Football on the rise for both sexes in NZ

The national game in New Zealand, as you probably know, is rugby. And it's a blokes' game. Or rather it used to be. In fact there are plenty of women throughout the country playing rugby just as fiercely and energetically as their male counterparts.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Saturday morning game one of my grandsons was playing in. His position is hooker, that guy who dangles between two props in the scrum. And this fellow really does dangle because he's small for his age. Some of my friends won't believe this, but I actually played hooker myself way back when I actually played rugby. But unlike my grandson, who's in there boots and all, I wasn't cut out for the game. Half the time the players from the opposite team would wind up covered in blood when we went down in a scrum: my blood, because my nose would bleed at the drop of a hat. Even if my nose hadn't bled, I still preferred indoor sports, with the less physical contact the better.

It was interesting that the visiting team in this particular game had one girl player in it. And she was very good: she had speed, and she was excellent at kicking goals. She could have been easily hurt by some of the bigger boys in either team, but she seemed to manage to keep out of their way - or perhaps they avoided her, because I think even in boys of that age there's an inbuilt sense that girls won't take the impacts a boy might.

Courtesy NZ Football

I said at the beginning that rugby is our national game, but soccer, it appears, is rapidly catching up. And of course there are girls in soccer too, and plenty of them. (The National women's team is called the Football Ferns; the men's is the All Whites, in contrast to the internationally-known men's rugby team, the All Blacks.)

One of my other grandsons used to play in a team when he was younger that had girls as well as boys in it. Now that the boys are bigger I think the sexes are separated off into their own teams. But girls' teams are catching on fast. There was a photo in the sports pages of the newspaper a couple of days ago promoting girls' soccer, in fact.

Which was part of the reason that I decided that the main character in my latest children's fantasy, The Disenchanted Wizard, would be a girl who plays soccer - with a passion. And also idolises Xanadu Whitworth, the top player in the city. At the beginning of the story, Della, the soccer player, is putting up an enormous poster of Xanadu in her bedroom. Her younger cousin Harold thinks Xanadu's smile is probably photoshopped. Della scoffs at the idea, and it turns out, in due course, that she's right to scoff. But she's wrong about some of the other things Harold has to say...

Football, anyone?

There's a site that offers all sorts of football invitations, in the States.  I can't quite imagine why you'd need to invite people to football.  There seems to be more than enough people go to the games as it is without inviting more.  

But plainly the owners of this site don't think that way, and you can see all sorts of examples of invitations you could give out to friends, relatives, and the uninitiated - the unconverted, you might say.   (The idea has a sort of evangelical quality about it.)

Admittedly, the invitations don't have to be to an actual game, but to a party, or a barbeque with a football theme, or even to watch the football in the comfort of your home, surrounded by mates and beer.

American football is a neverending mystery to anyone outside the States; it seems as though there must be some logic to it, and some plan (the movies always give us that impression without actually telling us what they're doing) but at the end of the day, watching this game is like watching a couple of herds of elephants running at each other after bowing their tusks to the ground.  And the injury rate is pretty much as high as it would be if elephants were playing.

Still rugby isn't different in terms of obscurities (more obscure than ever with all the changes that have been made) and the injury rate is just as high amongst the professionals - and they don't wear any of the protection that the Yanks cover themselves with.   Are we tougher?  Nah, probably just think we are.

Some rambling thoughts about incomes

In a tweet sent out yesterday, Steven Croft, self-described as the Bishop of Sheffield and a writer, said the following:

Every person is of equal value before God. So there is something wrong in a world where a boss is paid 300x more than some employees.

Now to me there's a bit of a concern here as to what Bishop Croft is saying.   Certainly we are all equal before God when it comes to being created humans, responsible for what we do with our lives and all equally responsible for our sins.  But I don't think God regards our situation in life to be necessarily equal. Some of us are given power, some are not. Some are given fame, some are not. Some are given obscurity, some skills, some gifts, some a seeming lack of gifts. God may have set out things that each and every human being should have had the ability to make an enormous difference in the world, but it doesn't appear to have been the case in the actual world we live in. That may be a result of the Fall (not the Autumn, US readers, but the theological Fall), and if it is, it's something we have to live with. (Things may be altogether different in that regard in the New World to come.)

