Guess whose back…

Back again. Tiger’s back. Tell a friend. Or indeed anyone who has any interest in sport. Tiger came roaring back to golf after a 4 month absence with a solid 2 under par total of 68 on Firestone golf course in Akron, Ohio. It is a tournament and a course that Woods loves having won this event 7 times; his first win on Firestone coming in 1999. However he did finish in a tie for 78^th last year but that was when the 14 time major winner was at his lowest ebb. He was playing with the new Open champion Darren Clarke last night and the Ulsterman couldn’t have played much worse. He shot a 7 over par 77 which included an eagle on the 8^th, holing his second from nearly 200 yards. In stark contrast to his playing partner, Woods was a model of consistency. He only made one bogey last night when being too aggressive on the 14^th, finding the greenside bunker and failing to make a sand save. He tried to play a delicate bunker shot with little green to work with, aiming to land the ball softly on the edge of the green and let it trickle down to the hole. He misplayed the shot by a matter of inches but the fact that he was willing to back his touch after a 4 month lay off shows us that he is not here this week to make up the numbers.

                                                     His scrambling on the front nine was excellent, making a number of par putts from 6-12 feet. He was level par through nine and he then went onto pick up 2 shots on the first two holes coming in. As mentioned, he gave one back at 14 but the 16^th par-5 was vintage Woods. He sliced his tee shot right on the longest par-5 on the tour which prompted commentator Bruce Critchley to remark that Woods doesn’t like the tee shot on 16 and he (Critchley) had seen him hit it all over the place off the tee in years gone by but he noted that he usually went on the make birdie. This time was no exception. Woods played a hard fade with a wood from under a tree in the right hand side rough. He then pitched to about 20 feet and duly holed out. Incidentally, this was the same hole that when Steve Stricker was playing his third to the green Critchley’s co-commentator Ewen Murray informed us, “this is a par-5 for Stricker today but then again it’s a par-5 for everyone.” Nothing gets past the experienced Scotsman. Woods never really let leash with the driver, swinging very much within himself but the most striking aspect of his round was his touch. His chipping was very good but his putting was first rate. He has gone back to his putter of old and he never looked like missing anything from six feet and regularly gave himself a chance from longer. One round doesn’t a tournament make but if Woods can maintain his fitness then a tournament win before the year is out is certainly not out of the question for the world no. 28.

World Cup cotton wool policy

South Africa have kept more than 20 first choice players at home for their tri-nations games against Australia and New Zealand. While the rested players’ mammies may be delighted, that their “little” boys are being kept out of harm’s way - the rest of the rugby viewing public is furious.

The springboks were convincingly beaten in both games, including a record 40 – 7 defeat against the All Blacks. The official reason given for the mass withdrawal is injury, however the union have admitted that the players are together in a facility in Rustenberg, rehabilitating themselves before the world cup. Many sinister observers see this injury epidemic as a farce and believe the players are there to rest up before their defence of the Webb-Ellis trophy.

This policy will keep athletes fresh and reduce the number of injuries before the world cup begins. However the team will lose match fitness and the majority of their warm up games. Therefore the side will arrive at the world cup in desperate need of game time and with reduced morale.

Ireland and New Zealand promoted a similar policy before RWC 2007, in both cases it was blamed for their poor displays and respective early exits. New Zealand rested their top players for the first seven weeks of the Super 14 season and Ireland travelled for a tour of Argentina with a second string squad.

Obviously there is medical evidence that it works, teams pay fitness coaches and medical experts large salaries to assess these policies. Nonetheless it is a high risk strategy for a coach: because even if it has the desired effect of starting the competition fitter and fresher, any poor performances will be blamed on a lack of competitive games, prior to the tournament. Players earn all the plaudits for good performance, but coaches get most of the flak when things go wrong. Eddie O’Sullivan bore the brunt of a disastrous world cup, while Ronan O’Gara’s poor displays slipped the collective memory.

Scotland also excused five of their squad: Allan Jacobsen, Ross Ford, Richie Gray, Alastair Kellock and John Barclay from club duties, at the start of April. It is no coincidence that their director of performance, Graham Lowe, held the position with the All Blacks, in 2007.  

Scotland are fortunate: in that they have nothing to lose – they are the Connacht of international rugby, no matter how many times they under-perform, they retain the “plucky” tag.

