Monday 9 April 2012

Fuck The Olympics

When Trenton Oldfield launched his protest against the elite by disrupting the Boat Race this weekend, he would almost certainly have been aware of the likely repercussions for him personally and the British sporting summer to come. Whatever you may think of Oldfield's sabotage, in disrupting a major establishment jolly, he will have reminded the government of the likely embarassment it could face if protesters decide to use sporting occasions as suitable opportunities to make themselves heard.

Not that they will need much reminding. Make no mistake, the Coalition are leaving nothing to chance. Forget missing out on the World Cup, the Olympics is still the big one. It's the perfect stage for nations of all political ideologies to strut their stuff, to display their cojones to a global audience and, in maintaining a united front of Corinthian valour, sporting nobility and heroic deeds, validate itself in the eyes of its home crowd and the watching world beyond.

Last summer the riots in London effectively gave the greenlight for the biggest mobilisation of our armed forces since 1945. Tens of thousands of troops will provide security for the Olympics. There is no doubt that the Games provide a high profile window for the would-be terrorist but the troops aren't just there for counter-terrorism purposes.

Colin Moynihan, chairman of the British Olympic Association and a former Sports Minister, spoke over the weekend of "idiots" ruining the Games with protests. This is almost certainly a first shot across the bows before the all out attack on civil liberties can properly begin. The Government's vision for 2012 is a fortnight of British triumph being beamed to the world. There will be zero tolerance for voices of dissent.

The BBC, neutered since the election via a frozen license fee, promise an unprecedented digital stream of every event at the games. The Royal Mail, themselves under the threat of further privatisation (job cuts), will be issuing a commemorative stamp for each gold medal that Team GB wins within 48 hours of them standing on the rostrum. This would appear to be not so much a case of capturing the public mood as dictating it.

Many sporting fans feel that politics has no place in sport. Tell that to South Africa, to Jesse Owens, to Tommie Smith. Karl Hudspith, the president of the Oxford University Boat Club, said of Oldfield's protest that "my team went through seven months of hell, this was the culmination of our careers and you took it from us." There's nothing quite like an ideologically minded disruption to ruin a lifetime's professional dedication - just ask the teachers, nurses, firemen about to have their own race disrupted.

So, I'll be avoiding the Olympics this summer. As much as I can. For the press are already keen to play their part in dictating the mood, the Sun counting down the days to this event with each edition. Soon the shops will be awash with Union Jacks and "official" 2012 merchandise, the one eyed mascot Wenlock will be ubiquitous, and the talk down the pubs will be of medal chances, drug tests and dropped batons

This is a government already well practised in deceit and deflection, the illegal NHS reforms swept under the carpet, the Prime Minister's connections to a corrupt and criminal media ignored in favour of convenient rows over taxing hot food. Whilst your Bolts and Ennises seek to wow the crowd, the Coalition will be silently ushering in the next phase of dismantling the few remaining public institutions for private profiteering.

With that in mind, I'll be hoping for a summer of British sporting failings, for each gold medal won will be an excuse for Cameron and the gang to bask in the reflected golden glory of athletic valour.

The Olympic flame initially symbolised the theft of fire from Zeus by Prometheus, a triumph for human inventiveness and pluck in defiance of overwhelming odds and seemingly unopposable forces. It's modern day descendant will not have been alone in its journey from Beijing. It will have been accompanied with a Beijing-inspired distaste for dissent, for oppostion, for the human spirit.

Saturday 7 January 2012

How Kenny Got It Wrong

Last night Liverpool became the first team to make it into the 4th round of the FA Cup by beating Oldham Athletic 5-1 but there will be surely little celebrating amongst the club’s players and management this morning. The alleged racist abuse by Liverpool supporters of Oldham player Tom Adeyemi means that the club will have to take a long hard look at itself and, in particular, its conduct in the aftermath of the Luis Suarez affair.

The game was Luis Suarez’s second of an eight match ban imposed upon him after being found guilty of using racist language against Manchester United defender Patrice Evra in a match earlier this season. Despite compelling evidence and a 115-page legal document outlining the reasons the FA felt confident in imposing such a sanction, Liverpool continued to complain that their player was a scapegoat.

