Goals not guns.
By: Keith Smith (Express).
Thursday, December 13th 2007
Tuesday night I did a double-take as I heard Jamal Shabazz on public television call the names of men in and around Caledonia as he advised this "clip" and that "clip" to "put down their guns and come out and watch last night's FA Final between the Warners' Joe Public and Caledonia AIA, the team that he coaches.
As a Muslimeen member during the insurrection that remains the only Muslim uprising in the West, Shabazz can hardly not know about guns, but as one of the country's national coaches and rooted in one of the country's "trouble areas" at that, he must have some idea about how sports, in general, and football, in particular, can serve as a diversion both in the sense of onsetting a peaceful pause if, indeed, one of the flash wars happens to be raging and in the sense of diverting the minds of impressionable young men from guns to goals, again in both meanings of that word.
Still, I thought that Shabazz was being bravely blunt in the way he called names of people and linked them to their gangs or, maybe it is just that both the captains and their clips have become so institutionalised in the "runnings" in these areas of underlying unrest and at least occasional arrests that the soldier/footballer/coach never even thought twice about using the ghetto's business to rally Caledonia crowd support on television, non-lethal battle having been drawn between Caledonia and Joe Public and all, the latter's coach, Michael Mc Commie, causing me to do a second double-take that same Tuesday night, when he said on that same television that his was the side that "people love to hate".
Aging and ailing now, I have not been paying attention to football here for years, unlike the days when a PSA match could hardly start without me, but I want to tell you that hadn't I been aging and ailing I'd have found myself at the Marvin Lee Stadium last night and, even as I write on the morning of the match, I am still not sure I will not drag myself there, Shabazz and McCommie, but mostly Shabazz, having heightened what I would have called the come-hither hype had I not sensed that the two couldn't be more serious about this football battle that has been so publicly joined.
But whether I am on site or not, I'll continue to be intrigued by Shabazz's enduring role as a would-be shaker-up of things as I have been since he gave up his own top class goal-keeping career (when he was) to become a coach because he concluded that Trinidad could always find a nex' goalkeeper but coaches were, at the time, more fundamental to the youth and the game itself which I thought to be an honourable and self-sacrificing position although, Shabazz, I was taken aback (for the third time although, given the time sequence, it was actually the first) by Lincoln Phillips on Sunday, when the goal-keeper turned T&TFF football director said to me at Maple's club reunion that there's a dearth of goalkeepers, well, good ones anyway, in T&T these days.
I have to believe that Shabazz, given both his own personal experience and his experience of what is happening to too many of the East/West Corridor's young now that guns have become par for that particular course, has not only had his fill of guns, but keeps calling upon those he knows to be loaded around him to give them up, not for a particular match but as part of a non-violent way of life not, of course, that that kinda violence has not resulted from a different kind of violence, kill me dead I not able to understand how any education system that turns out so many who cyar read can be anything but an "F" for fail, Morgan Job right when he made the point, on a different TV this time, that the children who come out top of the SEA class are not the problem but the 70 percent (imagine!) who make low, low marks in the exam, my own experience with the many I know who only passed because of the political propaganda that nobody fails, telling me that is not them but the system that stupid, which is why I am advising my colleagues in the media, next SEA, to headline not the top 100 but the last 500 as a beginning of a cleansing bacchanal.
