Indigo Jo Blogs

So, the Olympic torch has made its brief visit to London over the weekend, with a trip across London from west (Wembley) to east (Stratford, where it passed by the 2012 building site) and down south (the former Millennium Dome, which is on the southern bank but is on a bit of the south side that pokes up north) before heading off to Paris for an equally eventful progress through that city. I'm personally in two minds about all this - I'm glad that people have tried to turn the relay into a rally, but don't really object to the Olympics being in Beijing as, if a country's human rights record was a bar to the country holding a sporting event, the Olympics would never get held anywhere. After all, once all the third world countries are eliminated, it might occur to the committee who decides that the third-world countries that got eliminated were clients of at least one of the western countries that weren't.

However, I do object to the extent to which this government goes to appease the Chinese authorities. Last weekend, the torch was accompanied by a set of Chinese guards in blue, and the point of the Chinese presence was that they spoke Chinese - presumably so that they could identify protesters with the wrong Chinese slogans. When the country's president, Jiang Zemin, visited a few years ago, this government also bent over backwards to make sure that he didn't see too much of the demonstration, including (according to one letter in the Guardian) making sure the police cleared protesters off a bridge over Jiang's route. Clearly it wouldn't impress a quasi-dictator to see a demonstrator against him on a foreign visit, even to a country he knew to be a democracy, but what are they going to do - stop selling us computer parts or (perish the thought) zips for our trousers?

One other thought: I was wondering why the torch wasn't taken out to Shropshire as well, given that the original Olympics of modern times were, and still are, held in the village of Much Wenlock in that county. Perhaps it was down to time (although the Chinese are apparently finding time to get a torch - albeit not the torch, but one lit from the same flame - up Mount Everest), but surely they will make time for this in 2012, when the modern Olympics, like football in 1996, "come home"?

Posted by Indigo Jo at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

If anyone's not heard yet, the England team lost a football match against Croatia last week, which means England won't be in the Euro 2008 tournament next year. Boo hoo. The manager (Steve McClaren) resigned the next day. Now they're hunting round for anyone who will have the job, which nobody seems to. People seemed to be pinning their hopes on José Mourinho, who had already said, months ago, that he did not want to manage England or any national side other than his own (Portugal).

To be honest, I don't care about football much and the fact that next year there will be nobody sitting screaming in front of the telly at footballers who cannot hear them doesn't make me lose any sleep. The problem is, though, that the age of big-money football has brought about a Premiership which no longer nurtures native talent. Many of the major Premiership teams rely heavily on imported players, often from countries where football is a route out of the slums. Season ticket prices have been driven up and up, "coincidentally" with the rise in player salaries, making it more difficult for the supporters to regularly see matches; tickets for matches at high-profile clubs cost over £20 (in the case of Premiership clubs, good seats cost much more). (Arsenal, a stone's throw from the City, is notoriously popular with moneyed City types and their ground is known as the Highbury Library, because they are not exactly boisterous supporters; its tickets are sold to registered supporters only.)

Why is this? Could it be the fact that school playing fields are being sold off and that schools are supposedly placing less emphasis on team sports? Or is it that the traditional working-class support base of the game itself is being shut out of it by high ticket prices? It is not just football, though - the England cricket team is not the best of performers on the international stage, famously only winning the Ashes from Australia in 2005 when it had an Australian coach (and I remember the notorious defeat to the semi-professional Zimbabwe team in the mid-1990s). I would call myself a "by-default" cricket man, meaning that it's the only major sport I haven't detested since my school days when both it and football were compulsory, not that I've played it in years or that I've ever been to the Oval for a game, and like most people, I suspect that I really only think about the game when the team wins or, more commonly, loses a big international match. I think both games need to reconnect with their popular base if the national teams are to become winners again.

Posted by Indigo Jo at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)