Football and corruption? Never!

Wednesday 20^th September

Well, the football speaking point today is not the fact that Watford failed to beat Accrington Stanley in 120 minutes at Vicarage Road last night (we won 6-5 on penalties) but the Panorama programme on “bungs” in football which focussed on “Big” Sam Allardyce and his agent son. There was nothing even approaching “proof” that corruption had occurred and for that reason you have to say that it was as much a non-issue as the revelation yesterday by the Hungarian PM that his party had lied to the electorate in order to get re-elected or the fact that there exists rivalry between the PM, Chancellor and other ‘senior’ politicians in this country for who will lead the governing Labour Party when the shit-smiling Blair is finally forced out of office and has to accept that his legacy will be dominated with the story of his dogged (note the ‘poodle’ pun) support for a Republican US President with a neo-imperialist agenda.

The game is overrun with money and agents were inevitably going to cream money off the top of fees for players that don’t want/know how to change their own light bulbs. Like with the pointless “war on drugs”, the inevitable conclusion is that a libertarian approach is the best answer. You can no more stop people “touting” their players than you can stop the ungrateful professionals disregarding the club that gave them a chance and going to the latest club with a billionaire backer. Transfer windows and FA codes are irrelevant. Money screams louder than whispers in favour of principles. Did the 80s pass football by? Me thinks not.

“Bungs” was the topic of the day amongst the guys at work (the Gooner Brian was the loudest in condemning the BBC programme, but with George Graham as an ex-manager, what can you expect?) but this evening I was out with some people from my MA at a vegan restaurant in Hackney (Pogo Café) and football hardly got a look-in. I tried to steal the show a bit by revealing to one person after another that I’d just applied for a job in Darfur with the International Organisation for Migration, but nobody cared. So we focussed on a friend who’d just been turned down by Peace Brigades International (PBI) for an accompaniment post in Colombia. Tamsin was offering to go and share her skills (great Spanish, real dedication to human rights) with the people there who could use an international presence and was refused for reasons that are less than transparent.

I am no expert (I know that statement prefaces many an ignorant rant) but should people who want to go and help in situations where human rights are being violated as systematically as in Colombia really be refused because they ask some difficult questions? (OK that was a rhetorical question – you don’t know the details and I’m not getting into them here). My limited experience and the complaints of other lefties around me says that the more “alternative” a group is, the more likely it is to be picky for no discernible reason (this is not news: the "life of Brian" Monty Python sketch about “splitters” indicates that. In Palestine in 2004, I asked a bunch of Israeli occupying soldiers to perform that skit. They refused).