The problem with English Soccer

Written By: - Date published: 7:38 am, July 16th, 2021 - 13 comments
Categories: Pacific, racism, rugby league, uk politics - Tags:

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that Soccer is a beautiful game.  I played it for a few decades until my body insisted that it was no longer up to the task.  When played well it is a beautiful thing to behold.

I enjoy patriotism.

I also enjoy league.  It is more direct, more reliant on power and pace and skill.  And more working class.

Last weekend I rewatched again the 2017 test between the Kiwi League team and the Tongan team.

The Kiwis were full of professionals but fewer than before because a few of the Tongan warriors decided to represent their country, and sacrificed a significant amount of money to do so.

The lead up was mesmirising.  Sipi Tau clashed with Haka.  The sense of tradition was palpable.

And fans of both sides sat side by side in the stadium and enjoyed a passionate game of leage.

Here is the game.  Set aside two and a half hours and celebrate dual patriotism.

Celebrate also that our Kiwi community and our Tongan community managed to pack out a stadium cheek to cheek and still were able to walk out of the stadium at the end of the game with no issues.  Approximately half of them were estatic, the other half were rather despondent.  But there were no instances of social disorder.  Instead there was admiration that a tiny nation with maybe 200,000 citizens managed to out perform another tiny nation also full of warrior kings but with 25 times as many people.

How does this compare to what happened recently in England?

The European World Cup final is now history.  The short version about the final is that England dominated the first half but then faded and Italy made a come back.  Then during the penalty shoot out Marcus Rashford hit the wrong side of the post, and Jadon Sancho and 19 year old Bukayo Saka had their shots saved by the exceptional Italian keeper Gianluigi Donnarumma.

Some English soccer supporters noticed that the players who missed the penalties in the pressure cooker finish were all black and went to town on it.  The national side taking the knee was not enough and probably upset them.  The fact that for the first time in 50 years the team was on the brink of immortality was not enough.  Their fans chose to convert the event into a failure based on the skin colour of some of the country’s best players.

Owen Jones in the Guardian has a particularly class view of what has happened:

Instead of a trophy, England’s national team have inherited something far more precious: the mantle of the official opposition.

For most of the nation’s under-40s – the generations known as millennials and zoomers – Tory Britain represents a double-pronged onslaught on their economic security and deeply held social values. When Marcus Rashford – a “23-year-old black man from Withington and Wythenshawe”, in his own words – shamed the government into feeding hundreds of thousands of children, he was leading a rebellion on behalf of that most voiceless demographic, the young working class. Since 2010, when the Conservatives came to power with the help of the Liberal Democrats, 800,000 children in working households have been driven below the breadline; however momentarily, they were handed one of the nation’s loudest megaphones. When the England team took the knee, they affirmed the value of the lives of Black people in a nation whose government has cynically fanned racism for electoral ends, up to and including constructing a hostile environment that deported Windrush-generation Britons from their own country.

Boris Johnson and his acolytes refused to condemn the booing of their own national team for a very simple reason – they knew that those baying ghouls represented a crucial pillar of their support base that they did not want to alienate. When Conservative ministers then had the front to condemn the racism directed at England’s players, which they helped legitimise, it fell to England centre-back Tyrone Mings to point out the hypocrisy. “You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’,” he tweeted, “& then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens.”

That this is England’s most outspoken national team is no freakish accident. Hailing from across the nation – from south Manchester to Bath to Neasden – they are unmistakable products of their generation. Young people have for some time now been revolting against an ancien regime in Westminster that is rigged against their living standards and their progressive values; and however flush these players’ bank accounts are, they cannot escape where they came from.

Aotearoa New Zealand is different.  We choose to celebrate our diversity and when a team from a tiny nation stand up and take it to one of the best teams in the world we do not get violent.  We secretly cheer the underdog on, even though our preferred team may not have succeeded.

England has a lot to learn from us.

13 comments on “The problem with English Soccer ”

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  1. Enough is Enough 1
    16 July 2021 at 7:56 am

    "England has a lot to learn from us"

    Really? You honestly think that?

    As Taika Waititi said quite eloquently "New Zealand is a racist as fuck".

    For the most part the English football team united England, which today is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. London is an international city in every sense.

    Don't think the comments of a small minority of online boofheads, represents England, because it doesn't.

    • Drowsy M. Kram 1.1
      16 July 2021 at 11:13 am

      Taika Waititi said bluntly (of NZ): "…it's racist as fuck."

      Unknown Mortal Orchestra & Taika Waititi on New Zealand culture [5 April 2018]

      I think I’ve got quite an idealised vision of New Zealand as like Australia without the racism and the blokeish sense of humour…

      Taika Waititi: Nah, it’s racist as fuck. I mean, I think New Zealand is the best place on the planet, but it’s a racist place. People just flat-out refuse to pronounce Maori names properly. There’s still profiling when it comes to Polynesians. It’s not even a colour thing – like, ‘Oh, there’s a black person.’ It’s, ‘If you’re Poly then you’re getting profiled.’