South Africa and Pieter de Villiers do not have such a luxury: if they don’t have a strong world cup - that means winning the competition or losing narrowly to New Zealand, they will not be forgiven. The coach will be sacked and wholesale changes will occur.

However despite the fury that resting players evokes, there is undeniable evidence that it works. The Irish team has won a grand slam, its first since 1948, and been competitive in the majority of six nations campaigns, since the union gained the right to rest players, whenever it was deemed necessary. Brian O’Driscoll would never have survived the knocks he has received without the player welfare programme and ironically Johnny Wilkinson has kept himself fresh by being constantly injured (his rest periods may have been imposed by mother nature, but he is still competing at the top level).

But try telling that to a sports fan – he will simply jump upon the prevailing theory at the time and he always manages to shout loudest. So when the world cup is done and if South Africa, as expected by the bookmakers, do not win the trophy, allow this sports junky his fifteen minutes about resting players and its pitfalls. Calmly ask him if he laid South Africa before the competition and then smugly mention the Irish model.

M.C.

Bullets to Balls: The case for Israel playing in Asia

I am no friend of Israel. I think that within their state, they practice a policy that can only be termed apartheid. Within the Occupied Territories, they self-righteously mouth platitudes about the need for the Palestinians to move away from terrorism while continuing to stoke the underlying fires of the conflict throught their ongoing expropriation of Palestinian land. I fully support a unilateral declariation of independence by the Palestinians, as Israel will never make the necessary concessions for peace of their own volition, and I hope that the global community coerces them into doing so. That said, nothing justifies the abuse levelled at Yossi Benayoun in Malaysia last week, or the continued refusal of Muslim countries to compete against Israel.

Consider the fact that Israel, in spite of being entirely in Asia, plays its football in UEFA, and has done so since 1992. While Israel probably isn't that unhappy about this fact, the basic cause for this is that Israel's neighbours don't want to face the tough choice of whether to play against them. As a result, thanks to a bit of finagling, Israel plays against European teams. Prior to 1992, while Israel was a member of the AFC, it often had extreme difficulty playing against neighbouring teams and countries, particularly in the years following the Six-Day War. In 1964, both Iran and Pakistan pulled out of the AFC Asian Cup in protest at the fact that Israel were hosting it.

This is one of those "sport and politics" arguments. First, let us assume that sport and politics shouldn't mix. In which case, no problem. Israel should be treated the same as everyone else. If other teams are unwilling to play, too bad. Israel then gets a walkover. Let's see how many teams are willing to sink their World Cup chances to make an immature political point. In this reality, the only rules FIFA need enforce are its own. Granted, Israel is not alone in being geographically anomalous (Kazakhstan, the Caucasus countries and Cyprus all play in UEFA), but the others at least have a claim to being historically European and some geographic claim, whereas Israel is very definitely in Asia.

Flip it over and assume the reality that politics plays a part in sport, just as it does in anything. In this case two factors are at play. The first is that Arab countries are legitimately protesting Israeli human rights abuses, and shouldn't be punished for it by exclusion from football. Ergo, letting Israel play in Europe satisfies all parties.

The problem with this is that it favours the notion, common among the left in the West, that Israel is somehow qualitatively worse than any other regime. After all, any member of FIFA has exactly the same rights as any other, regardless of their human rights or lack thereof. Nobody ever refuses to play against any of the Islamic world, despite the appalling human rights situation in many countries. It was somewhat ironic that the racist abuse directed against Benayoun took place in Malaysia, as that country too discriminates against its minorities. Nobody thinks that because Iran bans women from driving, they shouldn't legitimise the regime by playing football against it. Hell, they even allowed North Korea to play in the World Cup. On that subject, FIFA had no problems awarding the 2018 and 2022 competitions to countries with dubious human-rights records. Clearly, FIFA doesn't care about human rights, so why should it accommodate countries that claim to do, particularly when the hypocrisy of said claims is self-evident.

