Soccer-punched: why Marx was wrong about religion

World Cups are state-sanctioned, capitalism-controlled drug-dealing that put people in the kind of funk the powerful can use to take the attention off their actions.

STRAIGHT RED – Karl Marx was right about almost everything. Almost …

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Lisbon

KARL Marx got it wrong. Not about the importance of the workers of the world uniting, nor recognising that they who control the means of production boss almost everything, nor on the inherent evil of capitalism.

Damn straight, comrade, on those counts and many more. So, what was Marx wrong about? God-bothering. Or, at least, about its place in modern society.

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

Those are 20 of the most beautifully arranged words yet translated into English.

It’s a pity we tend to remember not them but the next seven words: “It is the opium of the people.”

All 27 of those words are from “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, which Marx wrote in 1834: more than 200 years after cricket became professional and 23 years before the world’s first football club was founded, in Sheffield.

So he had no idea of the monster football would become. But he did take himself off to a cricket match, where, according to Ben Carrington’s “Marxism, cultural Studies and Sport” (2009), he decided that “if the masses could be so easily subdued by such a resolutely sedate game with its mores of bourgeois Englishness dripping from every rule and expression, then all was lost for the socialist cause”.

That explains, perhaps, why Marx didn’t see that the opium of the people wouldn’t be religion in future. Instead, it would be sport.

And that makes World Cups state-sanctioned, capitalism-controlled drug-dealing that put people in the kind of funk the powerful can use to take the attention off their actions. That’s a dark thought, but there are many more and much darker where that comes from. Here are but a few:

Russians were still celebrating their team’s 5-0 thumping of Saudi Arabia in the opening match of football’s 2018 World Cup when it emerged that the Kremlin had hiked VAT and planned to raise the retirement age.

During that match, Saudi forces launched a brutal offensive in their despicable proxy war on Yemen to isolate the main port and so sever deliveries of food and medicine to a nation already wrecked by famine and disease.

The day before a Moroccan own-goal earned victory for Iran, the latter’s authorities arrested Nasrin Sotoudeh, a prominent Iranian human rights lawyer, and told her she had been sentenced, in absentia, to five years in prison.

Hours ahead of scoring all three of Portugal’s goals against Spain, Cristiano Ronaldo agreed to pay a fine amounting to almost R300-million rather than face further prosecution on tax evasion charges.

None of those stories garnered anything like the amount of coverage devoted to the comparatively insignificant on the field in Russia.  

The masses were high on football, leaving the bold and the bad to do whatever they wanted in sickening sobriety.

That’s as much a comment on what’s wrong with media concerned with little else but their numbers of viewers, listeners and readers as it is on those viewers, listeners and readers.

Sometimes players are dragged into the mess, like Mohamed Salah was in Grozny on Sunday. Chechnya’s boorish oaf of a leader, Ramzan Kadyrov — who insists there are no gay men in his country, which may soon be true considering he has them tortured and executed — turned up at the Egypt team’s hotel and apparently insisted the sleeping Salah be woken up.

Then he posed for photographs with the player that rocketed around the world, leaving Salah to explain the how and why of his seemingly willing fraternisation with a vicious tyrant.

Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocratic, anti-democratic president, and Donald Trump, the dangerous buffoon Americans somehow chose to lead them, must have looked on in impotent rage and envy at Kadyrov’s naked chutzpah. 

It’s not only countries governed by criminals who use the cover of sport to try and hide what they’re up to, or at least give it a respectable face.

At a fan park in Lisbon before the Portugal-Spain game, a former lawyer and journalist and the godson of Portugal’s last fascist dictator stopped traffic and gathered a crowd around him. 

Well he might have: he was Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s centre-left president who doesn’t need to be asked twice to pose for a selfie with his beloved compatriots, who could easily be mistaken for voters.

As a woman in Lisbon said the other day: “Ah yes. The World Cup. Our politicians always wait for it to come before they force through unpopular legislation.”

She was from Düsseldorf in Germany, which is led by the ostensibly sane, outwardly decent Angela Merkel, patron saint of refugees everywhere.

This as much a comment on what’s wrong with media concerned with little else but the numbers of the viewers, listeners and readers they attract as it is on what’s wrong with those viewers, listeners and readers.

Which would be worse, a website putting up a video of Ashwin Willemse’s pet scorpion stinging the bejaysus out of a photograph of Nick Mallett, or people clicking on that video?

And how many more hits do you think this article would earn if the names of Willemse and Mallett were in the headline, nevermind that they have bugger nothing to do with this story? 

What the hell are we thinking? How can we allow something as comparatively unimportant as the World Cup to hijack our critical attention when we need it most?

Aside from the damage the tournament aids and abets in our society, the tournament doesn’t even do what it says on the tin.

The idea that we will, after the final in Moscow on July 15, know which is the best team in international football is outdated and laughably naive.