That's the first point about this tweet. The second is 'there is something wrong in a world' etc. Steven, we know there is something wrong, but it hardly just consists of somebody being paid an enormous amount of money compared to other people. There are innumerable inequalities in this area: in the last century film stars have invariably been paid extraordinary amounts by comparison with the extras in the same movies. This is because their talent is highly regarded. We may think they're overpaid, but I haven't yet seen anyone setting up tents and protesting about the money film stars receive.*  

In other areas of the arts, we find top musicians highly paid for the talents and for the gifts they offer to the public.   The man who moves the piano on the night of the concert is important, but he doesn't get paid an equivalent amount, and wouldn't expect to.

Some top painters, sculptors and others are well paid. Those who supply their materials are not. I think Steven Croft seems to be promoting a kind of evening out of income with an issue that's only partly related to it.

And then there are footballers, rugby players who get extraordinary amounts of money, often, it seems, for a small amount of actual work. But are we to decide that the linesmen, the referees should also be paid in the same way?  Unlikely. 

I don't disagree that we're all appalled at the arrogance of bankers and those in the high-flying money-transacting fields. But it began because somebody felt it was right to pay these people for their expertise. It's got well and truly out of hand, and I don't disagree that from my perspective they're exceedingly overpaid. (But then I think many film stars are exceedingly overpaid, too.)

But even that isn't the issue. The issue is that having begun by rewarding good work in the financial field it has become a race to see who can be paid most. In the interim, those being paid these fantastic amounts have done what many people who come into a great deal of money do: expect more money, and thumb their noses at those who have no means to expect more money - those who are paid '300x' times less than the one at the top. And in thumbing their noses they also begin to do illegal things, wrongful things, sinful things - and not just under the cover, but out in the open where everyone can see. This is their arrogance, and this is as much what people hate about them as the fact that they get a great deal more money than the average worker.

This hate has turned to protest. But the protest is more about the kind of 'Old Boys' Network' that seems to encourage the greed and arrogance, and helps out those who have got themselves into financial straits with other people's money, never their own, rather than about the fact that some people get far more money for what they do than others. 

One of the difficulties at the other end of the scale is that if you have no talents, no experience, no skills, you have nothing in particular to offer to an employer except your body and what it might do for that employer. Consequently your employer is entitled to pay the 'minimum wage' because he or she is not getting any great value for money when they employ such people. For me, this is perhaps a bigger issue than trying to rationalise why talented people get large amounts of money. How can the employing world help those who start off with nothing in the way of employable skills gain them? We used to have a strong apprentice system; before that there were guilds that took on young people and trained them. (Now, too often, we train the young people separately from the employment situation and then expect them to find a niche for themselves in the world.) But apprenticeships are few and far between; many employers can't fund them and the Government, in this country at least, seems to think the apprenticeship system isn't worth putting money into. 

I could go on and on. Essentially what I'm trying to say is that Bishop Croft is being too simplistic (perhaps Twitter encourages that). Even the protesters out in their tents are being simplistic (they're focusing mostly on one aspect of the problem). I suspect finding ways of lifting those at the bottom of the employment pile up and out of their catch 22 situation is more important than getting angry at those at the top. Their day of reckoning will come - and has been seen to, more than once.


Photo by Images of Money from Flickr.com

*Since I wrote this there has been the occasional female actor complaining that male actors in the same film get far more than she does. How valid the case is, is another story. 

Miscellaneous

Alan Jacobs, who tweets a good deal on all sorts of things, and probably should be getting on with his real writing more often, sent a wonderful Tweet during the early days of the Soccer World Cup:

This ball might as well be an Elgin Marble, so incapable are the Greeks of retaining possession of it.

I only remembered about this because I've been keeping a list of various items I want to use at some point in the blog, or elsewhere. They're a pretty random bunch, and it's hard to think how I'd place Jacobs' line otherwise than by just plunking it down on the page.

Here's something totally different, relating to the number of bags that are lost annually by air companies. (By the way, if you travel a lot and want to prevent hair loss from stress, don't read the following!)

Apparently 25 million items of luggage are misplaced globally each year, or one bag per 100 passenger. Pretty scary. We've only ever had one bag go astray, and that was between Dunedin and Wellington last year. We stayed in Wgtn for a couple of days, but the bag still didn't manage to get there. Finally we carried onto Napier, our next destination, and somehow or other (since Air NZ didn't know we were going there) the bag managed to get there ahead of us!