Shortly after the original verdict was handed down, Liverpool’s players made a misguided show of unity by wearing t-shirts depicting their apparently martyred colleague’s face in the warm-up at Wigan Athletic. These t-shirts have become quite a sensation on Merseyside and, initial witness accounts report, were prevalent in the section of Anfield that Adeyemi was abused by last night.

The end result is that a once great football club now finds its reputation absolutely ruined this morning. Their manager, Kenny Dalglish, a man whose compelling dignity and compassion in the months and years after Hillsborough elevated him to an almost godlike status in the city, now finds himself besieged within a fortress partly of his own making.

The club’s refusal to accept the independent commission’s report into the Suarez affair and Dalglish’s apparent approval of his players wearing what, for some people, amounted to t-shirts depicting the image of a proven racist cannot wholly be responsible for the idiotic behaviour of a small number of supporters last night. But there can be no doubting that, for many people, by refusing to accept the punishment quietly, by publicly questioning the commission’s judgements, that the club has done itself a massive disservice.

The commission made it quite clear that they did not believe Luis Suarez to be a racist. By punishing the player with an eight-match ban, they effectively endorsed that opinion, it is a mistake rather than a prejudice, let us move on. Liverpool’s misjudged reaction to the commission’s findings mean that Suarez is now wrongly vilified by some as a racist, and furthermore, means that some scumbags now feel they can identify with this player as someone they wrongly believe to share their hateful views.

The FA Cup will come around again. Banning Liverpool from this season’s competition as punishment won’t mean anything. A multi-million pound business empire will comfortably survive such an arbitrary sanction. Liverpool’s own punishment should be the uncomfortable silence one hopes Dalglish et al find themselves sat in this morning. The efforts of several Liverpool players to comfort Adeyemi last night should be applauded, but their own conduct helped inflame this situation in the first place.

The reputation of Liverpool’s supporters has withstood many dark hours in the last thirty years. Many of them will have understood at some level that the chanting of Suarez’s name will have been a provocative gesture. On internet message boards this morning, there is still a great deal of denial and conspiracy theorising going on, a feeling that the club and its supporters are themselves the victim.

The only way forward now is for the players and manager to publicly condemn, not via some PR-managed press release, the abhorrent nature of racist behaviour, racist language, and racism full stop. Furthermore, they should also apologise for their reaction to the commission’s findings and draw a line under the matter. If the FA fine or punish the club in any way, it will only add fuel to the fire. The Suarez situation has been handled, to my mind, perfectly. The player made a mistake and has, admittedly belatedly, apologised.

In the last twenty years we have allowed ourselves to be seduced by the image that football, with its safe family-friendly stadia, has cured itself of it’s former ills. The Premiership era of multi-cultural football teams with worldwide support was kindly supposed to have kicked racism, if not quite out of football altogether, then at least into some small corner where it could not quite be seen or heard. Compared to other countries, particularly those in eastern Europe, we have come an especially long way. Campaigns such as Let’s Kick Racism out of Football have been seen to have had a massive positive effect. The days when a Liverpool legend such as John Barnes would be pelted with bananas seemed to have been banished forever.

I know many Liverpool fans. Not one of them, to my knowledge, is racist. I imagine them to be entirely representative of the vast majority of the club’s supporters. It’s important that this isn’t seen as a one-club issue. The Suarez incident was a situation the FA could not be seen to get wrong, it is tempting for some Liverpool fans to see that his guilty verdict was inevitable, but it’s the wrong reaction. If the legal investigation was flawed, we’d have heard about it by now, the club’s refusal to appeal against the 115-page findings would certainly seem to say as much.

England captain John Terry will soon be facing criminal proceedings for alleged racist outbursts. The powers of this particular inquiry far exceed those of the FA. How Chelsea, and their supporters, conduct themselves during this investigation will be of great significance to the ongoing rehabilitation of football’s reputation. How all of us, as individuals, as fans, conduct ourselves in future, will be of greater significance still.