Last night there was an interesting interview with two German football pundits. For them it’s just another game. There is no big history of allegedly ‘humiliating defeats’ at the hands of ‘the old enemy’. Their big grudge matches, he said, are against the likes of Italy. Another commentator said that Germany, given its past, liked to look forward, not back. It wasn’t raised on a diet of WWII comics, or constantly whipped into a frenzy by the tabloid press.
In the same way, Gareth Southgate, becoming ever more statesmanlike, reminds us that most of the squad weren’t even born for the big famous encounters between the two countries. It’s another case of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ - we can see intense rivalries, we can impose intentions on the other side, yet if we talk with ‘them’, we listen to what ‘they’ have to say, we find out that this is just another big international game, no huge moment of national shame if we lose, it’s not loaded with anything other than the big hope that we go through. In all aspects of human life, particularly in dispute, we have an inbuilt ability to create greater space between the parties by seeing the other side as the enemy, seeing all their actions as inherently premeditated and evil. Let’s just play football, and not think about it too much. Comments are closed.
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AuthorRichard Marshall is an Accredited Civil and Commercial Mediator with over 25 years experience as a Litigation Solicitor, as well as being a qualified Solicitor-Advocate. He is the founder of Striving to Settle, through which he works as a mediator and provides negotiation training. www.strivingtosettle.co.uk Archives
August 2022
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