Tag: soccer

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English football fans in Europe during the 1980s and ‘90s were not ambassadors either for the British game or Britain itself. Increasingly cheap flights across Europe meant that vast numbers of fat, pasty, sweaty, bald or balding men were able to enjoy spoiling the afternoons of those wishing to use cafés and bars in Portugal, or France, or Malta.

Whenever England or a top English side played in Europe, a town square somewhere would soon fill with beer bellies on shirtless, gross, and grubby torsos. (more…)

Sir Bobby Charlton

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Proxy warriors

As I hoped to make clear in my piece last week on the Gaza conflict, Israel vs. Palestine is much like Liverpool vs. Tottenham (if you get the football reference) in that I would like both sides to lose.

However, daggers are drawn and fighting has commenced. It is all rather a long way away, but one of the great things about the modern world is that you don’t have to go out to get things. (more…)

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Jim Goad has produced a short video to accompany his latest essay, “The Banana as a Hate Symbol,” on a recent kerfuffle in Texas over a banana holder that was used as a prop at a Texas city council meeting — and on whether the conventional wisdom that blacks are associated with bananas because of monkeys is in fact correct. (more…)

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“A Monkey-Themed Banana Holder Is Tearing a Texas City Apart” reads a Daily Beast headline that attributes so much magical voodoo power to a banana holder, one suspects it may have been written by a black person. (more…)

Stuart Broad

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Sports writers and commentators occasionally use the term “a fairytale ending” to describe a particularly exciting game won late in the day, or perhaps a sporting career which ends perfectly, as if it were scripted. It is a curious phrase, because if these writers and pundits were better acquainted with the work of The Brothers Grimm, the nineteenth-century German polymaths, they would know that not all fairytales end happily. If you have an unruly child, make it read The Juniper Tree as punishment, and sit and chuckle at the nightmares that ensue. (more…)

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You might not have heard, but Spain is currently undergoing its own version of a George Floyd moment. Scaled down, of course — nothing can really match American production value — but nonetheless, there is a storm brewing, one resembling what much of American sociopolitics has been reduced to: racism and victimhood grifting.

A storm — although in actual fact, it’s more like a tempest in a teacup, as is often the case with these sort of black grievances. It all started last weekend when the Real Madrid Football Club went to Valencia to play that city’s main football (or soccer, if you prefer) team. (more…)

Noddy and the Golliwogs

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First they came for the golliwogs . . .

. . . but I was not a golliwog, and said nothing. At first glance this story looks encouraging, as it involves the rare taking into custody of a black gang by the British police, but on closer inspection it is just a repetition of what is happening all over Britain.

I don’t know if the golliwog was ever big in the States, but they are knitted children’s dolls, usually dressed in a smart red-and-yellow outfit, perhaps with a bow tie. But have a look at one and I am sure you will see the problem. Blacks in Britain, as everywhere else, are like Thomas More’s devil: They cannot endure to be mocked. (more…)

Vikki Spit and her fiancée. Spit has become the first person in the UK to receive compensation from the government for a death — her fiancée’s — resulting from the Covid-19 vaccine.

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Beware the Ides of June

Under British parliamentary rules, a vote of no confidence in a Prime Minister is similar to a recall vote in the United States, but it is the members of the incumbent PM’s parliamentary party — 359 Conservative MPs, in this case — who vote, and not the people. The peons only get to vote in general elections, where their choice is essentially between two brands of the same soap powder. (more…)

British MP Jeremy Hunt, whose surname is as perfect an example of Cockney rhyming slang as you could find.

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A bad month for the Iron Lady and the suffragette

There is never a good time to be a statue in England. You are out in all weathers, for a start, and on the rare days the Sun does shine pigeons seize the opportunity to take a dump on your head. But you do usually get to hang around on your pedestal or plinth for a few decades, or even centuries, before you are abused by humans. That, like much in the old country, is changing, and 2020 shall henceforth be known as the year of the great toppling. But the last month has seen attacks on statues of two famous English women, proving equality is alive and well. (more…)

Self-described Nazi Thomas Leech, who was recently convicted in the UK on terrorism charges, shows that today’s Nazis don’t really live up to their more fashionable predecessors.

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A rose by any other name

When I was growing up, or at least getting bigger, my parents were fairly liberal about swearing in the house. “Cussing” is, I believe, an American equivalent. This was not an injunction for or against swearing an oath on the Bible. But rules are rules, and there was always one word banned in our house: the dread C-word. How nice to be reminded of this childhood memory by Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), still wasting money after all these years. They have indeed banned the C-word. (more…)

J. K. Rowling, who earned praise for getting herself cancelled this year by refusing to back down from her normal views on genitalia and gender.

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We can be heroes just for one day. — David Bowie

Hans, are we the baddies? — Mitchell and Webb sketch featuring Nazi soldiers

As European and Commonwealth countries act like faithful servants to the autocratic global coup currently taking place, my own home country of England has fallen into step like a good foot-soldier. The government, nominally Conservative but actually a sort of Green Socialist elite oligarchy, has gone full Bezmenov, contradicting itself on a daily basis about COVID and preventing its people from seeing dying loved ones while it parties maskless indoors. (more…)

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The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
the score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
a sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game. (more…)

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In the final days of the holy Pride Month, the National Football League told the world: “Football is gay.”

The message came in a pro-gay ad released by the macho sports league. The ad also said that: “Football is lesbian;” “Football is queer;” “Football is transgender; “Football is bisexual;” “Football is American;” and “Football is for everyone.” (more…)