I suppose it was inevitable. Any big event happening in the USA and Donald Trump will not only be interested but will also seek to influence events to his own advantage. It starts with him watching the USA playing Bosnia/Herzgovina and he is upset that a USA player is red-carded. Instead of moaning to his mates as most of us would do, he phones the President of FIFA, the games ruling body. ‘It was not a foul,’ he says.
Now I don’t know how DT can make a judgement like this. First I’ve heard he is a fan. (If it was Sir Keir Starmer speaking we would at least listen. He knows something about the game.) But DT is in touch with the President of the ruling body and not only gives an opinion but asks if something can be done about the red card. After a riffle through the rule book it is discovered that a red card can be suspended for a year. So it’s all clear for the man red carded to play against Belgium who are reported as being furious.
Now I’ve been watching football all my life. This kind of jiggery-pokery might have happened before but not not my knowledge. And it didn’t do the USA any good. Belgium were so fired up that they blew the USA off the park.
It’s not the first time that self-serving politicians have left a stain on what we call ‘the beautiful game’. I could write a book on the way money and political propaganda have driven successive World Cups - (Thereby hangs a threat!) - to the extent that I just can’t recover my old enthusiasm for it. Football used to be called ‘the working man’s ballet’. Not it’s at the mercy of the money men and the reputation boosters. When did football become so fashionable?
But the wee voice inside my head says: ‘What did you expect? You with the theology degree!’ In his poem ’God’s Grandeur’ the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins looked out at the world and saw it wearing ‘man’s smudge’ and bearing ‘man’s smell’. But he doesn’t end there. There is a note of hope. He writes : ‘Nature is never spent’. By that he meant that the Holy Spirit is eternally present and His work is never done: ‘There lies the dearest freshness deep down things’.
High thoughts from where we began with the ‘fiba’? But Hopkins does not exclude anything from the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’. There can be change for the better in everything. When the doors are closed on cabinet rooms and gates shut in football stadiums the Holy Spirit is not excluded.
