Bayern's present, Stange's past
Four games before the end of the Bundesliga season, FC Bayern secured its 18th championship yesterday. Yawn. The team that has led the league for months now (more yawns) ended the title race (!) by defeating Wolfsburg 2-0. Even typing these sentences is making me drowsy. Let's change tack.
There was an interesting German football story last month but it was buried by the war, so here's a quick summary. Bernd Stange made headlines because the threat of conflict in early March forced him to leave his residence in the Baghdad Sheraton for safer but less salubrious accommodation in Dresden. You see, Stange had been the coach of the Iraqi football team.
What made Stange so newsworthy was that it emerged in the early 1990's that he'd been an informer for the Stasi, the East German secret police. In 1972, when he was a co-trainer of the East German club Carl Zeiss Jena, he signed up to spy on his charges when they went to England to play Wolverhampton Wanderers in a UEFA Cup match. Among those he betrayed in his time is the trainer of the current Aachen side, J? Berger.
This tool of dictators then had the nerve to appear at peace rallies in Dresden, calling for the US to be shown the "red card" for "ignoring" the United Nations. He wrung gasps of outrage from pacifist crowds when describing the effects of sanctions against Iraq. "I tried to import aluminium goal posts into Iraq, but was told they could be used to make canons, so couldn't be delivered," he's reported as saying. It is not reported if Stange spoke about the president of his employer, the Iraqi Football Association. That person was none other than Uday Hussein, Saddam's eldest son, and a man accused by numerous exile Iraqis and international human rights groups of torture.
What will become of football in Iraq? It's a hugely popular game there and Jay Garner should put restoring the national league on his to-do list. Before regime change, the country had 20 clubs in its domestic league and there was a daily football newspaper that reported on the scene. By all accounts, the country's best players are to be found in the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. Interestingly, in FIFA's listing of the Iraqi Football Association, the following appears: " President : SADDAM HUSSEIN Udai". Change comes dropping slow in Zurich.
Trivia moment: Iraq made it to the World Cup in 1986, and the Olympic team was on course to qualify for next year's Athens Games before Uday left the building and his helper Stange left the land.
Diarist of the day: William Souter, 27 April 1934"A diary is like a drink: we tend to indulge in it over often: it becomes a habit which would ever seduce us to say more than we ought to say and more than we have the experiential qualifications to state. It is a kind of private paper which demands its quota of news every day, and not rarely becomes a mere recorder of spiritual journalese. But not only can it persuade us to betray the self -- it tempts us to betray our fellows also, becoming thereby an alter ego sharing with us the denigrations which we would be ashamed of voicing aloud; a diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen."
