What I’m Reading: March 9 2007

A common theme in several news stories from Iraq this week was of soccer as a place of refuge from the violence wracking that country. National Public Radio (NPR) ran a report with the headline “Soccer Field a Rare Respite from Baghdad Violence” that covered a regular soccer game played in Sadr City with players from all ethnic groups. Many of the players see their game as an explicit rejection of the terrorists who have targeted soccer. One, Abbas Abdulkarim, is quoted saying, “What we are trying to do is strengthen peace to defy violence and defy the terrorists and others who don’t want good for our country.”

ABC News also had a report on how soccer goes on in Iraq, despite the danger (as one Reuters report put it, “kicking a soccer ball around on the streets is like dicing with death”). They showed a 9 year-old boy saying, “I love the game more than my life.” It’s sad that any 9 year-old boy should even have to think about being injured while playing soccer.

Sometimes fascinating soccer stories are buried in sections of the newspaper where you don’t expect to find them. That was the case this week when the Washington Post ran a piece in its world section on Chinese women’s national team player Liu Huana. Liu’s story is fascinating because, unlike most elite Chinese female players, she comes from a rural area of the middle kingdom. “By the time she was 7, she could take care of 20 goats by herself, often stopping to sneak fresh watermelon from another farmer’s fields.” Her goat herding and watermelon theft have helped her soccer career, though, as Liu claims to be tougher than her urban peers. The biggest danger Liu faces is when she goes back home.

“Some villagers will come up and kick me,” she said. “They want to find out why I don’t hurt when I am kicked on the field, when they watch me on TV. I tell them, ‘Well, I wear shin pads on the field, so it doesn’t hurt. But now you really hurt me.’ “

I’ve always admired Tim Vickery’s work for the BBC covering South American soccer. He seems to have been snapped up by Sports Illustrated as well and his first column (to my knowledge, at least) covers the question of whether Brazilian players who go to Europe are improved by the experience. Vickery points out that as recently as 1986, only two of Brazil’s World Cup team played their club ball in Europe, a far cry from the present, when nearly all members of the selecao earn their living in the Old World. Aside from the few players who make it to the national team, there are Brazilian players in nearly every league in the world. As Vickery puts it, “Brazilian soccer has become an export industry, consistently sending more than 800 players a year abroad.”

One of the 800 per year: Brazilian goalkeeper Fabio Dos Santos of Vietnam’s Dongtam FC

The interview with Lillian Thuram published in last week’s Observer Sport Monthly is an excellent read. The Barcelona and France defender is a member of that nearly extinct species: intelligent and articulate professional athletes (along with Oleguer, Barca has half of a very erudite back four). In addition to being one of the best defenders in recent times, Thuram is politically aware, and has spoken out on matters of race, religion, and economics. He sits on a French government panel designed to study race relations in the country which experienced riots in its mostly Arab and black suburbs in 2005. Unlike most hedonistic soccer players, Thuram works to make a difference for others, something he plans to continue after his sporting career is over.

Perhaps I would like to do something else beyond the game - maybe I could do politics, maybe I could be a teacher. But I want to make an impact, and work with others on behalf of good causes.

A few quick hits:

• As the Cricket World Cup kicks off, Shourin Roy at Soccer Blog discusses how that sport has dropped in popularity in the West Indies while soccer has taken off.
• A story with an interesting soccer connection (though mostly not about the sport) was the Washington Post’s article on Salvadorans in the Washington DC area who have sent much money back to their home town of Intipucá. $400,000 of this money went to building a soccer stadium in the rural Salvadoran town.
• The blog Some People are on the Pitch has a “list of little consequence” on 16 interesting club team names. My favorite is Swaziland’s Eleven Men in Flight.

And finally, Argentina’s Ferrocarril Oeste will (the club where Roberto Ayala got his start) lend their stadium to a very different use tonight when Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez holds a rally there to counter President Bush’s visit to neighboring Uruguay.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez rallies against President Bush in the Ricardo Etcheverry Stadium

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 7:59 pm 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.