For Mr Grew and others too, here's a link which gets you there:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/theatre/drama/story/0,,2267709,00.html

(quote)Football unites all those people who love the game, whether in agreement or disagreement, at the same time as it divides the supporters of the different clubs. The more you know about the game, the deeper the enjoyment; the more passionately you support your club, the deeper your involvement. The amount of intellectual energy generated by football is unimaginably massive; the effect of such passion is to dramatise the lives of people who might otherwise be snared in disadvantage, poverty and disability, with very little to look forward to if not their club's promotion. This cultural activity receives no support whatever from government because it needs none.(quote)

This is a hoary old argument, usually advanced by populists (and I don't believe Greer herself has ever been a populist) to point to the 'great good' that football and sport generally do to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, both among individuals and countries.  Yet it's a gutless argument - and, in the final analysis, a sick one: the Brazilian beggar, living amongst poverty, crime and vice, is supposed to comfort him/herself with the knowledge that the national team is the best in the world? So, basically, it's an argument for Hitler's beloved bread and circuses - give 'em a few 'triumphs' and they won't notice how bad awful their lives are.  I can well understand the appeal of this argument to the British government, who are determined to tax the British people into the ground in return for third-rate public services and a housing market that fails to meet the needs of the population. 

Admittedly, Greer makes some good points in the early part of that article, but I question how interested in sport or football she actually is - I suspect not at all.  This is another pointless polemic from a woman whom time has passed by. 

Garbage of a rich and rare variety.  Football is at heart a business - subsidised by the fortunes of the mega-rich and built on a bedrock of eye-watering ticket prices and feral merchandising.  It does not dramatise the lives of the disadvantaged; it exploits them - a rich men's plaything.

So incoherent is Ms Greer's style that I find it almost impossible to understand what is her main point. 

So incoherent is Ms Greer's style that I find it almost impossible to understand what is her main point. 

My feelings exactly pw - and to think she got paid for this 

And yet again I have messed up the quotes!

In my opinion, only a truly "female eunuch" could have come to the view that football in any way equates with Western High Art. Will future connaisseurs of high art look back to the 20th century to hail the appearance of a "new art form" - FOOTBALL? If they will, the future is even more doomed even than those "global warming" pundits predict!

Baz

Well - this is Rugby...



and I can see nothing that is likely to interest a female eunuch (or many others really). I notice that it's quite close to Coventry - perhaps she should be sent there?

Baz xxx

But there are two points here:

a) is multiculturalism something that should be celebrated? This is not intended as a rhetorical or provocative question - how can anything that ends with the suffix "ism" be some actual THING to celebrate?

b) the idea of any causal link between "sport" and 'multiculturalism" is quite misplaced (however good an idea it might have been) - we all know (going back to Norman Tebbit's so-called [and true!] 'cricket test') that when an 'English' crowd of supporters turn up for a cricket match between the West Indies and England, those of one ethnicity naturally support one team, and those of another the other! It's just a FACT.

Baz