Wednesday 17 September 2008

Why Are Catholics Better At Football? #

While trying to determine how the Glasgow Rangers website could possibly attempt to give any justification for the singing of "The Famine Song" by their fans at the recent match with Celtic, a Cavern of Reality appeared before my eyes.
Its because 'we' are better at footie than them.
That's what it is...
Ha!
Sorted :)

"The Famine's over, why don't you fuck off home" rang out the mustachioed hordes as their team were thrashing the Bhoys last week.
Oh, how we laughed at the Hyperreality.
A team, once the pride of the immigrant Irish community, but now managed by a dodgy bookmaker, a war criminal, a neo-capitalist and with an allegedly racist manager was playing the British team, now the plaything of a failing property developer whose business is in the process of exploring the peripheries of the global credit crunch, and a team with a capacity for, shall we say, influencing events on the field of play.
Singing songs of, not yesteryear, but yester-century seems to be quite the perfect backdrop for something that bears no linkage with Reality.
It is offensive.
But, so is what is happening to football.
So, the two things would seem to dovetail to me.
Just like playing the flute and undertaking paramilitary marching in front of Celtic fans.
We can take a joke.
No problem.

Its a power thing in Scotland.
Rangers could never abide the fact that we were better than them at football.
So they rig it.
They've always rigged it.
The fact that we are anywhere near their inflated total of league titles is testimony in itself to our superiority at football.

From the position of power, songs and sentiments are those of oppression - "Up To Our Knees In Fenian Blood" and "We Are The Billy Goats".
From the position of being oppressed, songs and sentiments take on an altogether more defensive note with the spirit of resistance and rebellion as a statement of often reluctant aggression - "The Fields Of Athenry", "Joe McDonnell", "The Men Behind The Wire", "Four Green Fields" and the like.

So, we'll qualify our original question:
"Excluding the Trophy Totalisation Hyperrealities of Scotland and Northern Regions of the Emerald Isle, Why are Catholics Better at Football?"

Argentina, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France (to a large extent), Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, Poland, Germany (arguably) and Eire (with Jamaica, the very foundation of the English national team in recent years)...
Every single World Cup has been won by a nominally Catholic country apart from the one donated to this Sceptred Isle by a dodgy Russian linesperson in '66.
Other countries import the global Catholic underworld and rearrange their nationalities to suit the Hyperreality.
So, Poles Klose and Podolski lead the German attack rather than the Polish.
And, there are Brazilians in most second and third tier national teams plus some higher level ones like Croatia and Japan.

Having escaped Catholicism in youth, have I been blind to the fact that, despite all the weird guilt stuff and the vision that it is quite reasonable for "forty year old virgins in dresses to beat young boys on the backside with wooden sticks", Catholicism has brought something good to the world - Proper Football?

And while I was contemplating this very thought, a stream of consciousness flowed with more questions about the world in which we find ourselves...

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