The same excess, but in reverse
The score of last Saturday’s soccer game between the Greek and Turkish national teams, which upset so many people here in Greece, was not something to be ashamed of. It is the nature of soccer, and other games, to sometimes bring us joy and sometimes sorrow. What was shameful was the way that our television channels analyzed Greece’s 4-1 loss to Turkey, and the fact that a deputy minister and no shortage of politicians from the ruling party joined in the hysteria that has been aired on these channels over the past few days. The subtitles that accompanied these discussions were excessive; they were vulgar even by the standards of sports newspapers that specialize in such coarse cliches: «a national Waterloo,» «a national embarrassment,» «a national thrashing,» «a Turkish nightmare,» and so on. And we were subjected to this for a full half-hour during even the ostensibly serious television news bulletins. Seen from one point of view, the coarseness we have witnessed on TV debates over the past few days is the flip side of the jubilation that followed the Greek soccer team’s victory of the European soccer championship in 2004. Following our national team’s victory, commentators from across the political spectrum had referred to a «national renaissance» – purely because we won against France. The pride of that summer has been transformed into a period of mourning. The same people who had proclaimed that Greeks are genetically programmed for victory – yes, that had been said at the time – are now protesting vehemently. Those who had christened Greece’s soccer coach Otto Rehhagel «Otto the Greek» are now condemning him as «the German who brought shame to Greece.» We are witnessing exactly the same excess, but in reverse. One can conclude that the guests on all the television debates are neither happy with our sports victories nor upset when our national teams lose. It seems that their priority is to get a seat on a show that gets aired every day at 8 p.m. And this is why they wear the expressions that correspond to the particular occasions. But this is not Greece, the country some people brand as excessive; this is its TV caricature – a caricature which involves ministers joining soccer debates and MPs mourning the «lost honor» of the national soccer team’s goalkeeper while hardly a word is said by anyone in honor of the veteran leftist Grigoris Farakos, who died on Saturday. Greece has far more serious problems to worry about than its national soccer team’s track record. The languishing national economy and the education sector are just two of these.
