French coach's anti-English tirade a grotesque hatred unwelcome in sport

MARC Lievremont, the coach of the France rugby union team, doesn't like black people. He says lots of other people also dislike black people.
 "We don't like them and it's better to say so than to be hypocritical," Lievremont said. "We have a lot of trouble with black people. We respect them -- in my case, at least, I respect them -- but you couldn't say we have the slightest thing in common with them."
He had more to say on the subject: "We appreciate our Italian cousins, with whom we share the same quality of life. We appreciate the Celts and their conviviality, and among all those nations we have one thing on common. We all don't like black people."
Well, that's not entirely accurate. What Lievremont actually said was: "We all don't like Jews."
Well, to tell the truth, that's wrong as well. What he said was: "We all don't like Muslims".

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All right, all right, as you might have read this week, what Lievremont actually said -- and no sleight of word this time -- was: "We all don't like the English."
Question: Does that make it any better? Is it really more acceptable to make a public display of dislike for the English than for any other group of people?
The difference is, I suppose, that Lievremont has got away with it. A few years ago, John O'Neill, the chief executive of the Australian Rugby Union, said: "It doesn't matter whether it's cricket, rugby union, rugby league - we all hate England."
He expanded on this theme: "How do you think France won the right to hold the World Cup? It's simple. No one would vote for England and they were the only other country in the running. Sadly, this is all a by-product of their born-to-rule mentality."
O'Neill got away with that as well, when he should have been kicked out of sport. He wasn't -- it's perfectly acceptable to express hatred of England. It's only when you express hatred of black people, Jews, Muslims and other groups -- like Australians and French -- that it becomes racism.
So let's step back a little. Let those of us who are English decline to take it personally. We won't say: "Well, we hate the bloody frogs. Who do they think they are? Talk about arrogance, try speaking French in Paris and they just sneer and answer in zee bad Engleesh, and as the song has it, they criticise our food and then they eat crepes."
But how truly unsatisfying it must be to hate the English. We don't even answer back when we are insulted by people such as Lievremont and O'Neill. We shake our heads and talk about general principles, as I am doing here. You arrogant English, how we hate you -- and so the arrogant English write sycophantic books about how France is the only civilised place on Earth. A Year in Provence sold by the million because it touched on the English dream of a perfect life under a French sun.
Oh and zee smug English and zee terrible English food they insist on eating . . . our television schedules are packed with programs about people trying to cook like Frenchmen. Never mind le rosbif: if you're a contestant on Masterchef and you produce "a Michelin-standard dish", you know there is no higher accolade.
And think how awful it must be for the Scots and the Welsh who hate England. All right, you oppressing, tyrannical English bastards, we want more independence, we want more self-governance, we want to be a real nation. Oh, all right. Here you are. Well, you're still bastards, anyway.
The Irish used to hate the English, and with good cause, but I was there at Croke Park in 2007, on the site of the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1920, when England went there to play rugby and -- of all things -- it was just a game of rugby. The English anthem was unbooed. Someone told me in a pub, for they have pubs in Ireland: "The end of 800 years of s***e." Hatred is something you can get over.
But the English never hated the Irish back. Rather admired them, even loved them when they weren't shooting the crap out of them. English people don't hate the Welsh or Scots. They don't even hate the French, despite a millennium of warfare and half of London being named for victories over the French -- in war rather than sport.
We English don't really get massed hatred. Perhaps that's what makes us so annoying. I'm not saying the English can't be disgusting -- I've been to England football matches abroad, I've been to Royal Ascot -- but when it comes to mass hatred of large groups of people, we really don't get it. No English coach or sports administrator would get up before a big sporting occasion and say that we English have always disliked the French, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, the Australians, the Germans, the Argentinians, the Americans or anybody else.
We can't take that sort of thing seriously. Perhaps that's why extreme forms of government have never caught on here. We never get around to uniting in hatred. You can find evidence of English anti-Semitism before the Second World War, but it was only a few demented English people who found the Nazis attractive.
P.G. Wodehouse expressed the quintessentially English response to Nazism, and to all forms of mass hatred, in what is perhaps his best book, The Code of the Woosters (1938). Bertie is much oppressed by Roderick Spode, a violent politician -- blatantly modelled on Oswald Mosley -- who leads the Black Shorts movement.
When the worm turns, Bertie tells him: "The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of halfwits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting 'Heil Spoke!' and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is 'Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"'
And that's rather what we say about Lievremont and his kind. Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher? Hatred of people on a general principle -- skin colour, race, religion, nationality, Englishness -- only demeans the people doing the hating. It is a way of making less of yourself, of seeing the world less clearly, of living your life less adequately.
In expressing his dislike for the English, Lievremont doesn't make himself hateful in English eyes. He makes himself pathetic, inadequate and -- because he is a Frenchman I mean this one to sting -- incapable of logical thought. I shrug my shoulders like a Frenchman on the English stage and say: "So much for him."
Should we follow the words of the Bob Dylan song, "don't hate nothing at all except hatred . . ." or should we refuse to hate even that? Especially when it comes to sport. Sport is trivial, it is fun, it is something we pursue for our amusement . . . to hate in the context of sport is grotesque. Those that stir up hatred in sport are -- well, they're just frightful asses, actually.

Nini/The Times