Tariq Panja at the New York Times is one of the world’s most widely written sports journalists; he is a digger, football expert, etc. He has written numerous articles and several books about financial trickery, not least in world football. That competence is not to be trifled with. Stationed in football’s current financial epicenter, London, he looks out over the biggest global sport: Football.
I still have a little difficulty understanding why he becomes the supporting link and voice when SVT, Johan Kükükaslan and Marcus Österling are to summarize the soccer World Cup in Qatar with the traditional World Cup annual report. Given the truth that he boils everything down to in his closing remarks, they could pretty much have asked anyone (almost).
The Emir of Qatar places at the award ceremony a black coat, a bisht, over the shoulders of the Argentinian Lionel Messi (bisht is a traditional Arab coat) and this Tariq Panja sees as “the icing on the cake”, he believes that this is what it was all about: Establishing Qatar as a world nation for sports.
According to him, the symbolism of this bisht was enormous, in many other Western and Swedish media they also talked about a “coup” by the emir. Crikey. I thought the coup was at least 12-13 years back, more precisely on December 2, 2010, when the corrupt Fifa boss Sepp Blatter opened the envelope in which Qatar was appointed as the 2022 World Cup host.
Yes, the purpose of this whole monstrous investment, both in money and in human life, that Qatar made was surely a way to put themselves on the map – but surely that is an ambition Qatar shares with pretty much every organizer of a championship, no matter how big whatever it is and whatever sport it is. Why else would you stand as an organizer?
Johan Kükükaslan walks around Qatar and remembers his and our football World Cup, and he begins by calling the Qatar World Cup (the 22nd in a row) the most controversial sporting event in history.
Well, well, maybe. Most of us didn’t want to see a World Cup in a dictatorship like Qatar at all (in the winter, too), but the legitimate and concerned criticism also increasingly turned into something of a rather sullen old-colonial gaze from especially us in the West (the rest of the world did not put much energy into the political aspect). Arab money had, as it were, acquired a different scent than green fine clean dollars from, for example, American billiard players on a shopping spree to buy up European football clubs.
In the middle of the World Cup, India’s foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, when he and his country were criticized for their meager support for Ukraine and Europe, said something very thoughtful, which also touched a bit on our view of Qatar and the Arab world: “Europe must grow out of the notion that Europe’s problems are always the world’s problems, but that the world’s problems are rarely Europe’s problems.”
I wish that a World Cup chronicle on television would raise other thoughts than these, but, alas.
Incidentally, the chronicle was nice and friendly, rushed through the group games – perhaps Kükükaslan & Co could have put more effort into analyzing, for example, the significance of the amazing Moroccan trip to the semi-finals. The political explosiveness of their encounters with old colonial masters such as Spain and France, for example, was enormous.
Best in the column was sports poet Peter Drury’s English framing, the legendary Premier League commentator certainly crosses all the boundaries of the pechoral at times – but as he does!
When he pushes all the buttons and emotions, and dresses them in his most beautiful language costume, well then you are with him all the way, absorbed in the sport and the beauty and everything that a player or a team stands for. You remember clearly why it is such a privilege to have your own team.
Read more sport-in-television columns by Johan Croneman:
We are like hyenas when someone is to be crucified
Injured by the audience – what’s going on?
2023-05-06 08:10:00
#Johan #Croneman #truth #SVTs #chronicle #lost
