Italy, Over and Out

June 25, 2010 by Layla Leave a Comment

In many respects, yesterday’s result should not have been a surprise.

When the competition opened, I predicted that Italy would most likely flunk out a la France 2002.

And it’s not only pessimism that guides this view: having watched almost every Italian game since 1981 I have noticed a glitch: confidence.

Or overconfidence, if you will.

Regardless of the manager or players, the game invariably progresses as follows: Italy plays hard and fast, Italy scores, then Italy becomes so smug that it begins to make silly mistakes.

Whether this results in an undue victory, a mundane draw or an embarrassing loss is no longer dependent on Italian skill; rather it is in the hands of the opponent.

And sadly, last night was a deadening embarrassment.

Filed under Africa, Europe, Frivolities & Miscellaeny, Pop culture, Sports Tagged with , , , ,

Voice of Hope (1976-2010)

May 26, 2010 by Layla Leave a Comment

Tell me this man does not have a divinely beautiful voice:

And then tell me it is not a tragedy that words cannot convey that he has died of acute meningitis, aged just 34, a mere two weeks before he was due to open the World Cup.

South African Siphiwo Ntshebe had been chosen by President Mandela to perform at the opening ceremony with his anthem Hope.

The track features President Mandela speaking for the first time on a track, intoning: “The generosity of the human spirit can overcome all adversity. ‘Through compassion and caring we can create hope…. We can create hope.”

Ntshebe was a substantial example of the power of hope: emerging from abject poverty on the outskirts of Port Elizabeth, he ultimately won a place at the Royal College of Music in London, where he studied from 2004 to 2006.

Having performed in front of Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, his debut album and single are due to be released with Sony Epic next month.

His demise comes too soon. Far too soon.

Filed under Africa, Pop culture, Sports Tagged with , , , ,

Football Comes Home: Palestine vs. Jordan

October 26, 2008 by Layla Leave a Comment

It was always going to be a cause for celebration, as Palestine played its first match on home ground at the newly built Faysal Husseini stadium in Al Ram, in the West Bank.

To date, the Palestinian side has been compelled to conduct home games in a plethora of countries, including Jordan and Qatar.

While Palestine has been a FIFA member since 1998, it has still lacked the vital recognition that would enable it to play in its true home.

As vast crowds of fans thronged the large screens outside the stadium, the lucky 6,000 who had tickets adorned the venue in red, green, black, and white, as they cheered beneath the static gaze of Yasser Arafat, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas.

Perhaps it was inevitable that the person to finally bring football home is Jibril Rajoub, chief of the Palestinian Authority’s feared preventive security agency, tough guy extraordinaire, and current head of the Palestinian football federation.

For Rajoub, the match sends a clear message:

This match is a significant message to the world that the Israeli occupation, the closures and the difficult living conditions have not defeated the determination of the Palestinian people who keep smiling and believe in a better future.

As verses from the works of the late poet Mahmoud Darwish boomed out of the loudspeakers, and players of Palestinian origin on the Jordanian team knelt and kissed the artificial turf, the match gained a potent significance.

Ultimately, the match ended on a 1-1 draw; but for Palestinians, it is indubitably a win-win evening.

Filed under Conflict Zones, Israel, Jordan, Middle East, Palestine, Sports Tagged with , , ,

Sporting for Peace

August 22, 2008 by Layla 2 Comments

In these sporty times, the following cockle-warming tale comprises a wonderful blend of footie, fusion, and faith, as a joint Israeli-Palestinian team is in Australia to compete in an international Australian Rules football tournament.

The squad features 13 Israelis and 13 Palestinians and is the culmination of a joint effort between the AFL, Israel’s Peres Center for Peaceand Palestine’s Al-Quds Association for Democracy and Dialogue.

The team conducted a sports clinic in Sydney for 160 Muslim, Jewish, Aboriginal and Christian youth yesterday, and will be officially welcomed today by the governor of New South Wales, Marie Bashir.

Next, they will fly to Melbourne to play next week against Britain, Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

While many of the players had never heard of Australia’s indigenous sport, let alone played it, before January, they have persevered through challenges such as snow and checkpoint closures.

A Palestinian player was even forced to drop out following death threats because he was suspected of collaborating with Israelis.

Despite these tribulations, Israeli player, Kevin Nafte, said the team pushed on through the problems.

