Egypt’s worst-ever soccer disaster: at least 73 people died at a match in Port Said on Wednesday. “This tragedy is not simply a story of a match gone horribly awry,” writes James Dorsey at The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccerblog. “It will have important and wide-ranging political ramifications.” (Full post here.) The causes for the tragedy are unclear.
According to the New York Times, “Politicians, fans and Egyptian soccer officials all faulted the police as failing to conduct the standard gate searches to prevent fans from bringing knives, clubs or other weapons into the match.” Did the ultras — hard-core supporters — of home side El Masry and Cairo heavyweights Al Ahly walk into a trap?
“People here are dying, and no one is doing a thing. It’s like a war,” said Al Ahly star midfielder Mohamed Aboutrika; “Is life this cheap?” He then promptly announced his retirement from the professional game.
“The ultras whether they walked into a trap or initiated the Port Said violence have no doubt again dug themselves into a hole,” Dorsey observes (full post here). “This time round it will be a lot tougher to dig themselves out. They have played into the hands of the military and the police in dealing a lethal blow [to] contentious street politics as opposed to electoral politics and the horse trading associated with it.”
We at Footballiscominghome extend our condolences to the families of the victims.
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Additional coverage of the Port Said disaster and its aftermath here.
This just in from Alex Galarza: NPR’s Andy Carvin is curating tweets live from Cairo @acarvin. Osama Diab at The Guardian also has a worthwhile story.
Read David Goldblatt’s “Egypt’s Political Football” here.
It is no coincidence that Alex Salmond, the wily and rather combative leader of the SNP, is fighting to hold the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014. This, of course, is partly to do with the anniversary of the Battle of Bannock-burn, where the Scots gave the English a bit of a kicking in the First War of Scottish Independence.
But, perhaps even more significantly, it is also about the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and a recognition that the patriotism that invariably surrounds great sporting occasions could lend the campaign for secession unstoppable momentum. No wonder David Cameron wants to hold the referendum early.
Few politicians, let alone sports fans, have failed to recognise the curious alchemy of events such as the Commonwealth Games, not to mention the Olympics and World Cup. It is not just the anthem-singing and the flag-waving, but a sense of unity that is conspicuous by its absence at just about any other time in national life – with the possible exception of a royal wedding.
We are divided by religion, by political affiliation, by cultural allegiance and by our attitudes to Simon Cowell but, when David Beckham is charging around against Greece, or Sally Gunnell is leaping around Montjuic, or Tim Henman is getting edgy against Pete Sampras in SW19, we are bound up in a shared national story. Look hard and you can almost see the pages moving.
In this sense the Africa Cup of Nations, which started at the weekend, is perhaps the most important sporting event in the world. Not in terms of the football, of course – although the European club stars who return home to represent their homelands lend stardust to an event that improves in quality with each incarnation – but rather in terms of the politics of identity. As the players of Niger and Libya and Equatorial Guinea cruise around the pitch, you can see history in the making. (more…)
With the African Nations Cup about to kick off this weekend in Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, it’s time to put the spotlight on Yaya Touré, the Ivorian international and Man City midfielder. In this part of a longer interview produced by his new endorser — Puma, an expanding commercial force in African football — the best-paid player in the English Premier League reflects on growing up in Ivory Coast, learning the game in Bouake, and then moving to big-time football in Abidjan.
Thanks to Tom McCabe for telling me about this interview.
Photo: Breakthrough Chiparamba girls football team, 20 July, 2011, Olympic Youth Development Center, Lusaka, Zambia. Courtesy of Hikabwa Chipande.
Training and Developing Coaches in Southern Africa: Licensing and Administration
By Hikabwa Decius Chipande
Football is the most popular sport in southern Africa but there are few qualified coaches at all levels. Prior to 2010 most top league clubs in southern Africa were coached by people without even a basic qualification.
One major problem is that Southern African countries have a haphazard approach to coach education. What had been happening until recently was that any person could come to the region, conduct a coaching course for a few days, and declare the participants as coaches with questionable certificates of limited value. It has been, therefore, very difficult to know the actual capabilities of local coaches and their qualifications because there had been no set benchmarks. South Africa is an exception in that it has the South African Qualification Authority (SAQA), although its effectiveness remains debatable. (more…)
After many, many years, I recently played Subbuteo again. It was such a blast that I’m starting a series of posts on the world’s greatest football game ever invented. My older brother, who taught me how to play, kicks off.
By Daniel Alegi
Rome, Italy, Christmas 1973: I finally got Subbuteo, the new English game everyone was talking about. It was the “Continental” set (see photo below); the box said the name was pronounced “sub-BEW-teo.” 20,000 lire ($15) got you a green cloth pitch, two white floodlights 13 inches high with 9-volt batteries, two plastic goals with brown nets, two balls, two goalies with a handle-rod and two teams in white shorts: one with red shirts, the other with blue.
“Italy – Russia!” I said. “Como-Varese!” said my brother from the height of his 18 months’ seniority. Their kits are almost identical, but would you rather make your debut in the Christmas snow at Moscow’s Lenin Stadium or in a Serie B derby in the Po Valley fog? Our first flicks were backed by our grandfather in the armchair snoring away. Cloth pitch on the carpet, improvised rules. Then during lunch dad stood up and stepped on everything (how could he miss a 4.5ft x 3ft pitch?). On the ground lay decapitated, amputated, crushed players. Only six survived this massacre, one of them a goalkeeper. And so with this ill-fated 1973 debut, played with only one goal, Subbuteo entered our house forever. (more…)
Bayern Munich’s Daniel van Buyten lines up to take a free kick against Cologne in this weekend’s Bundesliga. He blasts the ball into a defender sliding studs up . . . and the ball bursts its bladder!
Stryker-Indigo New York, a private multi-media film and print production company, has announced the acquisition of a major collection of 1950s-1960s 8mm and 16mm soccer films.
The film footage, featuring both university and international teams playing in American cities, contains rare home movie images of the history of the game in the United States. For example, there is footage of the first leg of the 1961 U.S. Open Cup Final between United Scots of Los Angeles and Ukrainian Nationals of Philadelphia at Rancho La Cienega Stadium in LA (now Jackie Robinson Stadium).
According to the Stryker-Indigo web site, its Futbol Heritage Archive houses nearly 9,000 historic photographs, slides, newspaper clippings, postcards, trophies, jerseys and artifacts. Following the closure of the US Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta, NY, researchers have lost access to an archive of more than 80,000 items, including the North American Soccer League archive and the 1994 World Cup archive. It is hoped that private collections such as Stryker-Indigo’s film footage will be made accessible to soccer researchers and aficionados so that the history and culture of the game can be properly recorded and disseminated.
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Thanks to David Wallace for inspiring me to write this post.
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