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In what must be the most one-sided single-goal victory I have ever seen - certainly at international level - Spain ended its 24-year wait for a major football trophy this evening by defeating Germany in the final of Euro 2008.

But you don’t come to MR to read the sports news.  However, for other matters of interest ...

It is a decade now since football became the sport of choice for chic liberal politicos.  What drew them to it, of course, was its emergence as a big-money glamour-game full of multicultural heroes for the masses.  Political opportunism meets social engineering in boots.

But Euro 2008 did not treat the MultiCult kindly.  The four semi-finalists were conspicuously white-majority teams - all white in the case of Germany and Russia, while Turkey and Spain fielded one black player apiece each time I saw them.  It’s a world away from the heady days of les Blues, when politicians all over Europe were convincing themselves that the (on-field) exploits of non-white footballers would teach the recalcitrant natives to love diversity.

Long may it remain so.

A couple of side issues ...

I found the genuflection to anti-racism before each match, with the team captains reading-out preachy little statements to the crowd about how hard we must all work to “kick racism out”, utterly, excruciatingly embarrassing.  It was surely politically clumsy, though, and must have done far more harm than good to the elites’ Sacred Cause.  Even football fans - in some cases, especially football fans - are capable of finding this nonsense manipulative and sinister.

Last point ... as an Englishman forced by the fathomless mediocrity of our very multicultural national team to watch the competition as a neutral, I was cheered to see a few commenters actually grateful that they did not have to witness of all those frightful, beery and jingoistic expressions of national passion by shirtless benefit claimants from Scunthorpe.  Apparently, the rest of Europe’s peoples voice their jingoism in ways far more picturesque and acceptable to liberal sensibilities.  Which is proof, if ever proof were needed, that self-hatred is the most curious kind of racism.

Five years ago Sepp Blatter, president of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) ...

... proposed limiting the number of foreign players at the top level of club football in Europe.

No, he wasn’t trying to finesse his way into the Madrid starting line-up.  He was, in his patrician way, concerned that Europe’s national teams did not have a sufficient pool of top-flight talent from which to draw.  Clubs had no incentive to gamble on identifying and nurturing home-grown talent when Africa and South America can and do produce the finished article in ample quantity and at low cost.  The result has been that some clubs such as Chelsea and Arsenal regularly field sides with only one or two players eligible to play for England - and it’s the same all across the European game, particularly in Spain.  England and Spain, it’s well understood, are serial low-achievers in the two big international competitions.

Blatter lost the argument.  He was out of step with the cool, cool image of the beautiful, anti-national game.  So cosmopolitan, so wildly popular with the white working-class male, it was just the ticket for a progressive, anti-racist political leader ...

... in search of street cred.

Besides, EU employment law was clear.  Blatter could not legally limit the clubs to a quota of non-EU players.

But that was then, and this is now.  Blatter claims to have won over the EU to his position:-

FIFA president Sepp Blatter is working with the European Union on plans to reduce the number of overseas players dominating teams in leagues across Europe.  Speaking to reporters in the Malaysian capital, where he is attending a regional award ceremony, Blatter said it was time for a change in Europe.

“The European Union does not cover this issue in its constitution at the moment but sport will be mentioned for the first time when they change their laws in December,” Blatter said.  “There are a number of processes coming together to stop the overwhelming presence of non-national players in club leagues.”

Blatter added that FIFA would like to set a limit of five foreigners in any starting line-up with the other six berths comprising players eligible to be selected for the national team of the country where the league was based.

Regarding the former difficulty of the free movement of professional footballers, he now says:-

The European Union has implemented the free circulation of workers, but football players are not employees in the conventional sense of the term. You need 11 of them on the pitch, and it is not at all the same thing as being an employee in a given company.

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Details of the murder of former England medium-fast bowler and Pakistani cricket coach Bob Woolmer, in his hotel room in Jamaica on 18th March, continue to appear in the international press.  Since there are no reports at this stage of money or valuables missing from Woolmer’s possessions, the killer or killers seem unlikely to have come from Jamaica’s hyper-active criminal class.  The speculation, therefore, is firmly centred on two possibilities:-

1) Woolmer was murdered because he was about to blow the lid on the insanely profitable phenomen of match-fixing in the game, possibly in a book he was working on.

2) Woolmer was murdered by a fanatical Pakistan supporter who did not take too kindly to the team, ranked third among playing nations, exiting the World Cup so early.

Not many people think it is the second possibility.  But if it is the first, it will have profound ramifications for the future of the international game.

