Holding Midfield
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Rarely throughout the winding story of modern football, that great social tranquilizer that can whip the sting from a generation of national unrest with one blast of a FIFA-branded whistle, has much been made of the role that the game has played amongst divided populations. When the going gets tough the tough are encouraged to huddle together around the nearest big-screen and channel their collective energies into cheering on their team rather than vent about grinding austerity, failing public services or bare-breasted corruption, even when the football is as close to the root of the problems as in Brazil last summer and next. Take away the fanfare and the occasion and the game?s history is as much a story of augmenting division as it is of cultivating brotherhood. In Northern Cyprus football sits close to the heart of fifty years of intercommunal violence and bitter regret, in a place where memories of an excruciating past cast a stubborn die over the present. Football remains a conspicuous marker of an island nation wrenched apart, but two modernisers are determined to explore ways in which the game might live up to its bellicose hyperbole of hope and community. The partition of Cyprus […]
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