      'We' don't know how lucky ‘we‘ are…

      Racism by country
      Various forms of racism are practiced in most countries on Earth. In individual countries, the forms of racism which are practiced may be motivated by historic, cultural, religious, economic or demographic reasons. Wars created sentiments of ultra-nationalism, ethnic pride and racism.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_by_country

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Convention_on_the_Elimination_of_All_Forms_of_Racial_Discrimination

    • Unicus 1.2
      16 July 2021 at 8:03 pm

      Give me a break. Waititi. is a grade A. racist nutter

      For all his self aggrandisement he has as much credibility among Maori as Boris Johnsons did. with his sad fan imitation at the EC semi final

  3. Sanctuary 3
    16 July 2021 at 8:24 am

    "…Aotearoa New Zealand is different. We choose to celebrate our diversity…

    I would question this. Yes, we are more diverse – but it seems to me that it is a bi-cultural Maori/Pakeha diversity (plus invited guests from the Pacific Islands, whose population sizes are unlikely to upset the apple cart, and countries populated by our cultural in group – a polite way of saying “white people”).

    At least some of the utterly indifferent and unsympathetic reaction from the vast bulk of the population to recent migrants from India pleading for family reunification is racist. The fact the government just last week unilaterally cancelled 50,000 visa applications, with a huge impact on Indians who had arranged marriages, occurred with barely a murmur is surely evidence of broad public support for a harsh line on migrants.

    There was/is huge public disgruntlement at the numbers of Chinese migrants. Unlike the poor old Indians though that was a debate that was kept a lid on because Chinese are seen as having lots of the filthy lucre. Anyone bringing it up was shouted down as racist by both liberals (because they secretly loved the house price inflation and desperately want to be seen as liberal, anti-nationalist and globalist) and the right (because they are easily corruptable fuckers who just want a chance for their turn to stick their snouts into the CCP's money trough).

    It is at least a viable claim to say that Labour's Maori caucus is now calling the shots on immigration and they are not interested in mass migration to NZ. Our border settings are now functionally racist and they've been largely set by the Maori half of the bi-cultural relationship, with the connivance of a large majority of the Ngati Pakeha.

    • GreenBus 3.1
      16 July 2021 at 11:48 am

      Sanctuary, surely our closed border and immigration reductions are due to Covid19 control measures, not racist policy by Labours Maori caucus. Keep the borders closed is supported by the great majority, racist and non-racist.

  4. Incognito 4
    16 July 2021 at 11:05 am

    I’d say that Aotearoa-New Zealand is struggling hard with its cultural diversity and there’s a long road ahead that will never end, actually. There are very few thinkers who can a do provide a comprehensive and cohesive framework for the future of this nation. In fact, right now I can only think of one, but I’m sure there are more who unfortunately don’t manage to cut through the noise and rise to the surface of my limited and narrow field of view.

  5. Craig Haggis 5
    16 July 2021 at 4:04 pm

    I was enormously relieved when England lost.

    Even a penalty shoot out win would have been seen as the greatest victory ever. The arrogance of the media and their mostly idiotic support would be ramped up to 11. The chant Two World Wars and One World Cup would have been revised. The other nations of the UK would have been ridiculed and mocked. Justice prevailed.

    • Sanctuary 5.1
      16 July 2021 at 4:19 pm

      Actually the English soccer team is becoming the official opposition in the UK, given how Tory lite Kier Starmer is.

  6. Jimmy Mcnulty 6
    16 July 2021 at 6:39 pm

    The problem was diversity. After kneeling to black Marxism, and getting booed, Southgate picked three penalty takers simply because they were black. He wanted the headlines “black men win cup!”. But they all took terrible, weak penalties, which were easily saved (or missed an open goal). Italy had only Italian players, no immigrants, a true national spirit & a great team—not one obsessed with schoolgirl politics of “diversity”. Now white English fans have to be betrayed & shamed because of this failure of a left wing manager, being accused of being “racists” for seeing through the charade. Left wing trolls post false “racist” abuse towards the failures. The rest of the “abusive” comments come from abroad (Pakistan, Egypt, India mostly). It’s a disgrace but typical of today’s assault upon the indigenous English.

    • The Al1en 6.1
      16 July 2021 at 9:25 pm

      You read like a brain injured, knuckle dragging little Englander.

      You don't speak for me, Millwall wannabee. The only ‘new’ shame we have is that which the likes of you have bought upon us. The only assault on indigenous English and our values is coming from the uneducated mob within.

      • Morrissey 6.1.1
        17 July 2021 at 9:52 am

        Jimmy McNulty sounds just like Murray Deaker used to when he polluted the airwaves for a generation.

  7. RP Mcmurphy 7
    16 July 2021 at 8:44 pm

    its just a game. nothing more. it provides just another temporary distraction for infantilised idiots. calling it th ebeautiful game is just echoing the promoters who would sloganise anything for a buck.