Socceroos qualify for the World Cup

Mark Schwarzer saves the crucial 4th penalty.

A new chapter has been written into Australia's rich sporting history after the Socceroos qualified for the World Cup finals following their 4-2 defeat over Uruguay on penalties at the Olympic Stadium in Sydney.

In what was the most significant night for Australian sport since Cathy Freeman won gold at the Sydney Olympics, the Socceroos outlasted a dogged Uruguay side in a match that yielded just one goal in 120 minutes of football.

After losing the opening leg in Montevideo 1-0, Australia needed to win by two clear goals but finished full-time and then extra time leading the South Americans 1-0.

The hero for the night came in the unlikely form of Australian goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer, who pulled off two inspirational saves in the shoot-out to ensure Australia would be represented at the World Cup for the first time since 1974.

The Olympic Stadium was drenched in a sea of yellow as 82,000 fans willed the home side to victory first during the initial 90 minutes, then in half an hour of extra time, and finally in the climactic shoot-out.

John Aloisi sealed the victory with the ninth kick of the shoot-out, but it was an all-round team performance that delivered Australia the victory.

Captain Mark Viduka was almost the villain for Australia when he missed his shot on goal in the shoot-out to give Uruguay a chance to level the scores. But Schwarzer's second save made up for Viduka's error and ensured Australia would progress to Germany.

The Socceroos' goal in regulation time came from midfielder Marco Bresciano in the 34th minute after some neat work from Harry Kewell, who played possibly his best match for Australia.
The Socceroos had the crowd in raptures when Kewell delivered the final pass for Bresciano to hammer through a left-foot kick that found its way into the back of the net.

Australia dominated possession and territory throughout the match, but failed to convert chances in the last hour and in extra time.

Midfielders Tim Cahill and Bresciano had several shots on goal in the second half but were denied by the efforts of Uruguayan goalkeeper Fabian Carini and some poor finishing.

First half

It was a nervous opening five minutes for the home side as Uruguay dominated the opening exchanges and peppered the Australian goal with several searching kicks into the box.
A corner off the boot of dangerman Alvaro Recoba in the 11th minute almost had the Uruguayans in front but the header went just inches wide of the post.

Australia's first real opportunity came in the 16th minute when a free kick was paid for a foul on defender Scott Chipperfield just outside the goal box.

Bresciano, called into the side by coach Guus Hiddink to give the Socceroos more attacking strikepower, stepped up but his kick was ill-judged and sailed three metres over the goal post.
Just a minute later Recoba had a golden opportunity to put his side up by a goal when he found himself in space 15 metres out, but just like Bresciano he was off-target and the home side was given a reprieve.

Kewell, relegated to the bench by Hiddink before the game, marched onto the field after 32 minutes to rapturous applause from the Australian crowd.

It did not take long for Australia's most recognisable player to stamp his authority on the match, delivering a sublime flick pass back for Bresciano to crunch the ball into the back of the net and deliver the home side a 1-0 lead that they carried through to the break.

The Australians were punished by the referee in the ensuing 10 minutes, giving away several free kicks that gave Recoba the chance to repeat his heroics from the first match that delivered the game's only goal. But Schwarzer continued his fine form from the first encounter and kept the visitors scoreless until the break.

Second half

Kewell was again in the thick of the action minutes into the second stanza, using his pace to scoot past Diego Lugano and draw a free kick. The Socceroos could not convert the opportunity but their intentions to attack were obvious and the chances continued.

Cahill, promoted to the starting side by Hiddink alongside fellow midfielder Bresciano, looked to have given Australia its second goal 10 minutes in, only to be denied by a fantastic save from Carini.

Bresciano followed up with a venomous strike but like his earlier shot the ball's trajectory was too high.

Australia's attacking midfield duo continued to pose problems for the South Americans, Cahill again denied a goal from a header when Carini intercepted a pinpoint cross from Kewell.

In the 77th minute they were at it again, Bresciano delivering a perfect cross to an unmarked Cahill in the box, only to see the header travel well wide of the goal.

Three minutes later Kewell found himself in open space and with a chance to extend the margin to two goals, but his right-foot strike was denied by the outstretched hands of Carini.

