Opinion | Keep politics out of sport? Heaven forbid, as Hong Kong v China showed
Should Hong Kong football fans have imagined that the game against China was just a pleasant kickabout between 22 fit young fellows devoid of any socio-political or historic context?
At the risk of this being my last column, wow, how wrong could we be? Politics and sport are inseparable – from the original Olympics, through medieval jousts, to Mong Kok Stadium on Tuesday night.
Maybe there was a brief time in Victorian Britain’s public schools – when organised games were chiefly intended to tire out boys so they wouldn’t interfere with themselves or each other – when the ‘Corinthian spirit’ really existed.
But there was certainly no such thing at Corinth’s Isthmian Games, which like all the Greek tournaments was invaluable for spreading propaganda and gaining jingoistic bragging rights. (And many believe the apostle Paul went to the games in an effort to try to convince some of the thousands of fans attending from all over the region to swap their Poseidon replica shirt for one with ‘Christ’ printed on the back).
Should Hong Kong football fans forget the last 150 – or more accurately the last 18 – years and imagine that a game against China is just a pleasant kickabout between 22 fit young fellows devoid of any socio-political or historic context? Of course they shouldn’t, and of course they didn’t.