry Winter, the writer for the London Telegraph, found a truly smart way: he wrote it as a study of how Scolari, the new Chelsea manager, operates. It created a whole new perspective on the game and was fun to read.