Which brings us to the thorniest issue of all and the strongest argument for excluding Israel from Asian football and keeping it in Europe: the fact that virtually all of its neighbours are at war with it, and a host of other places don't recognise its existence. As a result, playing against many Asian teams is impractical.
The problem with this is that neither Israel or its neighbours do much fighting against each other anymore, and keeping them in separate confederations is merely a fudge to people's sensibilities. After all, India and Pakistan regularly play cricket against each other, despite their ongoing hostilities (ok, there's a very limited pool of cricket-playing country, but it's a quantitative, not qualitative, difference). Russia and Georgia took second and third place in the 2008 Olympic Women't Air Pistol event, while their two countries were actually engaged in a shooting war. In one of the better scenes from the Olympics, the two athletes hugged and kissed before making an impassioned plea for peace. North and South Korea have played against each other several times, including in the semi-finals of the 1980 AFC Asian Cup. If, in the unlikely event of Israel and Iran making it to the knockout stages of a World Cup, they were drawn against each other, it would be hard to imagine either side backing out. If they can play in a World Cup, they can play in a World Cup qualifiers. It's that simple.

In addition, the Arab world has, at best, dubious cause for its stance. While back in the 1970s, several countries asserted territorial claims against Israel, nowadays only Syria has any sort of issue, the Golan Heights (Lebanon also claims a tiny part of that, the Shebaa Farms, but that is a trilateral dispute involving Syria, Lebanon and Israel). The justification for their stance has slowly morphed from one of direct disputes to a Pan-Arab/Pan-Islamic ideal towards naked anti-Semitism. Witness the propagation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by various Middle Eastern countries, or Iran's Holocaust-denying president. The fact is that there is no real cause for the Islamic sporting boycott of Israel, and FIFA, FIBA and the other countries who connive in it should have no truck with it.

But there is another reason why Israel shouldn't be allowed to escape its neighbours and vice versa. At present the Arab-Israel conflict is in a stalemate. Israel is now in a strong enough position militarily that it has no real fear of its neighbours. Its neighbours have no real interest in fighting Israel anymore, and can comfort themselves with rhetorical slings and arrows. Caught in the middle of this are the Palestinians, oppressed by the Israelis and ignored by the Arabs.

The primary reason for this stalemate is that both sides can effectively deny the existence of the others. The Arab world does this explicitly, through the terms of the 1968 Khartoum Declaration (no peace, no negotiations, and no recognition). But Israel also does so. It has, both literally and figuratively, walled itself off from its neigbours. The Israeli public think of themselves as European rather than Middle Eastern. In a very definite way, by denying the existence of the Palestinians and Arabs, they can deny their humanity, and therefore excuse any wrongs committed against them.

It is these two problems that underpin the intractability of the conflict. The Arabs refuse to admit that Israel isn't going anywhere. The Israelis refuse to admit that the Arabs are people too. By assisting in keeping the two countries separate, sporting organisations are allowing this delusion to persist. What this means is that Islamic countries can continue to denounce Israel for all to hear, and Israel can continue to paint the picture of the Arab bogeyman to its populace and thus continue to justify whatever human-rights abuses it decides to commit.

Right, having a few sports games against each other isn't going to change that. After all, the regional crisis has dragged on for centuries, defying the best efforts of all concerned to rectify it. However, at keast it will force the various parties to stop denying the existence of each other. If the choice is between playing the enemy and missing out on the World Cup, there are a few countries that might well bite the bullet and field a team against Israel. Even if it doesn't, there's no reason UEFA (I use them as an example because football is what I'm most familiar with, but there's plenty of sports that also allow Israel to compete in Europe) should make an exception becuase people are being difficult. Taiwan competes internationally under the name of Chinese Taipei, but it still competes, despite the lack of international recognition.
Plus, even if it won't move mountains, sporting fixtures between Israeli and Arab teams will at least create some decent publicity, and perhaps some sort of normality. Ok, every event will be politically, racially and religiously charged, but so are plenty of sporting derbies. Any issues about teams' or fans' safety can be dealt with by playing matches on neutral ground, should it be necessary. That alone would encourage countries to guarantee access for teams and fans, lest valuable revenues be lost.

As outlined above, there's only two ways of looking at it. Either FIFA doesn't do politics, in which case Israel should play in Asia where it belongs (georgraphically, anyway). Or if it does, than it has a duty to try and use its influence to try and end one of the world's longest-running conflicts. It may not move mountains. But given where Arab-Israeli relations are now, even a few pebbles would be better than nothing.

Post by Greg Bowler.

Contributors do not necessarily represent Kingbet's opinion on any matter but are independent.