Do you care as little as I do about the paucity of Asian players at high levels in English football? I care about this issue even less than I care about what happens to my nose hairs after I’ve trimmed them and sent them down the plughole; even less than I care about the family relations of the slugs in my strawberry patch; even less than I care about what the temperature is going to be in Bogota at 3am next Tuesday.
Why do I care so little that there hardly any Asians – none, really – at high levels in English football? Because it doesn’t matter a damn, is why. No more am I bothered by it than I am by, say, the absence of white women in sumo wrestling, or the domination of Mah Jong by Chinese, or the woeful lack West Indians on the professional darts circuit.
For any number of cultural, historical and social reasons, certain sports just happen to attract particular racial groups. No one is being “discriminated” against. (No one’s stopping white people competing against East Africans in long distance running; or Nigerians from competing against Orientals at ping-pong). It’s simply a question of people making choices, based on tradition and culture and differing physical characteristics, as people are wont to do in a free society. What it definitely is not is any kind of problem.
Unless, of course, you’re former BBC Director General Greg Dyke who took over last year as chairman of the Football Association and appears to be on a holy mission to make it as politically correct as he did the BBC. At the BBC he once infamously complained that the organisation was “hideously white” and set about enforcing quota systems for black and ethnic minorities. Now he is trying to do the same for English football by launching a recruitment drive for Asian talent.
It began shortly after he joined the FA last year – with the help of the FA’s “inclusion projects co-ordinator Kevin Coleman.” (Yes. You read that aright. The Football Association, traditional home of the least PC sport on the planet apart from foxhunting, cock-fighting and bear-baiting, now actually employs an inclusion projects co-ordinator. Called Kevin).
Yesterday Sky News thrilled viewers with repeat broadcasts of an immensely tedious update on the FA’s battle to combat the “chronic under-representation of Asians in top level English football”, with footage of earnest oiks from the FA touring the country talking to groups of Indian- and Pakistani-looking types to urge them to play more footie.
But why on earth should any of us be expected to support this racist and discriminatory measure? When football fans cheer on their team, they do so because they want them to win not because they want them to be the team in the premier league with the most enlightened anti-discrimination policy or the most diverse ethnic make-up. (And the same applies to TV. Most viewers don’t give a stuff about the ethnicity of the people on the screen. What they want is TV programmes that aren’t rubbish).
Greg Dyke, though, wouldn’t understand. He is an arch exponent of the Common Purpose school of thinking, whereby left-wing goals like “sustainability”, “diversity”, “social justice” and so on are expected to take priority over all else.
He did it at the BBC and now he’s doing it at the FA, an organisation so heavily infiltrated with politically-correct placemen – see eg here – it now bears hardly any relationship with the English football most fans know and love. Rather it’s just been turned into another branch of the BBC/Labour Party/Guardian Cultural Marxist axis.
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