THOUGH HE HAS THE CAUSE WRONG...:

It's time to admit football is pure evil: Engaging with football can be confusing – like being beaten up by beautiful, smiling nuns (Barney Ronay, 14 May 2011, The Guardian )

For a while this was shaping up as, if not quite one of football's most evil weeks, then at least a week when football could look back on its evildoing with a sense of having gone out there and really done a job. First came Lord Triesman's claims that Fifa – an organisation that inhabits a cavernous bulletproof aircraft hanger and whose gleamingly basted president emanates at all times a personal force field of strangulation-strength phoniness – may actually be a little corrupt.

The suggestion of murkiness was only compounded by Jack Warner's comment that, on hearing the claims against him, he laughed "like hell", as though this would somehow make him seem just really innocent and reassuring, rather than like the kind of horrifying, banshee figure who might appear in your nightmares waving a breadknife and wearing only a butcher's apron and a beard of bees.

The stakes were raised further as news emerged of another event so unusual it was hard to avoid a feeling of a gear change, a vertical take-off into clear blue evil virgin skies. I am referring to the invitation match played in Grozny on Wednesday night between an all-star "World XI" and a team captained by the Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. You know: that Ramzan Kadyrov. President of a developing nation but still keeps his own zoo. Possesses a gold plated handgun. Highly unlikely to maintain a current monthly standing order to Amnesty International.

The World XI for this fixture featured Franco Baresi, Fabien Barthez, Luis Figo and, oddly enough, Steve McManaman and Robbie Fowler. According to the Guardian's report the World XI went 2-0 up before developing a habit of "melting away" whenever Kadyrov got the ball, allowing the pudgy but tenacious Great Leader to set up four goals in an amazing 5-2 fightback victory. Half-time entertainment was provided by Craig David, who famously met a girl on Monday and took her for a drink on Tuesday – neither of which he's likely to have had much joy with in Chechnya, where women are urged to wear the veil, alcohol is pretty much banned and even "chilling on Sunday" is probably deemed worthy of a roughing up by the state militia.

Football's In Bed With Kadyrov moment pretty much put a cap on things. Taking into account existing ambient evil levels, this week is now probably up there with the most evil in the game's modern history. The time has come to talk openly about this. Football is evil now, albeit in a way that is often quite confusing.

...it's actually the corporatisation of the game that has cleaned up much of its worst problems, pricing the thugs out of the stadia and making teams multiethnic so that the yobs are rooting for races they used to despise, sort of a Jackie Robinson effect.

Posted by oj at May 14, 2011 7:26 AM
Tweet   

Follow @brothersjudd