Ah No, Domenech...

France exited stage right last night in a pitiful display which saw them outplayed by the Italians in a soporific match (I was awoken from a first-half doze by Thierry Roland announcing the expulsion of Éric Abidal for the foul on Luca Toni that led to the first Italian goal). It has been sad to watch the collapse of the French team in this tournament, mainly because you know what talent there is there in the country's football set-up, probably more than in any other country in Europe. It was also sad to see one of my favourite footballers Lilian Thuram be humiliated by the Dutch on Friday night - however undeniably thrilling it was to watch the Dutch do their magic. When Thuram came out of retirement three years ago along with Claude Makelele and Zinedine Zidane to sort an ineffectual team out and qualify them for the 2006 World Cup, it was him that dashed Irish hopes at Lansdowne Road with a magisterial second-half display that cut off all the danger that Ireland had mustered in the first half of that match. He was equally imposing in France's march to the final the following summer but now it is clear that he is a year or two past his best and about five yards off most the strikers he would have easily snuffed off not so long ago.

Thuram, whether he decides to retire now or not, will have a career that extends far beyond football, and given the man's intelligence and political activism, I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes a glittering star on the French left, which sorely needs a man of his stature and conviction. When Abidal got sent off last night, Thuram stood up on the bench and prepared to strip to run on, rightly assuming that the most-capped player and captain until his dropping, would be the obvious replacement for a missing centre-half. French manager Raymond Domenech had other ideas however and in his wisdom, he sent on the underwhelming Lyon full-back Jean-Alain Boumsong instead, presumably the same wisdom that allowed him to select Boumsong ahead of players such as Gaël Clichy and Philippe Méxès in the first place.

Though the French players (the injured Franck Ribéry excepted) must bear their own responsibility for their spineless performance, they were hampered as ever by the cluelessness of the baffy charlatan in charge of them. Domenech's predilections for astrology have long been ridiculed by many (and even suspected for some of his team selections) but there is a deeply unpleasant side to the man that deserves more comment. Ireland saw it in the run-up to the game in Lansdowne three years ago when he dismissed Brian Kerr's side as a bunch of hoofers (say what you like about Kerr but his teams were never of the kick-and-rush variety) and his ungraciousness in two defeats against a plucky but limited Scottish team indicates his general lack of class. The Swiss media and people alike have deplored the arrogance and commitment to secrecy of Domenech's entourage since before this championship began, comparing them, unfavourably, and not to mention ominously, to Marco van Basten's Dutch squad. Many people are of the opinion that his sidelining of Méxès, consistently one of the best centre-halfs in Serie A in recent years, is due to petty animus. And then last night Domenech criticised the sending-off of Abidal, claiming that there was not a clear goalscoring chance denied. The man's cowardice and complete lack of responsibility was finally cemented when, questioned by his common-law partner Estelle Denis, on his future after the game, he proposed marriage to her. While being knocked out of the European Championship is not, in the wider scheme of things, a terribly serious occurrence, one might expect of Domenech at this point a greater degree of professionalism and seriousness than this. L'Équipe was moved to call it in an editorial, 'more than a managerial error, a lapse of taste.' Right they are, and Mlle. Denis' tolerance of this nonsense may prove to be the first of many such examples in her future life. The French Football Federation will surely elect to remove this craven, unprepossessing buffoon next month, following a tournament in which there were not enough of the old guard to rebel against his foolishness and play as they wished, as they did in Germany two years ago. He will not be missed in the world of football.

All of this is not to take away from Italy's performace, which showed a great deal of character and adventurousness. Even in the defeat by Holland they have been playing some good football in this tournament and I expect them to burst the Spanish bubble come the quarter-finals to set up a rematch with the Dutch in the semi-finals. But, then again, having seen, Guus Hiddink's Russia outplay Sweden tonight without even being impressive, the Dutch may find one being put over them by their former manager...

