Football Morality

After the match, the news trailed a clip of a bellowing football commentator, struggling to make himself heard above the din celebrating the last-minute winning goal scored by the footballer now nicknamed - get this - the Golan Heights (for the heights achieved by Omer Golan in scoring that goal)! The commentator repeats, exuberantly & incredulously:

Israel has done England “a favour to end all favours”

Afterwards, during a radio phone-in about the game, a grateful caller (who stressed he was neither Israeli nor Jewish) tried to say something about how he hoped that we would now stop demonizing and vilifying Israel; but the Boycott Boosting Corp came into its own & he was cut off in mid-call by the show's host, on the basis that politics shouldn't be brought into this.

I wonder, though - remembering what Camus once quipped about how the best lessons of morality and the duty of man are learned through football. Here in Boycotting Britannia, we have shown ourselves to be in desperate need of some lessons in duty & morality, obviously, what with our unions having so spectacularly fallen foul of protections against discrimination & racism.

I glanced through some of the talk-backs in The Sun on the game - quite a discovery, this is indeed a first! In addition to finding with some amusement how one thread seems to have been taken over by Hebrew-speakers, I was pleased to note how one poster (Elvis) seems to have been transformed by the experience: before the game, he'd gone for a Protocols take on the situation (or should that now be W&M?!), imagining the match was going to be fixed by Jewish money, with some footie-mad Russian, with cash to spare, pulling the strings to rig England's chances & boost those of Russia. After the game, the same Elvis was all sweetness and light, in a clipped sort of way, in thanks to Israel. (Graun - of course! - made much the same Jewish conspiracy insinuation in one of its pre-match sports blogs... Seriously!)

Camus was apparently referring to:

an ethic of sticking up for your friends, of valuing courage and fair-play

believing that people

try to confuse us with convoluted moral systems to suit their own agendas

when we

may do better to look to the simple morality of the football field than to politicians and philosophers

... and especially, bien sure, boycotting academics!

Let's hope the qualities of friendship, courage & fair-play demonstrated this week-end retakes the field and that the simple morality of football will replace the shameful & petty posturing of the boycotting academics still trying to ruin our union and our academy to suit their own agendas.

One of the lovely BBA Forumniks does well to remind us that the academic boycott is a zombie, apparently possibly about to rear its ugly ahead again. And there's still the silent boycott which, no doubt, informally or unofficially precedes & succeeds this whole disgraceful debacle over UCU Motion 30. Let's hope we'll learn the lessons of morality & duty suggested by the football mania of this week-end and that the favour Israel did for England will be one to end all boycotts!