When terrorists were firing rockets into Sderot and the IDF was operating in Gaza, an emotional rage transpired into a motivational force. And after the two abducted soldiers were returned to Israel in coffins, everyone just kept on playing football with a renewed enthusiasm and spirit.

Sccording to the Peres Center’s director of sport, Gal Peleg, getting the team together, even for training, was a substantial challenge:

It wasn’t just a bit hard, it was extremely hard. We needed to overcome a lot of obstacles and barriers along the way. Starting from learning a new game, a hard game, and we don’t have any AFL ovals in Israel or Palestine so we needed to play on soccer fields. Some of the players need to travel three to four hours for every training session. Then they have to get a visa and permits for every training session, go through checkpoints, and they all are volunteering for this and taking time out of work or study just to be here.

Despite efforts to remain united in an environment in which conflict is all pervasive, Peleg observes that the fraught circumstances often proved insurmountable:

Unfortunately, we had some players – brilliant players – on the team, but their neighbourhood and friends were against the project of collaborating with the ‘enemy’, and that was a terrible shame. These were some of the obstacles we’ve had to overcome.

The Third International Cup is the sport’s equivalent of soccer’s World Cup.

Eighteen teams, including Canada and the United States, are competing in Melbourne between Aug. 27 and Sept. 7.

Australian Rules football is a blend of Gaelic football and rugby. There are three posts at each end of a giant oval and each team has 18 players.

[Via: The Canberra Times and JTA; image via: Peres Center for Peace]

Filed under Conflict Zones, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, Sports Tagged with , , , ,

The Bikini Olympics 2008

August 13, 2008 by Layla 3 Comments

As much as criticism has mounted in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, to be fair, it has been mostly directed at China’s deplorable human rights record, rather than the esteemed sporting affair.

However, for the Islamic lecturer and Saudi author, Sheikh Muhammad Al-Munajid, the Olympics are less about testing humankind’s endurance, than staging an event in which “no exposure of women’s private parts on a global scale could make Satan happier”.

The well-known Al-Munajid is a frequent feature on Saudi TV channels and has previously worked in Washington, D.C. at the Saudi Embassy Islamic Affairs Department, before he was stripped of his diplomatic credentials.

Al-Munajid is no novice when it comes to the call for sports-related fatwas: in a January 2005 interview, he said that soccer games “reveal nakedness,” adding that women must not exercise in public because they wear “tight fitting, short” outfits to do so, and also that women are forbidden from participating in the Olympics.

(Is it only me who thinks of Persepolis at this point?!)

 

Al-Munajid also discussed, in a July 2007 interview, how Western “beasts” use public toilets and wear colored underwear “to conceal all that filth.”

Truly, he seems a delectable gentleman and should I ever hold a dinner party, I would indubitably place his seating card next to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

I digress, however; in an interview conducted by Al-Majd TV on 10 August, 2008, Al-Munajid was highly critical of the Beijing Olympics, which he called the “bikini Olympics,” referring to them as “satanic.”

Below are a few snippets from his recent diatribe; to view the clip, click here:

Muhammad Al-Munajid: “How come modern sports – especially women’s sports – involve the exposure of private parts? It is well known that the Olympics – both in the past and the upcoming games… the world’s worst display of women’s clothing is the women’s Olympics. No exposure of women’s private parts on a global scale could make Satan happier than Olympic games that include women’s sports.”
  
Interviewer: “And in a scandalous manner…”
  
Muhammad Al-Munajid: “Yes. It is an enormous Satanic issue. Many people nowadays watch sports rather than participate in them.”
  
Interviewer: “And this is a problem…”
  
Muhammad Al-Munajid: “If only they would run or move their bodies a little… All they do is sit and watch the sports channels. Some fathers come to me and ask if it is permitted to hook up just to the sports channels. It is for the kids, they say. There is pressure. Football leads to temptation. It is not an innocent sport. 

[...]
  
“Wrestling involves the exposure of women’s private parts. Even the promotion of the competitions is done by scantily clad women. This is done at the beginning of the match, in the middle, and at the end, or so I hear… the matches are promoted by half-naked women.
  
[...]
  
“Beijing or not… I call it Bikini, anyway… because they are likely to display women in the worst possible way in these ‘Bikini’ Olympic games.
  
[...]
  
