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The Jewish Chronicle

The radical cure for the ills of Jewish football

The Maccabi League is a bit of a joke and has to accept change

May 7, 2009 11:42

By

Peter Moss

2 min read

Fifty years this year --- that is how long I have been playing Jewish football. Hard to believe. It feels longer. My first team was Bar Kochba FC, named after a Jewish revolutionary who not only was leader of a gloriously futile insurrection against the Emperor Hadrian 2,000 years ago, but was also rumoured to be the first biblical character to wear moulded studs.

We played in the Maccabi Football League, where every player has to be Jewish. The standard, aside from a handful of teams in the top division, many of whose players got their “real” football in the more rarified Saturday leagues, was not very good. It has got no better.

Matches are played against a wall of sound issuing from players’ frustration at their own ineptitude. Most yellow and red cards arise from second, third, fourth, even fifth opinions on every last refereeing decision. Let the ball do the talking? Not in Jewish football.

The demographics may seem to support an all-Jewish league — 1,000 or so Jewish footballers who want to play competitive football and are, for the most part, not good enough to play in non-Jewish football — but paradoxically this does little to foster an arena in which they might improve sufficiently to play at a higher level.