ABSTRACT
It is often thought that the English journalist and author George Orwell condemned sport outright as simply ‘war minus the shooting’ (see Davison 1998: 442). He certainly did not think it was a great means by which to solve problems in international relations. But he also recognised that it was not the cause of such problems: ‘big scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism’ (Davison 1998: 442-443). Orwell was writing just after Moscow Dynamo (a team of Soviet soldiers) had played a series of matches in Britain shortly after the end of the Second World War. His closing point was that ‘you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will “lose face”’ (Davison 1998: 443). Whether we entirely accept his analysis or not we can see that Orwell was acutely aware of the symbolic politics of sport.
