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WAS THE “FIX” IN AGAINST THE NETHERLANDS? by LOWELL PONTE

PONTIFICATIONS

WAS THE “FIX” IN AGAINST THE NETHERLANDS?

by Lowell Ponte

I tried to watch soccer’s FIFA World Cup Sunday but repeatedly dozed off from boredom.

Soccer is a game played by athletes too small to play American football. The Third World loves it.

Socialists love soccer, too, because its winners – to judge by what we saw during this World Cup tournament – are determined by the arbitrary whim and bias of officials (just as in the Obama Administration) who refused to reverse their calls even when videotape from several camera angles showed them to be flatly wrong.

Victory in modern soccer is akin to the Academy Awards, with prizes such as free kicks given for those players who can most dramatically fall down and clutch some part of their bodies, pretending to have been fouled by opponents.

On Sunday it appeared that the Spanish team had a license to trip and otherwise interfere with their opponents from the Netherlands, who committed one egregious foul but otherwise were penalized on the flimsiest of suspicions.

Why this pro-Spanish bias in officiating? Was it prejudice against northern Europe? Against Protestant Nederlanders or for Roman Catholic Spain? Against the Dutch uniform color orange?

I suspect that one unmentioned other factor may have been in play.

The host of this year’s world cup was South Africa. The current radical leftist regime there is overwhelmingly black, but before it took power the racist Apartheid government it would replace was run by Afrikaners.

The Afrikaner whites – whose ancestors settled a nearly unpopulated South Africa – were defeated by the wealth-and-colony-craving British Empire more than a century ago in the Boer War.

But in 1958 the Boers regained power via the ballot box and imposed racial separatism even more discriminatory than the British Empire’s.

And who were these Afrikaner Boers? They were Dutch expatriates.

Nobody expected the Netherlands (whose team includes black players and exhibits no racial discrimination whatsoever) to be one of the two finalists fighting for the World Cup on Sunday.

But imagine what might have happened if these kin of the former Apartheid Afrikaners had won in South Africa, which fought to host the cup as a way to show off its country as a place to vacation and invest.

A victory by these players garbed in the orange national color of the Netherlands would have stirred memories and commentaries on the old days of Apartheid South Africa’s Orange Free State and Dutch-linked history.

Was this a factor in all the penalties against the Netherlands, including a player ejection, that tilted Sunday’s playing field into a contest of 10 Dutch players trying to fend off 11 Spaniards?

Was the “fix” in to guarantee that the Netherlands team had almost no chance to embarrass South Africa by winning?

Tags: Columnists