A(nother) Flaw in the Rules of Football

Last night, Uruguay were playing Ghana in the World Cup. In the last minute of extra time, the score was 1-1, and Ghana had a very good shot on goal. The Uruguayan striker Suarez quite clearly pushed the ball off the line using his hands. He was sent off; Ghana missed the resulting penalty; Uruguan went on to win on penalties.

The problem is this: As the rules stand, Suarez's action was sensible and was self-sacrificially doing the best thing for his team. Had he not handled the ball off the line, his team would have been knocked out. As it was, handling the ball off the line ensured that his team still had a chance of going through, a chance which they duly took. The rules therefore encourage fouls in such situations.

The most obvious modification to deal with this would be the introduction of a penalty goal, as in Rugby. The rule would run something like this:

If a player commits a foul to prevent an otherwise certain goal, they shall be sent off and the referee shall award a goal to the side and player that would have scored had the foul not been committed.

Brazil 9 - Football / Futebol / Idolatry

My host (and some of his family) very kindly took me to see a football game the other day. It was Santa Cruz v Campinese in the Brazillian 3rd division. Tickets, by the way, cost about £10 for a good seat, or about £2 for a standing place.

Santa Cruz seem to be a lot like Manchester United, except without the money and Sir Alec. In other words, they used to be successful, but have dropped two divisions in the last two years and are most notable for having the largest stadium in this bit of Brazil (though some of it is being refurbished, and other bits are closed due to having been trashed) and for being very nasty to opponents, often using Hell-type imagery.

This is the so-called "Inferno Coral", where the hardest-core fans stand. Note that in Portuguese, "Inferno" means "Hell". Lots of songs about doing nasty things to their opponents... Lots of drums, jumping, and waving big flags too. At times the whole area looked like a living organism, because everyone was jumping to the beat of the drums.

This is the top worn by many in the Inferno Coral. Note the loving attitude it displays to his fellow man. The snake, by the way, is the emblem of the club, but it doesnt't usually carry guns. Note how incongruous the state flag (at the top, with the cross and the rainbow) looks, just like Christians wearing a Man Utd shirt...

Lots of food and drink was available, some of the more conventional kind (crisps, popcorn, etc.) and some of the less conventional kind. This, for example, is raw sugar cane, which is meant to be sucked on, then spat out. Given the local industries, maybe eating so much sugar is simply a patriotic thing...

At half time, the score being 0-0, the players and officials went off. Please note the following security features:

• There are very few (if any) stewards in the crowd
• There is a deep moat between the crowd and the pitch
• On the other side of the moat, there are policemen with big dogs
• The referree has police with riot shields guarding him while he goes down his tunnel

After the break, Campinese scored with a free-kick.

But shortly afterwards, Santa Cruz were awarded a penalty. Full marks to the penalty taker for being cheeky. He stopped most of the way into his run-up, pointed something out to the goalie, then kicked the ball into the net while the goalie was distracted. The crowd went wild.

One of the good things about being in a different culture is that it gives me a good opportunity to reflect on my own. This was a regular Brazillian third division match, and they treated it like a cup final. Here, football often seems so clearly to be a matter of worship. And that got me thinking about England...

Is the reason that there are so many more women than men in church in England (and in Brazil) linked to the fact that so many men worship sports?

What does it mean to support a football team? If Liverpool and Man Utd swapped 60% of their players over a period of a few years, why would I still support Liverpool? Is it because what is actually happening is worship (however half-hearted) for something underlying what actually goes on on the pitch?

Has sport provided us with a new pantheon of gods to worship, except where there is continually more information to process so that people don't get bored?

I can see that it can be right and good to enjoy watching people use the skills God has given them. But if supporting a football team is fundamentally about worshipping a non-physical entity, can a Christian consistently do it?

I know there's various reasons why people support the teams they do - attachment to roots, glory seeking, and so on. But they all seem like bad reasons to me.

So often we wrongly interpret the first commandment to say "You shall have no other gods before me" - i.e. "Make God number 1". But that isn't what it actually says. It actually says "You shall have no other gods before my face." It's commanding a complete absence of other gods, not just them being taken down to numbers 2, 3 and 4.

