Ephrem Endale
Contributer
The EPL will wind up a week from today who the champions would be a done deal. Under normal circumstances football lovers would feel gloomy as it would mean no more EPL for a couple of months. You aren’t far off the mark to suspect this writer is somewhere in that long list. But then this time around you feel maybe we need, like the players do, time for reflection and tidying up our actions. Recent unsocial behavior on the part of some so-called fans back here leads to say, “Yes we need a couple of ants of quite, just for the sake of not letting things go back to square one.
A couple of weeks back the Arsenal team lost an important game practically dashing hopes of becoming the season’s champions. “So what?” one might ask. Well it would have been the right question given the things that happened in town didn’t. One you tube site presented a waitress who was struck in the face by a crazed Arsenal fan angry that his team has lost. The lady has for now lost sight I one of her eyes and has multiple stiches on her face. In some places, so we were told, there were ugly scenes.
Had it not been the simple case of football well, we might have second thoughts talking about it. But the talk is that football betting has spread so wide that many youth are being ensnared in gambling. In fact I heard that a person bet tens of thousands with another person saying Arsenal will beat Brighton and he now is a complete shambles. There are official betting …that have legal…. Now concerns had been raised when the green light was given for sport betting. In fact many loudly argued this was not a brilliant move. In times when what happens behind closed doors is wreaking havoc openly allowing betting would be disastrous.
This time it’s not only about unruly youth knocking each other’s teeth out all over the place. Of course we thought the days of hooliganism over football matches which take place across the seas were over. They were! The only thing is we don’t seem to let them stay in that state! So when once again news of disturbances is heard doesn’t blame us for feeling let down. After all, we are in times and in a country where there are issues after issues which need our attentions and we can’t abuse time in issues as trivial. The Gunners being beaten beyond recognition or Man United are humiliated by some team at the rear end of the table.
This time the betting game, or gambling (because whatever name we give it however flashy the promotional campaign is it is gambling) one of the nastiest words in the dictionary, you might add. Many households have been torn apart, people who squandered their lives’ savings devastated, and children forced to grow up in a dysfunctional family. And now under our very eyes our youth are being taken on a ride by the habit.
Today it might be about soccer, tomorrow it would be a far more serious and more dangerous thing. That young lady, and I think mother of one, asks one important question “What am I going to do now?” She said the job of being a waitress demands presentable, clean personality and with so many stitches disfiguring her face no one would employ her. It’s sad. An unruly youngster who was all worked because Arsenal lost and failed to control his dangerous emotions and turned the young woman into a victim.
While we’re at it do you ever wonder why mostly two teams or one of them feature in all the wild hooliganism back here? After all EPL is a league of twenty teams. Then why is it always the names of Arsenal and/or Manchester United crops up? Ask many so-called diehard fans and you’d be lucky if they name you half of the teams in the league. So saying it’s about the love of football would be missing the real issue by a margin of a Continent and ocean. Who’s to blame? That’s a very tough question for which it’d be impossible to find an answer to which most of us would agree. It’s an issue which needs real research. But then that doesn’t mean we’re out of possible ideas.
I, for one feel the sport press especially the electronics section shares some of the blame. Every time the two or one of them is in the news many journalist try to make some breaking news out of the most common happenings you see in many football games on whatever level. A goal by Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka is not like a goal by any other player; forget the brilliance of the player behind the goal; it’s his name that matters not how he put the ball into the net. In some ways reporting on especially the EPL and to some extent the Spanish league La Liga seems to have one foot into the very sport soccer and the other elsewhere. I’m not ignoring the neck to neck scramble to attract sponsors. They say there is some real history over there. This heavily weighs on the ethics of sport journalism.
By the way the conventional wisdom is that sake we don’t have many ‘sports’ journalists; we have soccer journalists. Even there the holes all over the place are so wide you might pardon the public of having all the wrong ideas about that particular sport. Much of the reporting comes from translated dispatch from elsewhere. Here is where the problem lies. Many in the profession seem to be lacking in those skills. So, quite a lot of translated versions are so horrendously mangled it’s as if you’re reading two different dispatches in the English and Amharic versions.
By the way our sports media has its own analysts; yes, they do. And like many so-called ‘political’ analysis they give you little or flawed narratives which are all empty, meaningless words and nothing else. I mean there is so much arrogance, and ignorance on the part of many so-called political analysts you wonder if this world would ever come together on equal terms to make our planet a better place for all of us. We only hope the sports media smoothen up their rough edges and the so-called sports analysts talk nothing but sports and sports only.
Lastly back to the unruly behavior that cost a young woman part of her sight there is an Amharic pun which says “Sayikatel Bekitel” more or less meaning better to take preventive actions before damages occur.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD SUNDAY EDITION 21 MAY 2023