NOT BIRDING BUT PEOPLE

 

My note from me.

.It’s over. This World Cup Tournament to be embalmed in the pages of history. There has been hype and there are exceptional human beings who have thrilled us, exhilarated us and confounded us with their skill. I applaud Messi and Mbappe. We have every right to admire them. There are other skillful players out there too. This tournament was great because it was about the game, the football, the teams that made it there but above all of that it was the people who made it for me. The fans of all color and gaudy costumes, painted faces and the singing and dancing. People coming together. Yes, they were entertained by the best.

The final ceremony where Messi was shrouded in that gown by ‘the two most important people’ to make him look one of them! He soon got shed of it because he was then the important one and not them. Power to the little man. I loved that bit. It was the peoples’ tournament and will remain so. It is the fans that make it and not the trademarks of football clubs. Let’s support out local leagues and go to watch your hometown team

The next paras I have taken from Archie Bland of the Guardian

The trap of this World Cup, as Barney Ronay observed, is the way Fifa and Qatar have so ruthlessly co-opted everything beautiful about the game in the service of a “$7bn sporting extravaganza”, a tournament that is built on “a global labour market that drives migrant workers into lucrative near-captivity; a system Qatar did not create, which it has simply embodied with manic hypercompetence”.

Messi and Mbappé, he notes, are both “paid ambassadors of Qatar Sports Investments via dizzying contracts with Paris Saint-Germain”. This tournament’s success is “the real thing: end-to-end fully encrypted sportswashing. It is an incredible feat of will.”

Earlier in the tournament, chief executive Nasser al-Khater’s responded to a question about the death of a migrant worker by saying: “death is a part of life … we have a successful World Cup, and this is something you want to talk about right now?” The relative weight he attributed to those two priorities was borne out by this remarkable match’s ability to mute every other concern. It was grim, but not that surprising, to see Elon Musk and Jared Kushner cheerlessly watching on.

Messi floats above that reality, but his greatness does change it. One of the defining images of this tournament came in his walk to bring the trophy to his teammates, with Fifa President Gianni Infantino and the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, at his side (pictured above). He began to move away, but there they still were in the background – clinging to his coattails, trailing in his wake.