World Cup fever

Photo: Amdadul Huq / driknews

I couldn't fully agree with Zafar Sobhan's write-up: “World Cup fever, Bangladesh-style” published in The Daily Star on May 28, 2010.
So far I know, no survey was ever made as to whether people in other countries, particularly in those countries which didn't have the opportunity to participate in the World Cup, react to the world cup football in a similar manner. May we not forget that unlike many other games, competitive football is seen almost like a battle between two clubs or two countries, albeit for an hour and a half or so. It's for this reason that we sometimes hear of street-fights among the supporters of different football clubs even in western capitals like London and Berlin. It rarely happens in case of cricket or other games. No wonder, people of such countries who are not involved in the World Cup football fray would try to identify themselves with the one or the other. It's a very common human nature.
Now the million dollar question is why our people should support Argentina or Brazil and why not Iran or Saudi Arabia or even Britain or Germany? Here again, it's not much difficult to find the answer. Once more politics and war comes into play. Please don't take our people as so gullible. No matter what our successive governments did, our people and the media vented strong anti-American slogans during US-Vietnam War; they expressed their anguish when Britain attacked Argentina over Falkland Islands and very lately they vehemently rejected Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. All these signify that in general our people are for the oppressed and the exploited. Although the common people are not expected to be vividly conversant with the history of Argentina or Brazil , they have sketchy idea that once these countries were also colonized and exploited by the Europeans, particularly Spain and Britain. Therefore, it's not correct that our people do everything out of sheer emotion. It's not the emotion but the expression of fellow feeling of downtrodden peoples of countries which may be geographically far apart, but psychologically very close!