Last year on Twitter, Yoko Ono asked the question: Who will win the World Cup? Her answer being, ‘the child who believes in a peaceful world.’
I can never muster up any enthusiasm for football nowadays and haven’t watched a single game but would guess if this child had been in Scotland’s qualifying group, the probability is that Scotland would taken an early lead, before being pegged back immediately and eventually beaten by a last-gasp free kick into the corner of the Hampden net.
It’s just been announced that the next World Cup in Qatar will be played in November/December of 2022 and I’d guess Scotland will once again fail to qualify for this.
You may say I’m a dreamer but I would actually like if the Scottish footballing authorities declared they were refusing to even take part in any qualifying campaign for this corrupt event.
A line has to drawn somewhere and I’d draw it at staging football’s biggest tournament in a undemocratic land where where gay sex is punishable by jail, the stoning of women is legal and where hundreds of migrant workers drop dead each year as they work on construction projects including the building of new stadiums to host the World Cup.
Back in 1977, the SFA were invited to play a friendly as part of a South American tour at the National Stadium in the Chilean capital of Santiago. Four years earlier the country’s dictator General Pinochet had rounded up scores of innocent Chileans for the purpose of brutally torturing and killing them in the very same stadium. Despite this, Scotland’s footballing blazers agreed to the invitation, the resulting match being dubbed the ‘match of shame’.
The chances of the SFA doing the right thing this time around?
About the same as making money from Yoko Ono’s football tips.
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Anyway, so what have I been up to while half the world has been glued to the coverage of the current World Cup?
Well, watching a lot of Italian cinema has taken up a big chunk of my time. Since the war, Italy has given the world a succession of critically adored directors like Pasolini, Antonioni and Visconti. They’ve also produced some of the planet’s best genre movies, especially in the wake of Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, which ushered in a mad period when Italy was making more westerns than Hollywood.
After the success of Sergio Corbucci’s classic Django, there was maybe even a time when there were more spaghetti westerns with the name Django in the title being made than Hollywood westerns, most only based loosely on the coffin-dragging drifter of the original. Django Shoots First; Don’t Wait, Django! Shoot!; Django Kills Slowly; Django the Bastard and Viva! Django. I could go on. And on.
I’m guessing Italian film copyright law wasn’t stringently enforced back in the day.
Lee Scratch Perry was obviously a fan and here he is with The Upsetters on one of the most irresistible slices of ska ever recorded, The Return of Django:
Bizarrely enough the only official Django sequel came out in 1987, long after the Italian western craze had petered out, although a few years ago it was reported that we might yet see Franco Nero return again as Django, with speculation surfacing about the actor reprising his iconic role for a third and final time in a movie taking place around fifty years after the events of the original.
Of course, Nero did also turn up in Tarantino’s Django Unchained for a cameo where he asks Jamie Foxx’s Django his name and asks if he can spell it.
‘D.J.A.N.G.O. The D is silent.’
From Django Unchained (but originally used on His Name Was King in 1971), this is Luis Bacalov & Edda Dell’Orso:
For more on Qatar, and the Independent newspaper’s campaign against modern day slavery, click here.
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