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Xenophobia is a sport
Xenophobia can masquerade itself in international sport tournaments...
I wonder if King Harold would have been proud of his countrymen. Me, I was amused, smiling and nodding, and scribbling notes. When someone demanded, "What are you writing, you Malteser?" - I replied, "I'm a sports journalist." At the King Harold, our local pub in Leyton, east London, the pub manager (a chubby Scottish who later said, "Scotland would have won") decorated the pub in full regalia - pendants of the English flag and all the Euro-games trinkets that clutter souvenir shops. That there wasn't a Union Jack in sight (in football Ireland and Scotland are separate countries) is a telling detail.
The game, England versus Portugal, started with high expectations; jugs of Carling passed around, beer slopping, everyone clinking glasses, a cheer for England. The pub bristled with 20-something punters, divided in two groups - the beer-guzzlers, single men flocked near the counter and, across the pool table, the mixed-sex groups who were better dressed and never lost their temper (though tears glazed their eyes in bereavement). The former erupted in roars, but it was their curve-ball snipes I scribbled down.
"Come on Schol-ee." To a Portuguese who stole the ball - "You dirty cunt." To a Seaman mistake - "Seaman is past his sell-by date"; "No, he knew what he was doing." When the Portuguese goalie kicked a perfect low pass - "He can't shoot, he's got a dodgy foot." But the loudest, most outrageous jeers and howls came from a woman, a fact that vindicated The Guardian's story last week that women have caught up with men supporters in football. My mate Julian Green said, "She is vile, isn't she?"
Hearing the supporters' patriotic blindness confirmed what I knew: international football tournaments, like the Olympics, are peacetime sparring among countries. The King Harold, last Monday, like so many other pubs with patriotic names (Prince Albert, Duke of Edinburgh, Prince of Wales), became the outlet for nationalism. It's called sport. And never mind that in any other context the war cries would have been called xenophobic - which they were. But you can read a country's nationalistic feelings by watching football.
Take England. That the archetypal enemies are the Germans is only a reflection of English feelings towards Germany. (That Germany always beat England fuels more anti-German feeling.) Many English believe that the EU is a German conspiracy. "Germans couldn't dominate us in the war; now they are trying to do so through the EU," I recently overheard an educated acquaintance say. In recent times England has dug itself into a nationalistic rut, turning a cold shoulder on the EU, even if that means economic and diplomatic self-annihilation. Two-thirds of the English do not want to join the single currency: the sterling has become the symbol of Great Britain's last vestige of proud defiance.
In this context hooliganism is not random violence, but the violent arm of nationalistic passions. Is it a coincidence that in the past decade hooliganism has spread on par with the spread of xenophobic feelings in Europe? Or that England invented international hooliganism at a time when the English felt helplessly dominated, in the EU and in football?
The euphoria of one's team scoring in football is akin to the euphoria of an orgasm, supporters erupting in a collective orgasm, and that's not about sport. It's about, on the international level, one country screwing another. It was in that spirit that, after Turkey's Galatasaray beat Arsenal in the European games last month, hooligans stormed out of the ground and hurled bricks through Turkish take-aways in London.
At the King Harold, when it became obvious England would loose halfway through the second half, the jeering became louder, the comments more belligerent. "Referees are pussy.without a tail." To a Portuguese foul - "Come on Wise, knock back the cunt." The woman my mate referred to as `vile' had now shouted herself hoarse ("Wake up you cunts"). Prodding England forward, someone said, "Go down deep with it"; the `vile' woman harked back, "Yeah, that's how I like it. Deep." When a Portuguese player lost time, another man beat the air with an outstretched forefinger and shouted, "Now he's taking the piss. Down with him."
This side of international football, an excuse for pissed-up outrage of patriotism bordering on xenophobia, has a distinct face from country to country. In Malta, with no Maltese team to howl for, football is a sparring mime arising from the internal historical division of allegiance, the 150-year-old political struggle that cracked politics into two factions - those who wanted to promote Italian culture (and language) and those for English. Witness that division in international football, those for England versus those for Italy. (But how sad is the country that raises the flags of other countries?)
I have vowed that I won't watch another international football game in a pub. For starters, it ruins the commentary.
© Victor Paul Borg
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