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On the Soccer Pitch,
We Are All Sikhs Now!

JOHN IVISON

 

 

 

A YouTube video has been circulating among the members of my OldTimers soccer team, entitled: “How to tie a turban.”

The team, based in Chelsea, Quebec, Canada, is planning to don the Sikh headgear to protest the idiocy of the Quebec Soccer Federation’s turban ban.

We play most of our games against Ontario teams. Or we did until we were informed that we are banned until further notice, following the Canadian Soccer Association’s suspension of the QSF.

Another 20 youth teams from Ontario have also just discovered they will not, after all, be playing in Montreal this weekend because the soccer authorities won’t grant them travel permits.

The Quebec provincial association, abetted by the entire provincial political class, has decided that wearing a patka and a turban is a clear and present danger to anyone in the vicinity.

I have played soccer for 40 years. I know danger on the field. I used to play against men called Dingo in parts of Glasgow you wouldn’t walk around in broad daylight, unless armed with a nuclear missile.

Let’s dismiss the canard that it’s about safety.

Footballers routinely wear bandages and continue playing if they suffer a head-wound. Petr Cech, the veteran Chelsea goalie, wears headgear in the English Premier League every week FOR PROTECTION.

The only other semi-coherent explanation I’ve heard was offered in Maclean’s by a blogger called Simon Delorme. He suggested that the ruling was about abiding by the rules, including the regulations about the uniform. Soccer players don’t wear baseball caps or ski goggles, he pointed out.

“Just as there are religious values, there are sports values,” he wrote. This universality guarantees that whether in Marseilles or Moga, “anyone can join in, anyone can play …”

Can anyone see the flaw in an argument that continued in this vein, as it slowly circled the plug-hole?

In actual fact, there is nothing in law four that says you can’t wear a soft-brimmed cap -- in fact, many goalies do, in order to shield their eyes from the sun. The rule says a player must not use equipment or wear anything that is dangerous to him (or her) self or any other player, including jewelry. We have already established that a tightly wound cloth is not hazardous, short of the player unfurling it and wrapping it around a referee’s neck in a murderous rage.

I don’t particularly buy the idea that the QSF move is motivated by some deep-seated francophone antipathy to any kind of religious display. I think it is much less nuanced than any complex arguments about identity and reasonable accommodation.

Rather, I suspect it reflects official Quebec’s feverish distemper to control everything in its own small fishpond, like an unarmed North Korea.

The QSF made a decision that was self-evidently absurd and indefensible. The Canadian Soccer Association could not sit on the fence, so it brought down its own sanction.

Tom Mulcair, the NDP leader, spoke to the QSF and in a speech Tuesday in Ottawa, hinted that a compromise was in the offing. But that was before the intervention of Quebec’s politicians, including Premier Pauline Marois, all pandering to the lowest common denominator. Political engagement hardened attitudes as the turban ban was presented as a microcosm of federal-provincial relations and English Canada’s desire to impose its will on legitimate Quebec exceptionalism.

Except, of course, the QSF is a creature of the CSA in a way that the province is not when it comes to relations with Ottawa.

This sad chapter seems entirely in keeping with other bone-headed moves made by Quebec’s leaders just because they can.

The province’s grievance culture seems to elevate people who, because they want to boss other people around, are, ipso facto, least suited to do it.

One Quebec referee recently told me I couldn’t play wearing shorts with pockets, again for safety reasons. Protests that I was hardly likely to trip over my own pockets were not met with good grace and he eventually decided that the game would survive without my further involvement.

This idiot is probably a big cheese in the QSF, reveling in a suddenly improved safety record now that hundreds of Sikh kids and, yes, middle-aged hackers are playing in their backyards.

Quebec will be a lot better off when it realizes that the people who want to run the province -- the overly officious grievance junkies who think the law is there to boss people around -- should, on no account, be allowed to do so.

In the meantime, I will learn how to tie a turban.

We’re all Sikhs now.

 

[Courtesy: National Post. Edited for sikhchic.com]

June 14, 2013

Conversation about this article

1: Harman Gill (Canada), June 14, 2013, 10:47 AM.

Thank you, John.

2: Daljit Rattan (Surrey, British Columbia, Canada), June 14, 2013, 12:20 PM.

Nicely done ... thanks. Let sanity prevail. The issue is being dragged by ego and FOR political leverage. Never thought political leaders of all colors in Quebec would feel that threatened by a thin cloth barely 18"x18" in size. I feel sad for the young boys and girls inside and outside of Quebec who are being kept away from the game they love. Please restore sanity.

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We Are All Sikhs Now!"









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