A
Few Thoughts About The True International Language
by
Philip MADDEN
When
I was growing up in England I was never really interested
in football.
All the way through my childhood and teenage years I never
tried to get into
a team or even cared about it, and apart from one season
when my father
took me to see most of Rotherham Uniteds home games,
I never waited
for Saturday to come so I could dash off to a stadium
somewhere ,and
join others in shouting and jeering at grown men kicking
a ball around
a field.
Everything
changed when I came to Turkey. Whenever people of different
cultures
and national backgrounds meet there is, apart from the
usual linguistic
difficulties, a problem of conversational topic, because
of the barriers
of culture, religion or ethnicity. I have encountered
this many times
in my initial dealings with newly met Turks, a sort of
embarrassment,
a desire not to offend by making an inappropriate remark
to a
foreigner, yet at the same time a willingness to forge
a friendship. It is
here that football comes to the rescue.
Even
if you do not follow a specific team, or even like the
sport, because you
are a member of the human race at the beginning of the
21st century you
cannot hide from the phenomenon that is football. Simply
put it is everywhere,
and because it knows no border, has no religion or political
stance
it is accessible to all. So I would be asked at the start
of a conversation,
"Do you know Galatasaray?" or “What do
you think of our Hakan Sukur?”
and from there the conversation would lead to Manchester
United and
Fenerbahce and so on and so on.
Although these conversations were markedly
dull for me for there Turkish practioners they served
the function
of an easy way to communicate with a foreigner in their
own country,
and also a cheap way to practice their English.
In
class students would ask me who my favorite team was and
I, in an effort
to keep them interested in what was going on in the classroom
would
give them the name of a well known English team just to
keep the conversation
alive.
I
would ask them who they supported (CIM BOM!! Nine times
out of ten!!)
and so we were speaking football not English. In my social
life it became
the basis of conversation and to my amazement I was starting
to follow
the happenings in the football world, which team had recently
signed
which player, who was top of the league, who was the lead
goal scorer
in the country. Football had been a tool to establish
a link with students
and friends, but now it was becoming an obsession.
In
2000 the awful and shameful events that took place in
Istanbul, where two
Leeds fans were murdered for no good or valid reason changed
my attitude
towards football and in some ways my dealings with Turks.
I had to
listen to people tell me it was the fault of the two Englishmen
that they
had been stabbed, this is Turkey, they would say, we are
like this they
would not listen when I suggested that perhaps the two
unfortunates had
nothing wrong except be in the wrong place at the wrong
time. No I was wrong
I was told. Football was no longer an easy linkmaker,
it was know a matter
of the unacceptable and defending what cannot be defended:
murder.
Also
that year Galatasaray beat the English team Arsenal on
penalties to win
the UEFA cup and all talk and discussion of the killing
of the two Leeds
fans faded from the conversation of my Turkish friends.
Instead it was
replaced by strangers chanting Galatasaray football songs
in the street
at me, or writing graffiti on the door of my flat. The
reaction made
me feel that I did not belong here, that I would always
be a foreigner
that people were measuring their patriotism against their
partisan
football feelings. It was like Turkey had fought a war
against Britain
and had won and not what it really was: a football match
against a
team based in England and a team based in Turkey and which
both contained
Brazilians, Romanians, Frenchmen, Irishmen, Swedes and
Argentinians.
Things
have settled down since then. This year nobody as mentioned
football
to me at all, probably because of the decline of Galatasaray
As
both the dominant force in Turkey, and as an unpredictable
threat in Europe.
I discourage my students from trying to bring up the topic
of sport
in the classroom now, because it has served its purpose
and I want my
students to find more sophisticated ways of making friendships
with people
of different nationalities. Yet things could still be
difficult, in
September England and will come to Turkey to play the
second match of their
two qualifying matches for the 2004 European championships,
England won
the first match and nobody I knew said anything about
it (which made me
laugh!) but I will still avoid my Turkish friends whatever
the result and
that is something that disturbs me about the importance
of football as
a means of communication, or belittlement as the case
may be.
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