N-word

They did brilliantly well. The last African team had got to the 85th minute of their last game before it happened. Ghana were 2-0 down against Brazil. They’d fought hard against temptation...and then suddenly it was all too much. I felt for them, I really did. To have come so very, very close. But perhaps it was too much to expect. In any case, it was not to be. The irony was that it wasn’t Brazil’s third goal that caused it to happen, but the replay. The Ghana defenders pushed up, the Brazilian midfield advanced towards them, the pass was slipped through to Ze Roberto. As he prepared to slip the ball past the goalie Richard Kingson, the excitement became too much to handle, and the commentator, cracking under the strain, came right out with the n-word. He just said it. With just five lousy minutes to go...It’s so easy to dream of what might have been. But there’s no point. He just had go use the bad word. The Ghanaians were—I can hardly bear to write the word— ‘naive’. Specifically, they were guilty of ‘naive defending’.

I can’t have been the only person listening who let out a low moan of Noooooooooo. When Channel Five (I think it was) broadcast the African Cup of Nations they had, instead of a swear box, a ‘naive’ box, in which everybody who used the n-word had to drop a fiver. Obviously, the adjective never appears without the noun 'defending'. If memory serves Channel Five had a naive-free tournament. The message seemed to have caught on, and Tunisia, Cote d’Ivoire, Togo and Ghana had played all their matches thus far without the n-word being flourished once. I caught one use of ‘silky’—another word which, in a football context, means ‘black’—but no ‘naive’, until last night. We came so close.

Comments

[Kári Tulinius]

If I remember correctly, and I very well might be wrong, Switzerland tried the same high defensive line with an offside trap against Spain in 1990, and got pummeled 3-0. Nobody called the Swiss naive.

But alas, like nowhere else do national and racial stereotypes thrive as in international football. Somebody should make a list, a dictionary of received football ideas.

Where's a football mad modern Flaubert when you need him?

[missygp]

Ouch, how disappointing. Here, in Costa Rica, where I am currently working on xenophobia and immigration (!), the term is not "naïve". Instead, every time a black, African player appears on the screen we get "que potencía, estes equipos Africanos" (What power, these African teams) - from both the tv and the watching masses. There's nothing that gets judged without reference to black power - and not of the panther kind, sadly, but brute force. But it's good to be reminded that things at home are not what they should be, either, as it's easy to get on one's high horse about racial politics in other countries, so thank you.

[Amish Lovelock]

What's going on there with that semi-erotic "silky"?

[John Foot]

They do the 'naive' thing in Italy as well - usually to do with tactics. The other stereotype involves the supposed immense physical strength of the African players.

[Gary Naylor]

Naive! Well I don't like the word either, but it wasn't defending that let down the Ghana team, it was poor offside officiating and an abject panic when faced with the chance to score. I don't know what word you would use to describe relying on the officials to get it right (especially in this World Cup) and beautifully crisp passing finished off with a welly into the stands, but I used "gauche". Whether that's better than naive is for you to say, but it's no good denying that African teams have yet again failed to get the results that their talents deserve.