But despite the dominance of the Socceroos, they could not kill off the tired Uruguayans who held on to force an extra 30 minutes of play.

Extra time

Uruguay finished regulation time with star player Recoba and captain Paulo Montero off the ground, and the Australians looked the stronger side as the two teams took to the field for the final 30 minutes.

Hiddink made another change to the line-up five minutes into extra time, replacing Bresciano with John Aloisi.

The substitute was paid a free kick 30 metres from goal within four minutes of his arrival on the field, but Scott Chipperfield's delivery was brought down by the Uruguayan goalkeeper to avert any danger.

The home crowd were willing the Australians to victory, but it was all to no avail as numerous chances went begging as the Uruguay defence clung on for dear life. Aloisi, Kewell and Viduka all had chances in extra time to tip the result in Australia's favour but could not find the net.

With three minutes left on the clock in extra time, Uruguay's Richard Morales narrowly missed a shot on goal when he cracked a ball past Schwarzer that kept travelling left of the post.

Schwarzer then made a crucial save with a minute remaining that ensured the game would go to a penalty shoot-out.



Homer's view on the big win.

Gorillaz perform "Feel Good Inc" live at the MTV Europe Music Awards

Gorillaz, the world's more popular virtual band, won Best Group at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon on November 3rd, 2005. Afterwards, they took the stage to play "Feel Good Inc" live.

How they did it???

Assimilate or Die

Commentary: Do the French riots portend a coming cultural backlash against globalization?

By Mark LeVine

November 14, 2005


About 130 years ago, Josiah Strong, celebrated evangelical preacher and a chief ideologue of American empire, offered a stark choice to the "inferior races" the United States would encounter as it fulfilled its "manifest destiny" across the seas. Their only hope would be a "ready and pliant assimilation" to the wishes of the new, "peculiarly" vital and aggressive Anglo-Saxon-Christian civilization bursting forth from the United States. Assimilate or die -- in Strong's terminology, become "extinct" -- those were the only alternatives for the weaker races in what Strong, in most respects no fan of Charles Darwin, believed was a contest that could only be described as the "survival of the fittest."

At the same historical moment, France was defining its own imperial and nationalist identities, based on the concept of "assimilation" to a republican consensus founded on liberté, egalité and fraternité. For those deemed truly French (vrais français) -- from Brittany to the Basque regions, from the Germanized-Moselle to the Italian-speaking Savoie -- innumerable distinct ethnic and regional identities could be subsumed in the citizen and his beloved republic.

Outre mer, across the sea, in France's colonies, the choice was to be much starker. While the official goal of French colonial policy, particularly in Algeria, was the "assimilation" of Muslims into modern French culture, in practice the two communities were kept largely separate. Just as today in France's urban areas, there was virtually no mixing between European and Muslim populations. A recent description in the French daily Liberation could (with minor changes) describe either era: "The paths of the people of the cités and of the graduates of the elite School of National Administration never cross." Rather, Strong's admonishment to assimilate meekly or die was the reality the conquered faced. Resistance, as the saying goes, was futile, except at the cost of millions of lives.

At the turn of the twentieth century large numbers of the colonized began migrating to their autre mère -- France -- to work at the kinds of jobs the French, facing a severe labor shortage, didn't want to do. Not surprisingly, the republican ideal of equality for all citizens remained a distant dream. Indeed, the binary and hierarchical divisions of French colonialism only intensified in the mother country. There, the danger that the vrais français might be contaminated by the backward and (even today in the view of Interior and Religion Minister Nicolas Sarkozy) not-fully-human Other, was that much greater. Indeed, the republican ideals of liberty and equality, when adopted by immigrants from the colonies, threatened both French rule abroad and white supremacy at home. Segregating immigrants into ghettos, where they could be better monitored by security forces specifically created for such purposes, seemed an effective solution.

The policy hasn't worked. The last two weeks have laid bare how a century of faux promises of republican equality have produced what no less an authority than French President Jacques Chirac has described as a "reign of soft terror" and dead-end lives in the banlieues. As he admits, such a situation cannot but lead the ghetto young "to revolt" every generation or so. What has made this most recent revolt so much more intense than the "intifadah of the cities" of a generation ago is precisely that it is occurring in the context of France's slow, painful incorporation into the neoliberal globalized order of things.

