Suddenly, there are all these football matches, I mean soccer games, at the little stadium behind our house. You know there's going to be a match when, Sunday morning, an Algida umbrella appears and then they start testing the sound system for an hour, first with explosions of the national anthem when they're discovering it's too loud, then intermittent bursts of Shakira and Turkish pop.
Usually the turnout is okay. They let the local fans in first, and then about 20 minutes after kickoff, the other team's fans are allowed in. I guess there must be a history of inter-fan shenanigans, because the ratio of away team fans to cops is about 2 to 1. And usually we know who the away team is, because they bring a banner. A couple of weekends ago it was Eyüp Spor. Then it was a team whose banner just had a slogan I couldn't make sense of, but I'm sure it was very manly and supportive and stuff.
Because the Sarıyer Spor's training field is off the other side of our balcony, I know those guys work their asses off, in all weather, every night after work until around midnight. I mean, I'm assuming they have day jobs, since I'm guessing an illustrious career with Sarıyer Spor doesn't pay the bills unless they all live with their parents and don't pay bills.
Still, this past rainy, freezing Sunday, I don't think I would have felt very good if I had been playing for the away team.
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| They didn't even have a banner. And I guess the cops decided to knock off for the day. |
10 comments:
Oh yes, friendly messages on banners -- especially for the visiting fans -- are the norm here. Here's an example.
Hee!
I've never really got football despite the fact that the beautiful game was invented in England and remains a national obsession (and the national team remains a national disgrace). 22 grown men running around a muddy field in the depths of winter chasing a leather ball. What's that about?
I have to say, though, I don't mind one bit the 22 grown men racing around and doing their calisthenics every evening... Too bad they don't play shirts and skins here!
Well a look at fan videos shows fandom really isn't about the game. This for example. That could have been about any mass movement of any sort -- the game seems incidental.
It is different when you are playing though. I think the attraction is that it doesn't take and gear to play and the skills required to enjoy playing it are minimal. If we had hoops in our neighbourhoods basketball would have been just as popular here (and perhaps elsewhere).
It's my theory that basketball has overtaken baseball in popularity in the US mostly because there aren't many large enough open spaces in cities to get an impromptu baseball game going (a vacant lot, for example), where all you need for a pick up game of basketball is a bit of concrete and a net.
Football (soccer) has always been a middle class (and up) sport in the US anyway, and was hardly popular until the late 70s or early 80s, and then it was only kids in organized leagues playing on rented fields. It's only that those kids have grown up now that the sport endures somehow. I don't think I've ever seen American kids playing soccer in the street or in whatever little space they could find...
As for fandom (having just watched a bit of that video), it's my theory that football fandom has taken the place in people's (dare I say males') hearts of medieval city-state skirmishing, and that professional sports just fill the gladiator hole, though perhaps more humanely.
I don't know if it is primarily a male thing. It makes [conventional?] sense for it to be that way but I have some anecdotal evidence to the contrary. One thing I noticed when playing (mixed) soccer in the US was how physical the women would get. Shoulders hits to the rib cage (easy to do when you are 2/3rd my size) dangerous dives etc. all came from women. I remember trying to figure out whether I should keep my own game clean or turn Turkish-style cirkef myself the first time it happened to me. You are talking about fandom, of course, but it carries over as it does in other things. It may have something to do with the nature of the thinking/approach than the sex of the subject. (I deliberately avoided saying 'gender' here since, perhaps, it can be argued that those are male-ish things even when done by women. Dunno. Beyond my depth.) Nationalism works that way too. On the issue of the questionable things uttered on national TV during the quake coverage, at least two female anchors got into trouble for example. For something that ties the city-state thing with female fandom, here's a female announcer more or less inciting street violence between people from Trabzon living Bursa and Bursa fans: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0IJ4QIpSsA
Ah, my flippancy has caused me to stumble into, I think, the same trap my grandmothers did when they were mocking the bra-less feminists-- is it male-ness that keeps the White Guelphs at the Black Guelphs throats, or would the women have participated more if there weren't other social constraints keeping them at home? To say it was anything other than social constraints (or babies) is the same as saying women are somehow genetically marked to stay at home and be nice and clean and not swear and not go to football matches and raise hell with the boys.
Which I'm not entirely comfortable with. For me to feel like the whole football violence thing is a bunch of silliness could just be socialization and I wouldn't know.
Now, in mixed sports, I think a lot of women know sneaky physical fouling is one of the tools in our pockets when the men are usually bigger, stronger, and faster, and loathe to "hit a girl." When I played water polo in high school (one of three girls in the region, apparently), I definitely abused the right of sneaky, underwater fouling because I knew the boys (mostly) wouldn't hit back, and if they did, the ref would come down harder on them. If I had to get the ball from someone bigger, stronger, and faster than me (which was mostly everyone), a bit of "surprise!" was my only tactic and it totally made them drop the ball.
When I played women's water polo in college (intramural, mind you-- not competitive), I came out of those games far more bruised and bloodied than I ever did with the boys. I'll never know if the boys played like that with each other (but not with me), or if the girls were just meaner, but my dislike of the whole thing is one of many reasons I'm not an athlete of any kind. Also I pretty much suck at sports.
There are obviously genetic/hormonal etc. differences and their effects might manifest themselves in various ways but I highly doubt whatever those ways are, they are what customs dictate they are. Mixed sports, co-ed schools, equal-ish opportunity help get the point across through our thick cranial bones by providing personal experience. If I didn't have a sis, classmates, friends and colleagues who were better than me (both in evident aptitude and accomplishment) in what some claim are male things (math, science, engineering etc.) probably no amount of well-meant indoctrination would have convinced me that conventional thinking was flawed.
You are right about competitive sports that involve physical contact. If a referee is truly needed to call/stop the fouling involved, the players are probably too nasty and sportsmanship is there in name only. OTOH, such interactions do exist and are perhaps inevitable. I know I have done somewhat permanent damage to at least one person (stitches around the eyebrow) through retaliatory fouling that didn't quite work the way I thought/hoped it would. (Shameless excuse: I hoped to get the guy in his solar plexus and didn't know he was shoving me w/o jumping for the rebound.) Had it been a formally refereed game, many fouls would have been called before it got to the point where I lost my head.
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