HERE, do you remember Novak Djokovic’s Da comparing his wee lad to Jesus?
The auspicious year of 2022 had barely begun and Novak had been detained Down Under for attempting to enter Oz without a Covid vaccination to take part in the Australian Open. Novak claimed he had received an exemption to play in the tournament. The relevant authorities disagreed, so he was locked up in a detention centre alongside refugees of somewhat lesser note and deported the night before the Open began.
“Jesus was crucified on the cross but he is still alive among us,” Srdjan Djokovic stated ominously at the time, which should have led any family member or friend of the family in close proximity to whisper into his ear, ‘Srdjan, please pal, let’s not like, ‘mon we go for a drink instead.’
But alas, there was no intervention to be had, “They are trying to crucify and belittle Novak and throw him to his knees,” he went on unhindered. “He will endure.”
Sitting at the fag end of 2022, there are a few ways of looking at the Djokovic melodrama, all of them wrong, because the only appropriate way of approaching it would be not to look for any length of time at all and focus instead on matters more important, like the fate of the refugees he shared a detention centre with during his brief Calvary.
But it was me who started there like, so let’s go on and not worry about what might be more appropriate, for a few minutes at least.
Philosophically speaking, there are many who think we, the human species, are inhabiting the final days of Rome and that the walls all around us are beginning to crumble. Maybe this is why sport on the international stage has come to take on such a mammoth sense of its own self-importance, its doyens strutting about with egos as bloated as a whale carcass on a Donegal beach.
In a world of plague, fire and fury where the price of bread is beyond the means of many, the circus is absolutely essential for holding things together. And the more the need for the distraction grows, the more manic, the more twisted the tricks at the circus become.
So it’s probably appropriate that 2022 was pushed into motion by a messianic millionaire tennis star being carted off to an Atipodean prison cell. And what better way to end it than with Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé slugging it out in the desert?
Give us shades of Muhammad Ali trumping George Foreman in Kinshasa, the masses cry via Twitter. Although if the Rumble in the Jungle was intended to symbolise an African renaissance, the Mbappé v Messi bout was denuded of anything but buying power – the power of the miniscule few to buy the attention and diminishing wallets of the rest of us poor creatures.
Even when matters of life and death and dignity appear on the world sporting agenda, there is a sense not so much that they have elbowed their way onto the stage as that they have been co-opted by the circus master for the night. There they are – human rights, the living conditions of the precarious working poor – drowning among the entertainment, as if the spectacle machine has chewed them up and spat them out as side dishes.
At the World Cup, you had the black Denmark shirt in memory of fallen migrant workers which was never worn and the rainbow bands in support of LGBT rights which never graced a single captain’s arm. To signal a passing interest in virtue was seemingly enough, there was no need to actually act on it or anything so extreme.
In fairness, Fifa had threatened to sanction protesting players with yellow cards – at the very least – so whatever else could the poor football associations of northern Europe do but meekly comply?
After the ban on the LGBT armbands, the sight of the German team holding their hands over their mouths, looking as if they’d just been presented with raw cat brain or stray dog balls on a golden platter for their dinners, was bad – I mean, John Lennon and Yoko Ono were able to come up with a better form of protest without even bothering to get out of bed – but the empty words of politicians were even worse. At least Novak went to jail for a few days for his convictions.
However – and there’s always a however when it comes to the mad circumlocutions of the global circus – why should the athletes at the World Cup have offered themselves up as sacrificial lambs when the corporations of their own countries are in such a warm embrace with Qatar and all its profit-driven doings?
I mean, why expect Harry Kane to take the hit in a struggle he didn’t sign on to when his own government is in a military alliance with the offending country – when the RAF’s Red Arrows were performing red-white-and-blue somersaults over Doha during the very same tournament? Why should Christian Pulisic have had to lead the charge for American liberty when the home of the US military in the Middle East is in, you guessed it, Qatar?
In 2022, our sports stars were still expected to play the game, it’s just that the game was that much more twisted, becoming so many times more cynical with every passing minute.
And who can save us from this cold batch of cow dung? Ultimately, only ourselves. But that might take a while. And right now, we don’t have that long: 2023’s circus is already rumbling down the track with bells on, so let’s not allow the sporting year to fade out on a sour note, God forbid the curtain comes down on this year’s feis while the band plays nothing but a dirge.
Let’s always remember that, in 2022, we at least had Argentina and the ultimate triumph of pure sporting genius fighting against the dying of the phosphorescent light. At the heart of it all, a man who kept going towards global sporting glory in spite of the diminishing odds that time dished out to him.
Yep, step forward Emi Martinez. The man with the Falls Road haircut, the Mar del Plata moves and the lowdown, downtown chat. The man who, when a gilded prince of the realm demanded obedience, gave the regent nothing but his phallus.
