I'm not a soccer fan, but this New York Times piece on women's soccer and fans is worth reading.
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As for the actual playing, he said: “The women are whining less. They’re not lying around on the field. And they’re going to attack. They’re not afraid to lose.”
Ghitta Jansen, a hybrid Canadian-Dutch fan in the crowd — born in Holland, now living in Canada, in Reims for the match — had her own views about high-paid male soccer players.
“They are primadonnas, rolling around like the world’s coming to an end,” she said. ‘“You kicked my foot and now you hurt my ego,’” she continued. “Get up and do your job.”
In men’s soccer, the joy of the fans from one country is usually inversely related to the unhappiness of the fans from the opposing team. Partying can segue into violence and ugliness. Things get broken. People get beaten up.
But it was impossible not to be caught up in the benign giddiness of the Dutch as they danced and swayed and chanted and sang and conga-lined their way behind the orange double-decker bus that has served as the country’s rolling mascot for the last two decades — first for just the men’s matches, and now for the women’s, too. When their beloved team beat Canada, the band even struck up a rendition of “O Canada” to salute the vanquished.
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every now and again sport can be important
Here for some girls and for their people.
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Adams, like so many Mohawk women here, could rattle off the alarming statistics. Eighty-four percent of American Indian and Alaska Native women have endured physical, sexual or psychological violence in their lifetime, according to the National Institute of Justice. One in three has been raped or suffered a rape attempt, twice the national average, according to the Justice Department.
The National Crime Information Center in 2016 reported 5,217 missing indigenous women, with only 116 cases logged in the Justice Department’s missing persons database. The epidemic has been attributed to a number of factors, including institutional racism, lack of resources for tribal law enforcement and jurisdictional issues on reservation lands.
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17:55 in General Commentary, just cool, Sports | Permalink | Comments (0)