Wheel of Fortune

This is not going to be an easy topic to write about.

In the late 50s, there was a team of young football players who were among the most promising players of their generation. They belonged to a team called Manchester United. They flew to Yugoslavia to play in an European match. On the way back, they transited in Munich… well if you’re a Man U fan you know the rest.

(Incidently Munich was the place where Hitler first established the Nazi party. It was the place where Great Britain and France decided to allow Hitler to take over Czechoslovakia, setting off a chain of events which started off WWII. In 1972, during the Olympics, a group of Palestinian terrorists kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes, promising to release them for ransom. When they were lured into an ambush, they killed all the athletes. Munich is quite an exciting place.)

A lot of the Man U legend was built around that disaster. One of those who were in that plane and didn’t die was Bobby Charlton, who went on to win the World Cup, and become one of the greatest players in England, if not the world. (Probably not the world.)

Eventually, the team rebuilt itself, and by the late 60s, with their 3 star players Law, Charlton and Best, they won the league, and later the European Cup. They went through a comparatively lean period of more than 20 years without the league, but they became one of the biggest club sides in the world in the 90s, helped partially by the legend of the Munich Air Disaster.

Liverpool would suffer even worse. In 1985, they were already the greatest club side in Europe. They had won 4 European Cups, including the one in 1984, and were looking for their 5th.

The European Cup final in 1985 took place in Heysel, Belgium. Their opponents were Juventus. There was some trouble in the crowd, exacerbated by the hooligans on the English side. Just before kick-off, a wall collapsed, killing around 50 fans. (I can’t remember the exact number, it doesn’t matter.) The match had to go on, because they were afraid that there would be even worse crowd trouble if the crowd were told that the match was cancelled. Understandably, neither side wanted to win, but somebody had to and it was Juventus.

In 1989, Liverpool were to play an FA cup semi-final against (Nottingham Forest?) in Sheffield Wednesday’s stadium in Hillsborough. The police were having trouble controlling the crowd entering a stand. The match was about to begin and there was still a large crowd standing outside. They made the mistake of allowing too many people to enter one of the stands, and in the resulting crush, 96 people died.

This was the incident that led to a wholesale review of standards for the condition of football stadiums, and increasing commercialization of that league. The formation of the Premier League resulted in player’s salaries getting more and more obscene. It is very distasteful to juxtapose these 2 incidents together, but there is a causal link.

The slave trade had already begun before the Europeans came. It was the Arabs who went into Africa to raid the continent for free labour. But it was the Europeans, especially the settlers in the Americas who took this to a totally different level. We all know some of the facts from our school textbooks, and I haven’t read up a lot on this so I don’t really know.

But the descendents of slaves in the USA are certainly having it better than those who remained behind in Africa. They are still being discriminated against, and not given as much opportunities as the whites, but the idea of race is beginning to fade, if not disappear. Right now, the most powerful government official in the US is a black man. OK, he’s actually a descendent of someone who stayed behind. But for the majority of black Americans, if their ancestors had not been captured into slavery, they would be having a pretty miserable life.

I guess the wheel of fortune is very funny like that.