However historically unprecedented its supporters believe globalization to be, it is more accurately understood as an expansion and amplification of processes that were born in the last great era of global integration -- that of European high imperialism in which France's Republican identity was shaped. What gives contemporary globalization its special disintegrative force, however, is the way it weakens the protective power of the nation-state which, until recently, acted as a buffer (however problematic) against the "assimilation" of whole societies into the global economic and cultural order.

Translated into the French situation, this means that a government continually accused of presiding over a "bloated welfare state" actually has increasingly less funds at its disposal to spend on the kinds of reconstruction and amelioration programs once again being promised to the inhabitants of the banlieues in hopes of quelling the current violence. Indeed, in France as in most countries, the state is constantly forced to choose between spending shrinking resources on addressing urgent inequalities or continuing to provide an acceptable level of services to, in France's case, millions of petite-bourgeois citizens and retired functionaires (state employees) who are only a few euros away from moving to the extreme right and into the embrace of Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National.

As the French historian Emmanuel Todd pointed out recently in Le Monde, the immigrants and petite bourgeoisie, who otherwise have "profoundly divergent interests," together produced the stunning "no" vote on the European Union Constitutional referendum, precisely because both saw the Constitution as forcing France along a neoliberal path not faintly in their interests. But as Interior Minister Sarkozy's comments at the start of the violence--he advocated, in language reminiscent of Saddam or Milosevic, "karcherising," or sandblasting the "racaille," or sub-human scum, from the banlieue--laid bare, neoliberal globalization has a nasty habit of intensifying the prejudices and suspicions alternatively nurtured and suppressed by France's republican-nationalist ideology.

In fact, Sarkozy's language makes even more sense when we recognize that, in the present advanced era of globalization, the order is no longer "assimilate or die," but rather (as a New York Times editorial described it years ago), "dominate or die." In this zero-sum context, the refusal of the banlieues' Muslim inhabitants to "readily and pliantly assimilate" to either the republican or the neoliberal order has left the forces of law and order little choice but to (threaten to) cleanse them from the body politic. How else are the true French to retain some semblance of their thirty-five hour work-week and generous retirement benefits?

If globalization produces many economic dilemmas, it creates cultural crises no less potent in their threat to the status quo. As a recent article in Liberation argued, "The French model" in which people have "to forget their identity" to assimilate "cannot survive globalization." This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. Decades of discriminatory assimilationism have produced, geographically at least, a "ghetto Islam" that is now viewed as a primary breeding ground for al-Qa'eda's global jihadis. But if the violence of the last two weeks has revealed anything positive, it is how unsuccessful extremist Muslim groups have been in significantly penetrating the urban youth culture of the banlieues. Islam is not the problem, then; rather the problem is that the majority of the residents of the banlieues are Muslim and/or black, and have been discriminated against on account of this for the entire history of the Republic.

Muslims might be physically ghettoized, but hundreds of interviews with teenage youth in the French and American press since the start of the violence offer a striking picture of those in revolt: They are rebelling precisely because they still dream of being accepted as French, not because they've given up on such a project. (Indeed, how one defines French identity is certainly one crucial issue that is up for grabs here). Several thoughtful French commentators even interpret the violence as a "refusal of marginalization" that reflects a deep acceptance of fundamental French values expressed in the "coupling of liberty and equality."

That may be. But if French society supports Sarkozy's push to crush the violence by cleansing the ghettos of their "troublemakers," the next "intifadah of the cities" could well be in honor not of Marianne, France's national emblem and the personification of liberty and reason, but of Musab al-Zarqawi and his successors.

Where Chaos is King, Who Benefits from Disorder in the Middle East? By Mark LeVine

Why Paris is Burning The larger meaning of the French riots By Mark LeVine

The Problem With Music

The Problem With Music
by Steve Albini

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.

Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A & R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire." because historically, the A & R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly. These guys are universally young [about the same age as the bands being wooed], and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave.

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