The Football So Far

Two days into the European Championship and though there hasn't been a game of absolutely excrutiating boredom (Austria v Croatia threatened to become that at times, mind), the tournament has yet to really catch fire. Both the hosts deserved better than the 1-0 defeats they suffered in their opening matches. Austria in particular will find it difficult to pull back the deficit. The pick of the games so far was tonight's between Germany and Poland. The Poles brought the game to Germany, playing some attractive attacking football but unfortunately they were lacking any real edge up front, where former Celtic reserve Maciej Zurawski struggled to carve out openings. The Germans, obviously having developed a strong understanding over the past couple of years, are playing a more expansive game than they did on their own turf in the World Cup of two years ago and on tonight's evidence they are worth their favourite's tag. Their defence (and Jens Lehman) look suspect and they may suffer against a side possessed of more incisiveness than the Poles. It looks unlikely they will be tested however until a potential semi-final against Portugal, and given the dreariness of Croatia's performance today, they shouldn't have to break a sweat to even reach the quarter-finals.

Once again I am restricted to watching the matches on French TV, whose coverage is appalling as ever. TF1's commentary is saved only by the presence of Arsène Wenger in the gantry, who is the only person who knows what he's talking about. Over on M6, Thierry Roland (the French John Motson) and Frank Leboeuf dispense inane patter, devoid of any insight or knowledge of any players not associated with either the French national team or Ligue 1, and littered with enthusiastic 'magnifiques', 'superbes' and 'belles actions' to describe the most workaday efforts by highly-paid professional footballers. The tone of deadening banality and politesse makes you feel like watching the damn thing with the sound turned down, listening to the radio, à la Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh. On top of this there is nothing in the way of pre-match, half-time or post-match analysis and commentators for both channels make the most pathetic attempts at pronouncing the names of players e.g. Peter Cech is Peter Sèche, which presumably means he hails from 'La République Sèche'. It makes you pine for Motson, Clive Tyldsley and Andy Gray, never mind the unrivalled trio of Giles, Dunphy and Brady.

As preparation for the tournament I went to see Emir Kusturica's documentary on Diego Maradona, which proved irritating and enjoyable in equal measures. A few short months ago i walked out of Kusturica's infinitely tiresome comedy Promise Me This and I was a little suspicious about this. Actually, my suspicions were mostly confirmed, it being a massaging of El Píbe's ego while making Kusturica look good too (interspersed with the interviews with Diego and the stock footage of the man in his prime are outtakes from most of Kusturica's films). Diego spouts shite about politics, most of which involves taking potshots at the Yanks and the Brits and lauding Chávez and Castro, in a typically populist Latin American way. But his gleeful remark about feeling he'd pickpocketed an Englishman when he rose above Peter Shilton to score the infamous 'hand of God' goal is a refreshing alternative to the insufferable piety of the English who complain incessantly about it (as if they didn't win the World Cup due to a non-existent goal or Gary Lineker didn't dive to win a decisive penalty against a superior Cameroon team in the 1990 World Cup quarter-finals). Kusturica throws in a couple of interesting asides about residues of aristocratic dignity amongst the poor and the birth of the Tango, that I suspect he has filched from Borges or García Marquez, and he must surely be one of the few film directors that could go for a kick-around with Maradona and emerge with credit. The film is most remarkable though for its YouTube-esque montages of Maradona goals, which of course look all the better on the big screen.

The tournament starts in earnest tomorrow with two intriguing matches in the group of death. Romania v France and Holland v Italy. As ever I am supporting the Dutch though I think they may struggle to make it out of this group. France look the best equipped to give the Germans a run for the title but they can't afford to slip up early on. More later in the week.

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 3

Good news, on two fronts. One is the election of Ireland's first black mayor, in Portlaoise. Rotimi Adebari, a Nigerian native who arrived in Ireland seven years ago is set to don the town's chain of office for the next year. You'd need to be very naïve to believe that this development is emblematic of total racial harmony in the country but it is likely to go some way to furthering it.