What we will know is which squad of players, arbitrarily chosen more often than not, who represent nothing except themselves and their teammates, have been more successful than 31 other but similar squads over the course of a particular month. Nothing more, nothing less.

How do we keep our eye on the real ball while the World Cup is here to distract us with fakery? By turning to Marx.

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.”

Yes, that’s Marx. Groucho Marx.

Time to face the painful truth: sport is bad for you

We think sport stars have the best bodies. But they are rarely free of pain and they age faster because they wear out exponentially more quickly.

Times Select

TELFORD VICE in Florence

HOW many 20-year-olds do you know who have to put their lives on hold for six weeks because of a knee injury? Or 23-year-olds who live for months with a spinal stress problem? Or 25-year-olds who have a shoulder wrenched out of shape?

The subjects of these calamities are not soldiers, bar brawlers or victims of domestic abuse. They are instead Damian Willemse, Kagiso Rabada and Mohamed Salah — stars of rugby, cricket and football, and apparently fine physical specimens of the human race.

Except that they’re not. They’re crocked. And they are far from the only people impaired, often permanently, by what they do for a living.

We think sport stars have the best bodies out there. Closer to the truth is that they are rarely free of pain, and that they age faster than we do because they wear themselves out exponentially more quickly.

Dale Steyn’s painful relationship with his right shoulder and left heel for more than two years now proves what doesn’t need proving: sport is bad for you, particularly if you play at the top level.

Stories about injuries are the bane of a sportswriter’s life; right up there with reporting on positive drug tests and trying to make players sound interesting when they say utterly forgettable things, which for almost all of them is almost all of the time.

But they’re paid to play. Not talk. Thing is, it can seem as if they are paid to learn the Latin names of those parts of their bodies that have been wrecked in the cause of trying to win.

The exceptionally articulate Steyn is a case in point, what with words like infraspinatus and coracoid tripping off his tongue as readily as bouncer and yorker.

You probably know your yorkers from your bouncers, but did you know the infraspinatus is, according to the medical books, “a thick triangular muscle”, “one of the four muscles of the rotator cuff” and that its major function is to “externally rotate the humerus [the bone that connects shoulder to elbow] and stabilise the shoulder joint”?

Or that the coracoid is “a small hook-like structure on the lateral edge of the superior anterior portion of the scapula [shoulder blade]” so-named because its name translates into “like a raven’s beak” in Greek, and that fracturing it is impressively difficult and unusual?

Steyn knows all that, and much more. Too much for a man of 34. In fast bowler’s years that’s about 68.

Unlike most players Steyn has spoken candidly of his frustration at the healing and rehabilitation process, and of his worry about hurting something else while he works to resolve the original problem.

“I go for a run up the mountain and I could get a hamstring injury,” he said in October, when he was emerging from his second major shoulder injury.

“Or I finally get over all of this and I go and roll my ankle getting out of the car.”

Close but not quite: less than three months later a freshly repaired Steyn tore a ligament off his left heel by stepping awkwardly into a foothole while bowling against India in the Newlands Test.   

Square one, here we go again …

More often heard than Steyn’s honesty is the kind of view expressed by boxer Ronda Rousey: “I’ve separated my shoulder and my collarbone; I’ve messed up my knee a million times. I’ve broken my foot in several places. I’ve broken my toe a bunch, broken my nose a couple of times, and had a bunch of other annoying little injuries, like turf toe [spraining the ligaments of the big toe] and arthritis and tendonitis. It’s part of the game.”

If self-harm was a crime you’d have a hard time getting that argument past a judge, and if you think that’s a reach consider that in December 2016 the US Supreme Court declined to hear appeals from former National Football League (NFL) players against a total settlement amount of US$1-billion the NFL offered previously concussed players to shut up and go away and take their brain damage with them.

A billion dollars sounds decent, but in March the players and the families of those who have died — some of diseases and conditions doctors have blamed on playing gridiron football — went back to court to file charges of fraud against the NFL for allegedly trying to delay payments, sometimes aggressively.

A month later the NFL lawyered up to argue that a special investigator be appointed to stop “widespread fraud from infecting” the settlement plan.

“Write your injuries in dust, your benefits in marble,” Benjamin Franklin said, and that’s happens almost without fail.

We record and remember players’ performances at length and in detail. But their injuries, the effects of which may linger long after they have graced the arena and entertained us royally, are invariably footnotes in their biographies.

It’s time we saw players for what they are: human before anything else, injuries and all, and deserving of more consideration on that score.

The other score? By comparison it matters nought.

Leo and Mo: What the Renaissance means for the World Cup

“Ramos! Bastardo!” – a Florence gelato seller on Sergio Ramos after his tackle on Mohamed Salah.