“What women wear in the Olympic games are among the worst clothes possible. The inventions of Satan, with regard to the exposure of the body in gymnastics, in swimming, in whatever, in tennis… Women have never gotten naked for sports like they do in the Olympics. It is aired to billions of people worldwide. The problem is not just with the spectators who are present. The whole thing is aired on TV…”
  
Interviewer: “And maybe the men’s clothing is more modest than the women’s…”
  
Muhammad Al-Munajid: “There’s no ‘maybe’ about it. It is definite.”

I love the disclaiming ”or so I hear”, while on a completely different tangent, the Interviewer seems oblivious to the concept of objectivity and clearly sees his role as an opportunity to stoke the fervid Al-Munajid into a frenzy.

As for Al-Munajid’s claim that the men’s outfits are more modest than the women, I have but two words from yesteryear that any woman raised in the 1990s will comprehend: Linford Christie.

Boy, was that a rude awakening to the male form…

[Image: Getty Images, Polish Volleyball Team]

Filed under Asia, Frivolities & Miscellaeny, Religion, Sports Tagged with , , ,

The Name of the Games? Blinkership and Censorship

August 7, 2008 by Layla Leave a Comment

When two British campaigners arrested in Beijing after staging a Free Tibet protest outside the Olympic Stadium touched down in Britain today, a debate began to rage through the British media.

The crux of the moral tussle has been thus: would such protests – which the Britons have avowed would be the first of many – draw the roving eye of the world’s media towards crucial issues that would otherwise pass unnoticed? Or are the demonstrations inappropriate and ruinous during an event that unites the world in sporting camaraderie?

Frankly, I find this debate utterly perplexing: one glance at China’s burgeoning record of human rights violations brings beads of horror to ones forehead and to venture that such antics should be swept aside – and to all intents and purposes a blind eye turned – in the name of sport is surely madness.

The boycott of sporting events is by no means a new phenomena: in 1972 the chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on Apartheid stated that the most effective action against South Africa’s discriminatory racial policies had been the world-wide sports boycott, while more recently in 2007 the development agency Caritas backed the call by 42 Australian Catholic bishops for Cricket Australia to cancel their tour of Zimbabwe.

The actions of Iain Thom, 24, who unfurled a banner reading “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet” after climbing a 120ft pylon, and Lucy Fairbrother, 23, who co-ordinated the protest on the ground, can be viewed as much needed reminders that the frivolities mask a darker side of China.

Greeted by cheering supporters at London City Airport after they were deported from China, Fairbrother, a graduate of Bristol University, remained unbowed after their arrest and deportation by Chinese police:

We are only a very small part of this campaign and the ongoing struggle. We will carry on fighting and there will be more protests during the Olympic Games. Despite what we have done the situation in Tibet is still dire. One of the reasons that we were there was that Tibetans couldn’t be there in our place. They were refused visas and if anyone in Tibet dared to protest, they would certainly be treated much more harshly and would face torture and imprisonment. [Source]

Thom, from Edinburgh, echoed his cohort’s sentiments:

We knew there were risks involved but the risks were nothing compared to the suffering Tibetans have endured. Security was tight but we walked up to the pole – and everything was done in a straightforward manner. We were arrested for disturbing public order and were later escorted to the airport. We wanted to make a call to world leaders and the Chinese government for meaningful change – this is a matter of basic human rights. It was definitely all worth it but expect there to be more. The job is not done but we feel like we have achieved something.

Fairbrother and Thom were arrested yesterday along with Tirian Mink, 32, from Portland, Oregon, and Phill Bartell, 34, from New Jersey, who unfurled a banner from a second pylon.

The protest conducted by the foursome has proved momentarily successful and that peaceful demonstrations can often be as attention grabbing as the more violent ones that fill the news.

Far from condemning such activists, admiration is in order – although it remains to be seen for how long the protests shall remain peaceful, both on the side of the Chinese authorities and the protesters.

Filed under Asia, Censorship, Sports Tagged with , ,

Valediction in Vienna

June 21, 2008 by Layla Leave a Comment

In the light of the events of last night’s thumping loss on penalties, I find myself in a post-match stupor, quite unable to laud the dramatic final moments for the simple reason that I believe the closing seconds of extra time to have been less prodigious, and more farcical.

As Bilić remonstrated with the Italian referee, Roberto Rosetti, his pleas fell on unheeding ears as the official unabashedly awarded the dubious goal to Turkey and sealed the fate of perhaps the strongest team in the tournament.