Another, more trivial piece of news is the launch of BBC's iPlayer, which will allow web users to catch up on BBC programmes from the previous seven days that they have missed, including free downloads that can be viewed for thirty days before they get wiped. Mac users will have to wait until autumn to use it but I'm not going to grumble too much about that. Hopefully there will be no restriction on people outside of Britain streaming or downloading. Hopefully this will be the end of waiting months or even years to catch up on the likes of The Office, Extras and The Thick of It.

Good Cheer for President Sarkozy

A month and a half ago, earnest editorials from well-meaning fools all round Europe saluted the 'tremendous display of democracy' displayed by the French people, when 85% of them turned out to either vote for anyone but Nicolas Sarkozy or to endorse his Front National Lite social policies. Seanachie wasn't fooled at the time and he now wonders where those same editorialists will be when it comes to writing about the 60% turnout for yesterday's first round of the parliamentary elections, the lowest since 1960? The left were probably wearied after the first round and many of the young people that mobilised in the hope of avoiding a Sarko presidency have no doubt retreated back into apathy. Sarkozy's UMP looks likely to assume a crushing majority of the Assemblée Nationale, making the next five years even bleaker than they seemed five weeks ago.

Sarkozy, who was not involved in the elections, as all cabinet members are separate from the Assembly, was caught on Belgian TV, arriving late for a G8 press conference after enjoying some refreshment with dear old Vladimir Putin. Defenders of the teetotal Sarko insist that he was not drunk but I have seen enough cases of inebriation in my years tending bar to know. Just as well Vlad didn't offer him some of his famed 'soup'.

Are Those Real Kidneys?

It appears that the Dutch reality TV show where a terminally-ill patient was going to donate her kidney to one of three candidates was a spoof, with actors involved all round. Those crazy Dutch...

News Round-up

Gay people are having a rough time of it in Eastern Europe of late, especially at Sunday's Gay Rights protest in Moscow, where a shower of Nazi thugs laid into the likes of Peter Tatchell, Fred Fairbrass, and, I imagine many, more, lesser known people. The cops stood by and intervened only to arrest those that were being attacked. Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov has vowed to never allow Gay rallies in the city (despite homosexuality being legal under Russian law), calling them 'satanic'. I have always thought there was something fishy about them queers but couldn't put my finger on it. Thanks to Mayor Luzhkov for clarifying the matter for me. Incidentally, the young thug preparing to punch Tatchell in the Guardian's photograph (don't you just love all those cameras primed, ready to intervene?) has a curiously 'manly' 'tache. He couldn't possibly have been there for other motives, could he have?

Further west in Poland, a country that is labouring under the right-wing Catholic fundamentalism of the Law and Justice Party and the President-Prime Minister double act the Kaczynski twins, that government's spokesperson for children's rights has asked psychologists to determine if handbag-swinging Teletubby Twinky-Winky is gay. Ms Ewa Sowinska thus takes up the mantle of the late, unlamented Jerry Falwell, who, at least, did not deign to ask a psychologist for their opinion. Falwell knew a propagandising fag cuddly toy when he saw it. Interestingly one of the Kaczynski twins is rumoured to have exotic tastes in young men surprisingly at odds with his government's hounding of gays.

Old Europe is not to be outdone however, a Dutch reality TV show has needy contestants competing for a dying woman's kidneys. The producers claim that they have a serious sociological intent in making the show but one suspects that they are not going to donate the royalties to the Dutch kidney foundation.

In Sweden, the lodestone of European righteousness, the nation pressurised Miss Sweden Isabel Lestapier Winqvist into withdrawing from the Miss Universe competition, because of it being 'demeaning to women'. Ms Winqvist, presumably fearful of becoming a Nordic Hester Prynne, complied and even the organiser of the Swedish franchise, a swimsuit company that has done away with the swimsuit section of the national competition, stands by the decision to boycott the competition. While I will not disagree that a competition as grotesque, inane and tacky as Miss Universe degrades women and many of the women involved are objects of pity more than anything else, this official stance by Sweden strikes me as the worst form of pedantry, a grandiose smashing of a walnut with the biggest mallet that Protestant Social Democracy can buy. There are far more important issues that concern women worldwide, such as people trafficking, unequal pay and even underprovision of toilet facilities (in the third-world particularly, a hidden killer). Attacking Miss Universe looks like Sweden wants to say something to the world about itself rather than the rights and concerns of women.