TELFORD VICE in Florence

ONE fine day in 1505 a genius and his assistant climbed Monte Ceceri, then an unwooded hill in Fiesole, a town outside Florence as beautiful as it is ancient, and tried to fly.

In fact only the assistant tried to fly. He was, according to some, Zoroastro da Peretola, the illegitimate son of Bernardo Rucellai, part of a rich and powerful family of Florentine wool merchants.

According to others Zoroastro’s real name was Tommaso di Giovanni Masini, and he was a common gardener’s son who cooked up his story of more exciting origins to ease access to the great and the good of Renaissance Florence.  

That seems closer to the truth: Rucellai was 13 when Zoroastro was born. What is not in dispute is that Rucellai was among the genius’ pupils.

The genius was Leonardo da Vinci, at the time of that day at Monte Ceceri in his 50s and with 20 years of interest and research into the mystery of flight smouldering in his mind.

The assistant, then, was expendable; a minion in the march towards the magnificence of a man whose ideas continue to capture the world’s imagination some 499 years after his death.

To Zoroastro was strapped a frame of lightweight wood covered in feathers, and of Leonardo’s design. Then the human-fuelled experiment stepped off the side of the hill. The spot he did so is marked today by a puzzlingly shaped cement bench: is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a feather? Is it even a bench? 

Remarkably, Zoroastro did not perish. He even flew — towards Florence for a kilometre, which was more than twice as far as the Wright brothers in a total of four attempts adding up to 411 metres 398 years later in what has come to be known as the first powered flight.

A happy ending? Not quite. Zoroastro broke both legs when he hit the ground.

That brings us to another, more modern genius. This one does his own flying. But he was also injured when he crashed to earth.

His name is Mohamed Salah, and he is in a race against time and the rapidly beating hearts of all 99-million Egyptians in Egypt — and the millions more around the world — to play in the World Cup in Russia. Salah’s team’s first game is against Uruguay in Yekaterinburg on June 15.

Egypt are in the tournament for only the third time and not since 1990. They are there not least because of Salah, who scored five of their eight goals in their six qualifiers.

Salah’s 32 goals for Liverpool led the English Premier League this season, and he was in those colours in the 30th minute of the Champions League final against Real Madrid in Kiev on Saturday when Sergio Ramos cut him down with a cynical challenge that resulted in a shoulder injury.

“Sometimes football shows you its good side and other times the bad,” Ramos tweeted on Sunday. “Above all, we are fellow pros. #GetWellSoon #MoSalah.”

That didn’t wash with an Egyptian-born gelato seller in Florence on Wednesday. At the empathetic mention of Salah’s injury he roared, “Ramos! Bastardo!”

He is not alone. A petition demanding Uefa take action against Ramos has garnered more than 500 000 signatures, and now the bloody lawyers are trying to make an offer that can’t be refused.

“Ramos intentionally injured Mo Salah and should be punished about his actions,” the suit behind the suit, Bassem Wahba, said on Egyptian television.

“I’ve filed a lawsuit and a complaint to Fifa. I’ll ask for compensation, which could exceed €1-billion (R14.6-billion), for the physical and psychological harm that Ramos gave Salah and the Egyptian people.”

Good luck, Mr Wahba. The world, including the non-Egyptian part of it — Spain and their fans excepted — no doubt wish you success.

If Wahba or indeed Salah need inspiration they could find it in other aspects of Zoroastro’s remarkable life.

He knew Leonardo since at least the 1490s, and besides grinding colours for some of his paintings he left a lasting impression in bizarre ways.

Nicknamed “Indovino”, or fortune teller, Zoroastro was considered by some an alchemist and a magician, and by others a mere blacksmith.

Leonardo wasn’t Zoroastro’s only fan. Dom Miguel da Silva, the Bishop of Viseo, wrote in a letter dated February 21, 1520, of a laboratory he had set up with “Indovino”:

“We make spheres which shine brilliantly and in which appear strange human figures with horns on their heads and crabs’ legs and a nose like a prawn.

“In an old fireplace we have made a furnace, built up with bricks, and here we distill and separate the elements of everything; and with these we extract the fire from a marine monster which forever burns and shines.

“In the middle of the room there is a large table cluttered with pots and flasks of all sorts, and paste and clay and Greek pitch and cinnabar, and the teeth of hanged men, and roots.

“There is a plinth made of sulphur polished up on a lathe, and on this stands a vessel of yellow amber, empty except for a serpent with four legs, which we take for a miracle.

“Zoroastro believes that some gryphon [a mythical dragon-like creature] carried it through the air from Libya and dropped it at the Mamolo bridge, where it was found and tamed by him.

“The walls of this room are all daubed with weird faces and drawings on paper, among which is one of a monkey who is telling stories to a crowd of rats who are attentively listening, and a thousand other things full of mystery.”

Good drugs? Maybe. Salah could use some to make it to Russia.