Re: [PEN-L] Zidane Apparently Called "Dirty Terrorist"

[paul phillips]

There was an old adage applied to football (soccer) and rugby, both of which I played in highschool and unversity in Canada  (plus I have a niece playing professional football in England and a granddaughter in the premier league in Calgary).  "Rugby is a ruffians' game played by gentlemen; soccer a gentlemen's game, played by ruffians." In fact, in my experience, rugby was perhaps the more sportsmanlike of the two games simply because, without good sportmanship, the game was exceedingly dangerous.  In soccer, this was not quite so true though, the problem with unsportmanlike behaviour in soccer has been more associated with the 'fans' which reflected largely unemployed and disaffected youth, the victims of the British and European class system.  That has more recently taken the form of racism that was particularly directed at the French team which has the highest proportion of players of ethnic African origin, including those who came from former French (Islamic) colonies in northern Aftrica.   The Italians have been accused of racist trash talk in the past so when I saw the head butt my immediate reaction was to suspect it was provoked by a racist taunt. Paul P Carrol Cox wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: I have never watched soccer before. It was unknown in my home town when I was growing up, although in 1956, we heard that some Hungarians had moved there & were playing some strange game. In the 1930s most of the rural elementary schools in southwestern michigan played soccer. Inter-school sports of any kind at the elementary level were not organized at the time, but teachers would get in touch with teachers in other elem schools and arrange games. And we played without umpires. Carrol

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