Until 1977, when the late Kerry Packer launched his circus with lucrative contracts to the cream of international talent, cricketers were the poorest of sporting professionals.  The county player is still not rich.  But international players earn several time average salary.  The wealthiest of them are Indians, and on top of the heap is Sachin Tendulkar who clears 5 million US dollars a year, almost all from endorsements.

This, though, pales into insignificance beside the billion dollars per game it is thought possible for bookies to make by illegal betting in India.  While the rewards are so high it could not be expected that players’ hands would remain clean.  When found, corruption has been vigorously prosecuted.  But it has almost certainly been more widespread than the ICC wants to admit.  Murder, however, changes everything.  It is far beyond any illegalities of the past, and marks a deeply sinister turn for a once gentlemanly pastime.  Is cricket ready to be taken down some South Asian moral sewer?

At the end of this affair, the ICC will likely have to ban Pakistan from internationals for a period of years.  It is not beyond the realms of possibility that India, where the nidus exists, will pay a heavy price too.  The bookies, no doubt, will survive no matter what.

A major story in Australia that has been little reported in England is the accusation by England’s South African-born batsman Kevin Pietersen of racism and corruption in the SA cricket authority.  The game’s international administrators have stuck together and are now threatening Pietersen with two investigations:-

KEVIN PIETERSEN may be investigated by the International Cricket Council’s anti-corruption unit after alleging that the game in South Africa is corrupt.

England’s best batsman is also facing possible sanctions from the England and Wales Cricket Board for claiming South African cricket is racist.

The statements were part of a wide-ranging interview by the South African-born Pietersen which appeared in the South African edition of GQ magazine.

... His comments have created a storm of protest in South Africa, with a furious Cricket South Africa writing to the ECB and the ICC demanding action.

Pietersen may face the serious charge of bringing the game into disrepute, which covers inappropriate public comment. It carries penalties ranging from a ban of two to four Tests or four to eight one-day matches.

... Pietersen has been claiming for several years that he was forced out of the game in South Africa because of racist policies against white players. There is a quota system where each first-class team in South Africa is expected to contain at least four non-white players.

During the magazine interview he also professed his admiration for the late Hansie Cronje, who was banned for life after a match-fixing hearing, and claimed that Cronje was a scapegoat for other players who were not punished.

In separate letters, Cricket SA has demanded the ICC’s anti-corruption unit investigate Pietersen and the ECB discipline him for his continued charges of racism against the country’s cricket system.

... There are concerns Pietersen’s comments are being used by right wing elements in South Africa to subvert the reconciliation process in cricket.

Denying he is racist, Pietersen told GQ what he thought of the appointment of Ashwell Prince, a coloured player, to captain South Africa in the absence of an injured Smith: “I just thought it was further evidence that things were going downhill.

“It’s got nothing to do with the colour of his skin. It’s just that better players are being left out for political reasons and until that system changes, South African sport will continue to go downhill.

“I’ve got some mates who are now on the fringes of playing domestic cricket in South Africa who are better than three or four of those players in the South African side.

“I’ve got a very good mate who is actually a better player than me, who is now working for (SA Breweries), because he can’t get into the side for political reasons and that’s wrong.”

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Italy on penalties!  The only national side who have suffered more than England in the penalty shoot-out finally nails five in a row, and lifts the World Cup.  Not a great game.  In fact, if I say that England would not have been disgraced in this company you will know what I mean.  France the better side for the last seventy-five minutes.  But any moral claim that arises from that was thrown away by Zidane’s violent conduct and red card.  What’s the betting it was a racial slur that made him do it?  And if it was, will we hear about it?

Anyway, a team of Europeans has won the World Cup in Europe, and that’s not a bad result at all.

MR regulars will have noticed from the jpegs that daily decorate our banner that war has a prominent place in my understanding of Western intellectual, social and political development.  War shapes our society for decades after the last shot has been fired.  It is the father of social instability as well as some truly rotten ideas about a “better world”.  Some time I might try to prove that the advanced phase of liberalism with which Western Man is now struggling is wholly the product of The Great War and its continuation a generation later.  What, one wonders, might our world be like today had peace prevailed in 1914?  Liberal no doubt, but not marxian.

But whatever one’s reasons for paying heed to those two great European upheavals of the Twentieth Century, it is something worthy of our personal time.  So I was interested to read this report of the regal progress to England this summer of Ricky Ponting’s Australian Test side.

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