So when do bags go missing? Here are the stats:

- Transfer baggage mishandling (52 per cent)

- Failure to load (16 per cent)

- Passenger bag switch/security/ticketing error (13 per cent)

- Loading/offloading (7 per cent)

- Airport/customs/weather/space-weight restriction (6 per cent)

- Arrival station mishandling (3 per cent)

- Tagging errors (3 per cent)

It's those transfers that are the big problem. I watched a bunch of guys throwing (yup, that's how it's done) bags onto a trolley while waiting for my plane to move onto the next destination a few weeks ago. None of the bags were checked in terms of whether they should have been taken off the plane or not. In fact, the guys didn't look at the labels at all. No wonder things go astray.

Sixty Six

The other night I discovered that we had a DVD on our shelves called Sixty Six, a movie I hadn't even heard of. My wife had bought it at some point unbeknowns to me.

It turned out to be oddball, funny and quite original. And it had Helena Bonham Carter in one of her 'mother' roles (as in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), which was a bonus. She has considerably more to do in this than in 'Charlie' and is a somewhat tougher mother (and Jewish). Eddie Marsen was the Jewish father - he's an actor you seldom know about in spite of his strange face - he was Inspector Lestrade in the recent Sherlock Holmes, and has appeared in plenty of movies, but is usually one of the lesser characters.

In this movie he plays the downtrodden of two brothers who run a grocer's shop that, early in the piece, is wiped out by a supermarket opening just up the road (all their customers abandon them in spite of years of hard work). His brother is full of jokes, full of beans, full of life. A go-getter within his own small sphere. Eddie's character is the opposite in every way, and a little eccentric, to boot.

The main character - and the narrator - is a boy just coming up to his Barmitzvah. He's planning on having the most amazing Barmitzvah ever, with plenty of presents, and lots of people. Unfortunately, it coincides with the final of the Football World Cup. England shouldn't even get in the final...but it does, and young Bernie's Barmitzvah is pretty much down the tubes.

Bernie (played by Gregg Sulkin) has everything going against him, just like his father. He has a snazzy older brother (though he's not actually very bright, unlike Bernie), he gets asthma when he's stressed, he's hopeless at sports, and so on. But he's a clued-up kid, and doesn't intend to let disappointment get him down. The crisis, of course, brings out the best in all the family members.

The story is supposedly based on director Paul Weiland's own family circumstances, but it's very likely the family has been a little eccentricated for the movie. Weiland seems to have spent most of his career working with Mr Bean - which will explain some of the humour in this movie, though by no means all - and overall he has a sure hand on the direction.

Small scale, not particularly action-packed, this is a gem of a movie. I'm surprised I've never come across it before...!

More on Boise

Some time ago, when the Iraqi war first started, there was a briefly famous blog, called, if I remember rightly, Where is Raed? Now, rather oddly, that phrase became a kind of catch-cry around the Net when Raed himself disappeared for a few days, after having reported on life in the midst of all the bombing and fighting of the first days of the war. (Remember, those were the days when we thought it might be over in a couple of weeks.)

I can remember myself feeling some emotion about the fate of this guy, as did thousands of other bloggers around the world. Well, Raed resurfaced as good as new, and is still going strong. Raed still gives some interesting insights into life in Baghdad, as he always has done.

Which leads me in a very roundabout way to my next point. Boise again. What, that unpronounceable spot?

Yup. Boise got in the news recently for a similar reason that Raed did. Well, sort of.
Someone called Chrissy Popadics has found Internet fame not because of who she is so much as because of who she’s affianced to. (Always wanted to use that word!) Her man is the Boise State Union’s star running back Ian Johnson (of the Bronco football team). His team had a stunning win the other day, with the result that Johnson became an Internet star; that is, searches for him rose a mere 1401%. Johnson proposed to the previously unheard of Chrissy Popadics, a cheerleader for the team, at the end of the game, and the rest is history. Chrissy Popadics suddenly became a face and a name across the known world. In fact, she may have outdistanced her fiancé in the search engines.

Life in Boise is obviously never dull. In fact it’s so un-dull that people are moving there by the truckload. You wanna buy a house in that unpronounceable place? Better get in quick, because it’s a sellers’ market, and you’ll be lucky to find anything under half a million, so Boise Real Estate tells us. The picture to the side is a half a million dollar (that’s US dollars) house.

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