Why do people not see (a la Isaiah 44) that football is something people invented, and therefore it cannot be worthy of our devotion?

Why is it that the people at the top of the game (players, managers, etc) don't seem to show anywhere near the level of support or loyalty that the fans do? Answer - because they know it isn't worth it. For them it's a business - a way of making money.

Hopefully, it's kind of obvious I'm still wrestling with this question. Just to show how inconsistent I am, here's a photo of me with the European Champions' League Trophy...

And here's a good cartoon from Dave Walker on the subject.

Brazil 6 - Competitiveness and Excellence

Brazillians are of course very competitive, especially when it comes to sports such as football and volleyball. Even teenage girls often seem to be keen and good players, though there are still a fair number of adults of both genders who aren't especially interested. I'd guess a higher proportion of Brazillian men aren't into football than of Mancunain men!

This competitiveness extends to all sorts of things - silly games, English competitions, etc, and doesn't seem to give up easily. For example, on English camp, one of the main afternoon activities was a kind of team competition at English, with spelling, anagrams, etc. The teams were all keen, even the ones with no realistic chance of winning three days in, which I don't think would happen in England.

In church, there seems to be competition for size of churches - it's one of the most common questions, and large churches are generally better regarded than small ones. (I'm reporting this, not agreeing with it.)

There's a lot of that sort of thing going on with status and money too (of which more later).

But there are some areas it doesn't seem to affect - food, for example (more on experiences of eating out in Brazil later), or cleanliness (or maybe that's just the people who were meant to be doing the cleaning on the English camp - we'd not have taken them as leaders on the camp I do in the UK...) I guess what I'm trying to say is that there doesn't really seem to be a conception of excellence apart from a conception of competition. People aren't driven to excel for the sake of excelling. Or that is how it seems to me, anyway.

Church or Football?

From Dave's Cartoon Church Blog.

Get in there. I really ought at some stage to discuss my odd attitude to charismaticism, which seems to be polarising both towards and against. But I've got exams today, so I won't.

Football

I watched the football last night. Liverpool v AC Milan. Hey, at least we got to the final.

Having said that, as a Liverpool fan, it was almost worth seeing Liverpool lose to see Milan's star player, Kaka, running round the pitch afterwards wearing an "I belong to Jesus" T-shirt. The British commentators were embarrassed and avoided it almost as quickly as they avoided the streaker or whoever it was.

Reminds me of the 2002 World Cup final. After Brazil won it, most of them removed their shirts to display their "I love Jesus" t-shirts, then had photos taken like that. The commentators just went quiet, which is quite impressive for football commentators...

Chelwood Baptist Church, Adswood Road

When visited:

8th May 2005, 10:30am

Location:

Adswood Rd, just the Cheadle side of the West Coast Main Line

Type of Service:

Fairly informal "normal service", no communion.

Welcome:

Generally good. A few "hello"s at the start, people chatty and welcoming afterwards - tea and coffee offered.

First Impressions:

The building is basically painted breeze blocks with banners; about 50 seats were out, and it got to be about half full. There was a healthy range of ages. It came across as quite working-class (that's not a bad thing). Seems to be lots of football-based work and outreach - the church has a 5 a side football pitch.

Music:

There was a clavinova-type keyboard at the front, but no-one playing it. Songs were projected onto the wall via Powerpoint; most of the music was MP3s played through the PA system, there was one Hillsongs DVD at the start. Singing was pretty good on the ones they knew, and there didn't seem much resistance to old or new stuff.

Sermon:

It wasn't the regular "minister" doing it. There was a long thing read from the "Make Poverty History" website. I was pleasantly surprised when there was a sermon later. It was 19 mins on social justice. It wasn't a Bible-centred sermon, but I didn't disagree with anything that was said (except for a "legitimate" misapplication of the parable of the banquet) and it was Bible-influenced. There were Bibles (NIV paperback) round the church, but they didn't seem to be referred to.

Website:

www.chelwoodbc.org.uk
(Internet Exploder only)

Overall:

Definitely a Christian church, and seems to be fairly healthy and growing. I think they'd probably benefit more from a slightly more Bible-centred approach to preaching and understanding. I'd be reasonably happy coming here, as long as they let me preach from time to time!