More Fillums from Cannes

Every year at Cannes there are films that divide - sometimes they are winners of the Palme d'Or, such as Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark, Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 (though the objections to Moore's Palme d'Or were mainly political). This year such films appear to be Andrei Zviagintsev's The Banishment, for which Konstantin Lavronenko won the Best Actor prize and Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, which shared the Jury Prize. Zviagintsev's previous film, The Return, won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003 and was a superb, tightly-marshalled tale of the mysterious return after years away of a brooding, sadistic father and its effects on his two sons. The Banishment, however resulted in huge walk-outs among critics; such a divisive film can only be worth seeing. Reygadas' last two films Japón and Batalla en el cielo similarly provoked mixed reactions, not least because of their graphic sex scenes and the extreme violence of the latter. I liked both films, with some reservations, and his latest, a slow, difficult examination of Mennonite farmers in Northern Mexico, looks like it might appeal to me too.

Many critics have spoken of the general quality of films being higher than usual, and one would expect it to be better than last year, which returned very few memorable movies. Gus Van Sant received a special prize for his latest film Paranoid Park and the Grand Prix - the runner-up prize that has been scornfully received over the years by many people such as Krysztof Kieslowski, Von Trier and Michael Haneke - went to Japanese director Naomi Kawase, whose films have been enjoying critical acclaim in France for a number of years but is largely unknown in the English-speaking world. There was also a warm welcome for Garage, the latest collaboration between Lenny Abrahamson and Mark O'Halloran, following the wonderful Adam & Paul. A bleak tale set in the West of Ireland, it stars Pat Short in an unusually straight role, for which he has got good reviews. Short's latest show Killinascully is hugely successful but, from what I hear, dire stuff but it is worth remembering the glory days of d'Unbelievables and his and John Kenny's turns in Father Ted. It is top-class culchie humour, a note-perfect portrayal of the language and mannerisms of small-town Ireland. Like much of the best Irish comedy, it probably wouldn't travel very well. But enjoy it all the same. 'You might as well make tay for them'. Classic.

Just Like in Real Life

I'm not a fan of the International Herald Tribune but occasionally it does provide a bumper issue within its very thin pages and today's is one of those. We learn of the first rail crossing between North and South Korea since the end of the Korean war fifty-four years ago and the campaign of harrassment and vilification conducted by Hindu fundamentalists against an Indian Muslim artist (it is strange how the Western media, so given to the word 'Islamofascism', has yet to start using 'Hindufascism' even though fanatics allied to the former ruling BJP have been long engaged in undemocratic activities against everyone from Muslims in Gujurat to filmmaker Deepa Mehta to Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty, but I suppose the Western conception of all Hindus as peaceful cow-loving Gandhi-followers precludes such a stance). Best of all is the story from a correspondent in the Czech Republic about Cimrman, a fictitious Czech character born in the 1960s as a satirical prop against the Stalinist dictatorship, and who has since inspired fourteen plays written "on his behalf", given his name to an asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter and is soon to be immortalised in the name of a mountain in Russia. Cimrman is a product of a Central and Eastern European imagination that champions the little man that has produced the majestic oeuvre of Kafka, Jaroslav Hašek, Ivan Klima, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Ivo Andric and countless others and which has recently been reincarnated in the superb Romanian films The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12.08, East of Bucharest. The discovery of this fantastic character, so dear to Czechs and an irrepressible resistant against tyranny made my day in a way that few other things have recently. Three cheers for the Czechs.