In the midst of the jubilation surrounding Klasnić‘s last minute goal, the match truly seemed over – a match that had otherwise seemed lack-lustre and half-cut, as players repeatedly crashed to the ground and balls flew wide of the mark.

By some fluke however, Şentürk tippled the game into penalties, Croatia lost their nerve, and the rest is sporting history.

Admittedly, I would not be too morose just yet – my team number one, Italy, are still in with a chance – had the Croatian loss not been lamentable on so many counts.

Primarily, they were one of the strongest teams in the tournament thus far and, dare I write it, were destined to prove a worthy match for Italy.

Certainly, the Azzurri played with outstanding gusto against France and rendered it one of the most tantalising and thrilling matches of the competition, but for enduring fervor, motivation, and power on the field, the accolade must go to Croatia.

Secondly, and perhaps controversially, Turkey have failed to impress with any level of panache and should they win, it would be a win akin to that secured by Greece in 2004 – a miraculous feat to be celebrated, but not repeated.

I am positive that many of you reading this will disagree and the words “grapes” and “sour” shall be circulated in greater abundance than at an international vinegar convention.

Nevertheless, I remain stoic: the better team lost – but to date, it is this very unpredictability that is rendering the competition utterly riveting.

Filed under Europe, Frivolities & Miscellaeny, Sports Tagged with , , , ,

The Wörthersee Win

June 12, 2008 by Layla 5 Comments

Tonight, at the Wörthersee Stadium in Klagenfurt, a match unlike any other was charted and the victors wholly deserving of the title, ‘Heroes of Hrvatska’.

As the Croatian team and their dynamic manager, Slaven Bilić, celebrate their win, the tournament surely has been thrown wide open.

For a lack of any other word, Euro 2008 has been completely bonkers and it is becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain who will win.

Italy, the current World Cup holders, went down in flames to the Netherlands in a 3-0 defeat.

Greece, current European Cup holders, lost 0-2 to Sweden in an insipid display of ball-kicking.

Turkey defied all expectations last night and romped home with a 2-1 victory over Switzerland.

But by far the most astounding, skilled, and undeserving of such surprise at said virtues, is the Croatian side.

I will concede, their opening game against Austria amused me not; indeed, as the newly coiffed players-in-checks indulged in a spot of am-dram, I found myself worrying that they had attended the Italian Summer School of Football Drama and Posturing.

As they glided around the pitch like love-sick couples on a Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park, I yanked at my hair in frustration over the demise of perhaps the last, true team of real men playing the beautiful game.

Tonight, however, I see that it was merely a clever disguise behind which to enter the tournament under the radar, before casting off their mimsy cloak and whomping the Germans with goals so fast the ball was but a blur and Ballack doubtless strained his neck perpetually wondering from whence the next strike would come.

As a team, Croatia has long impressed me by its power; the word ‘formidable’ was surely invented to describe their playing style and presence on the pitch.

While veteran teams such as Italy, Portugal, and on a wider level Brazil and Argentina exude a superstar allure, Croatia is all about winning. And winning well, with as little shirt-tugging, amateur dramatics, histrionics, and simpering as possible.

Although, it must be said that in the final three minutes of tonight’s tussle with Germany, Belgian referee, Frank De Bleeckere, administered more bookings than a receptionist at Disneyland in high season.

Nevertheless, while Italy is, and always will be, my number one team – my mother would probably disown me if I even brushed an England shirt – Croatia will equally always gain my utmost admiration.

They bring true, hard passion into the game and in my view are the most deserving winners so far.

And so it is: naprijed Hrvatska!

Filed under Culture, Europe, Sports Tagged with , , ,

Less Forza, More Farce

June 9, 2008 by Layla 4 Comments

I am dumbfounded. 3-0.

How. Could. This. Happen.

For once, I am lost for words, and henceforth shall tear up with humiliation and frustration at the mere sight of anything orange or Dutch.

So that’s Edam and Tropicana off this week’s shopping list.

On a spirit-lifting note, check out the following – pure positivity.

All that is missing from the sport section is “Dutch Side Resign From Tournament Following Persistent Bout of Explosive Diarrhoea” and “Italy Takes Home European Cup.”

For now, however, I shall bury my woes and look forward to this:

[Google Good News via: andfaraway and Boing Boing] 

Filed under Culture, Europe, Sports Tagged with ,