What I’m Reading: March 3, 2007

It was actually from last week and not even a soccer story, but I found the Christian Science Monitor’s article on the England’s rugby playing a match against their Irish counterparts. What makes this story interesting is its political undercurrents. The stadium was the site of what I believe is the first “Bloody Sunday” incident (one of the inspirations for the U2 song) in which occupying British soldiers opened fire during a Gaelic football game, killing 14 people. The article is headlined “Symbolic Step of Peace at Irish Stadium” and we can only hope that the rugby match will have been that. Another interesting factoid about the Croke Park stadium where the match was played is that it is being used as the home stadium for the Irish national soccer team while their normal stadium, Landsdowne Road, is being renovated. This is semi-controversial, at least among some who want the stadium only to be used for truly Irish sports like Gaelic football and hurling.

Hurling

The Christian Science Montior also showed its stuff as a newspaper covering a wide range of international stories not in the headlines with its report on flooding in Mozambique. Thanks to the African government’s higher levels of vigilance and preemptive action, the country is likely to avoid massive starvation due to the floods. What caught my eye was the article’s mention that relief agencies land their helicopters on soccer fields in order to deliver supplies. It is a nice contrast to my earlier post on violence on soccer fields.

But violence on soccer fields has not been eradicated. Far from it. A sad story this week came from Iraq, where 18 boys in Ramadi were killed by a suicide bomber as they played soccer. I plan to write more on this story and the sad way in which it showed how ignorant the US military is about violence in Iraq (they continue to deny that the incident even occurred).

Cubans athletes leaving their teams to defect while playing in the US is a fairly common phenomenon. Many baseball players have done it as have soccer players. Each time the Gold Cup is played in this country, it seems, a few more players decide to make the US their home. The most recent defector is named Maykel Galindo and he just signed for Chivas USA. The Miami Herald details his story, which included a year spent playing for the Seattle Sounders, far away from most Cubans. Galindo talks about an off-season trip he took to Miami:

Out West, there is not Cuban food like in Miami. La Carreta, Versailles, so many places. I ate like a king. Hearing the language, meeting so many Cubans, it felt like I was home. It was a beautiful experience. Someday, I’d like to live there. But I will always love Seattle for how they opened their arms to me. That will be my first American home. Thank God, everything worked out. It was a heavy price to pay, but it was worth it.

The excellent blog The Global Game has a post on head coverings in soccer. The story arose from the recent article in the Globe and Mail on an 11 year-old girl who was not allowed to wear a hijab while playing soccer in Quebec. I remember a similar incident when I was growing up in Ohio in which a Sikh player was not allowed to wear his turban while playing, leading to outrage.

11 year-old Asmahan (Azzy) Mansour with her controversial hijab

Another blog, Some People are on the Pitch, comes up with an interesting rubric to discuss nations’ success (or lack thereof) in soccer. They judge countries’ success not only based on wins and losses, but also compare those results to the nations’ populations. A large country with little success (they focus on India) ranks lower in their rankings than a smaller country with a similar record. Small countries who punch above their weight are ranked highly, with Uruguay, a country of around 3.5 million people that has won the World Cup twice (in 1930 and 1950), ranked at the top.

And finally, Adam Spangler at This is American Soccer tipped me off to what looks like a fascinating new blog. It is called If This is Football and is run by a British grad student at the University of Chicago named Thomas Dunmore. The blog covers politics, economics, and history as they relate to the beautiful game and is a great read.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under What I'm Reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.