The closest thing we have to Cimrman in the English-speaking world is Matt Groëning's peerless creation The Simpsons, which celebrates its 400th episode this week. I have long suspected that this most brilliant of TV shows is underappreciated and, most likely, wildly misunderstood in its homeland, and this piece in The Nation confirms this. The liberal scribe muses about the series: "[it's] terribly animated (at least by Pixar or Dreamworks standards), unabashedly crude and, at times, prone to deus ex machina endings". To say that The Simpsons is 'terribly animated by Pixar or Dreamworks standards' is akin to saying that Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' was a bit badly drawn compared to John Singer Sargent's draughtsmanship, but middle-brows will be middle-brows. As an example of The Simpson's brilliance, here's a wee taste of one of the greatest episodes. Watch it all; it's funny because it's true...

English Chavs in Racism Shock

I can't watch Big Brother from here, though, to be honest I haven't watched an episode of the show since Nasty Nick Bateman got bumped off it back in the first series. Since then it appears the nastiness has become more in vogue if the reported treatment of Shilpa Shetty is anything to go by. What is it actually like there? I get only reports from British media sources that divulge little of the magnitude of the story; there have been good pieces in The Guardian by Hari Kunzru and occasional fruitbat Germaine Greer. Kunzru's piece is particularly interesting as it notes the slightly pompous disposition of the Bollywood actress, which ruffled the feathers of the chavs a bit too much. As horrendous as the racism is, I can't find it terribly shocking either. Did anyone seriously think that English lumpenproleterians, with zero awareness, never mind knowledge, of Johnny Foreigner, would act any different when put in a room with an Asian actress, who, unlike them, can actually be called genuinely famous, known to hundreds of millions of people? Trying to exonerate one of the other tenants, who, it was suspected had called her a 'Paki', by claiming that he only called her a 'cunt' is one of the greatest pieces of mendacity yet proffered by Channel 4. And there is some stiff competition for that.

Being detached from it all I suddenly feel the yen for British TV, if not quite Big Brother itself. The farrago and its ins and outs remind me of those questions that people in English-speaking countries asked expats living in Paris at the time of the banlieue riots; the riots were far bigger news abroad, where images of burning cars fifteen miles from Paris translated as the city itself being on fire. Is Big Brother all that big over there?

Just in...

Those living in Anglophonia will sneer at this (but hey, I'm not British, I live in France and I've never set foot in England [the last is true by the way]) but I have only just discovered Armando Iannucci's fantastic political satire The Thick of It. A Yes, Minister for the Blair years, it is cutting and depressingly credible in a way that Rory Bremner, God Bless him, could only dream about. A cross between Alan Partridge (where Iannucci cut his teeth) and The Office, the series strips away the shrouds of government with impunity, and gives the greatest explication of the Blair/Campbell axis of evil yet proffered. Unfortunately the lead actor Chris Langham, who won a BAFTA for his part, has since been convicted on charges of child pornography, thereby hindering the recording of a third series (the first two were only three episodes each). Great as Langham was the series should survive well enough without him, considering how dispensable his character was for the entire two series. Peter Capaldi's demonic Campbellesque spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker could carry a whole decade of programmes on his own.

Nipped in the Budd

A bit of self-indulgence here; I had a flashback to my childhood the other day, when I remembered the name of Brian Budd, a Canadian soccer player, who won the World Superstars Championship three years in a row in the late 1970s. At the age of about five, my Dad took me to see him give an exhibition of his all-round athletic ability at the Baymount in Strandhill. I remember being slightly disappointed because I was stuck at the back of the hall, with a restricted view, even atop my Dad's shoulders, but I was gratified nonetheless to be in the presence of the great Canadian, who was matched in my esteem only by Evel Knievel and Superman.

A quick dash to Wikipedia turned up this link to the CBC archives, from 1978, where Budd appears on Peter Gzowski's talk show 90 Minutes Live, which will, I'm sure mean more to the Canadians out there than the rest of us. He looked exactly as he did a couple of years later in Sligo though I think he had beefed up a bit in that time. Certainly his close control with a football left something to be desired, and it is not surprising that the pinnacle of his footballing career was a stint with Ayr United reserves.