Blogging some Bollocks

Yeah, I know I haven't really been on the blog, and I know everyone is still talking about the A-League. I reckon it's cool that Sydney have been knocked out, as they deserve in my view, but I haven't been watching the games, and have been content to read the analysis from Mike, Tony, John, Cecilia and Wayne.

I've also gotten a bit involved in the discussions over at the Queensland Roar Supporter's Forum. I'll do a bit of an analysis of that one day perhaps. Right now suffice to say that when it comes to "Why I hate Sydney?" I just don't relate. I don't even think it's funny.

Increasingly I'm thinking that it is hatred that is the irrational demon in our game. For all its glory, beauty and transcendental spectacle, is is just me who can see that football doesn't mean anything at all? That is, it means EVERYTHING of course, but meanwhile it means nothing at all. That's Football's superiority as a religion: unlike other religions, there is no pretense that some universal incontrovertability is underlying it. Unlike with other religions, there is no claim that football is not an earthy institution completely contrived and constantly corrupted by humans. Unlike with other religions, at the end of the day we can have a beer and a laugh with our most bitter enemies. I don't hate Sydney. I'm just bloody pleased that they're out.

For the handful of longer-term followers of this particular blogscape, The West End Terrorists are back for their second season, which is just a snappy two months ending with a finals day between the top four on the 31st March, just in time for the winter soccer to begin. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, the The Terrorists are the indoor soccer team my son is part of, and which I manage.

Last week they began well with a 3:2 win over The Hogz, but unfortunately this week (yesterday - Sat - morning) they were defeated with the same score, by AC Milan. Personally I blame school 'leadership' camp, where after being expected to go to sleep in cabins full of old mates at 8.30pm, the rest of the night is a bitter and exhausting conflict between adults and children, finally resolved by corporal deprivations of enforced standing still and quiet outside for hours. I remember that crap from when I was a kid and I still think it sucks. The kids got back Friday night and needless to say they were all quite stuffed.

Meanwhile the world is full of the beauty of our game and institution. For Brisbane folk, the kick-about continues every Sunday at 4.30pm at South Leagues Club. Last week we got up to 12 a side. The real over-35s competition looms, which will be my first organised competition since I was about 8. But tomorrow, for the sheer hell of it really, I'm also going to a kick about in the morning with the Roar supporters crew, at Tarragindi. Might be an interesting thing. I've learned heaps about watching the game by playing it, and for any football tragic with even a modicum of health and fitness, I think it is compulsory. You've just got to kick one of those balls occasionally.

And there is always, always football games to watch. For the last two Saturdays, cheaper than Fox and more convenient than Suncorp, I've watched games down at the local pitch at El Salvador Soccer Club. 20 or 30 fans, not including the birds, a Corona from the humble little bar run by volunteers, and some wholesome, passionate football. Last week was 'Brazil' vs 'Lebanon'. These were pretty much fully ethnic teams as far as I could tell, screaming at one another out there with their own lingual protocols. Of course I expected the Brazilians to win but they were thrashed by the Mediteraneans. This week was two 'El Salvador' teams, less ethnically based, but with some great individual skill. It was an entertaining 2:2 draw, with a red card and a bit of fire toward the end. Good stuff. You could write volumes about the worse things one could do with a Saturday afternoon.

Football is a religion. It's not just the A-League. It's not for the elite. A part of it will always be a ball of socks on a dusty street in the sun, but it flowers and grows and articulates. It's solace, it's esperanto, it's biophilia, it's love.

Movie Review: Hooligans and Thugs

Movie Review: Hooligans and Thugs - Soccer's most Violent Fan Fights, Umbrella Entertainment

I watched this DVD on the weekend. It was hard to get to the end because it is actually nauseating. Far from being a documentary, it is 58 minutes of non-stop violence, some of it very graphic and horrible, and with no special effects whatsoever. How this manages to be graced with an MA15+ rating is beyond me, as there is no way I would allow a child to watch this in any circumstances, and I am a very liberal parent in that regard.

In the opening minutes of the movie there is a very unconvincing qualifier from narrator Steve Jones (never heard of this tosser but he is described as "the original punk rocker") that 'this is not meant to condone violence but just to document what really happens' or some such. Then it goes on to splice together the violence to hip music and comments like, 'that would have hurt' and 'some people's hooliganism is another's fun'. There is no reports of any game which does not have any violence, and a viewer new to the sport would be more than forgiven for believing that every soccer game ever is coupled with brutal violence.

Meanwhile there are criticisms of the police for being just as thug-like as the thugs. Some of the footage certainly makes this case, but there are no interviews with police or authorities charged with controlling the hooligans and no suggestion of what they are supposed to do about it. So the criticism just comes across as youthful anx.

The video is from an English point of view and is frankly racist, especially toward Turks and South Americans. No interviews with hooligans from these places, just caracatures.

"Banned in the UK" is proudly displayed on the front of the case. Well you could certainly get a hearty freedom of speech debate going over this one. My own view is that banning this movie just gives it credibility. And it's possible - I doubt it but it's possible - that the ugly, one-sided point of view is even intentional, as it punches the audience in the face with the stupidity of the point of view as well as the reality of violence. Put another way, the implicit question, "Do you really want to be this mindless and stupid?" is louder than the explicit glorification of violence.

But the violence is certainly real, and for me the movie did expose Les Murray's 'there's violence in every sport and soccer is just played a lot' argument as just a little naive. The 'conclusion' of the movie is that violence is not going away but is here to stay and will most likely get worse. Mind you this is a conclusion the movie seemed to celebrate rather than mourn, alongside a petulant, 'get used to it' message for the rest of us. But it should raise real questions about the nature of fandom and team-support and provoke us to watch for directions as well as realities.

The A-League is still pretty small, and the worst we get is some thug-like groups shouting abuse at each other. Harmless enough. At the same time Australia does not escape the attention of this movie as some pretty horrible rioting is shown from a youth world cup (Melbourne? Someone help me out here?) in the 80s. There's no meaningful analysis of course so there's no way to know whether this rioting was local chaps or English and European fans. But the point is crowd violence is so ugly, and so bad for our beautiful sport, that there's no harm in being aware of the possibilities as we form our own fan culture.

My own conclusion might sound a bit namby-pamby self-righteous grandma fluffy, but nevertheless here it is. I'm all for a bit of fun, I'm all for the grand larrikin traditions of irony and taking the piss. But at the same time we should be aware of the logical conclusions of abusing teams just because they are the other team, in a very similar vein as we as a society should be aware of the logical conclusion of abusing people just because they are from another country. I daresay the same tribal instincts, evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago (probably in that context for very good reasons of survival), are at work.

Good sportsmanship, on and off the field, is the sign of maturity and true moral strength. Like all good things it is not something we can just switch on, but something that is a journey for each one of us. But it is a journey with high rewards. The biggest reward is our beautiful game's ability to grow and thrive. If we take to the joys of the dark side of our humanity, we can destroy our game. This movie is compelling evidence of that.