IT LOOKED like a headbutt and no doubt felt like one too. But that famous incident involving former French football captain Zinedine Zidane and Italian defender Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final represented something much more.
The spontaneous action in the 111th minute of the match was caused by a “clash of divergent aspects” of a “fractured” set of physical and constitutional characteristics, the Sociological Association of Ireland’s annual conference in Galway heard at the weekend.
And so, Zidane the “civilised” professional footballer was subsumed by Zidane the Franco-Algerian for whom honour is paramount, Seán Morrissey of the University of Aberdeen told the conference.
Morrissey studied the ensuing “media storm” for his sociology doctorate which, he said, was “unlike any other” media storm in sport.
“In Britain, they employed lip readers to look at the television footage, and there was an assumption that Materazzi’s remark must have been racist. In fact, it was only when Zidane gave that interview to the Canal Plus television station in France that it emerged that the remark referred to the chastity of his mother and sister, and the interest died down thereafter,” he said: “That was when I got really interested.”
To understand the remark’s significance, Morrissey drew on the work of French academic and former foreign legionnaire Pierre Bourdieu, who wrote a book on the Kabyle area of Algeria where Zidane’s family was from.
“Bourdieu found that the type of masculinity there was very different to that reflected on the football field, in that this was a pre-industrial society which didn’t have wealth, but was very patriarchal and had invested a lot in maintaining a sense of honour,” said Morrissey.
“These were very different inherited tensions that Zidane, born of Algerian parents in Marseilles, had to negotiate on the pitch. And, there he was, at the end of a long season and a long career, a billion people watching, and it was like a tinderbox.”
Morrissey said violence in sport was becoming less frequent due to more highly regulated structures. “Such regulations tend to highlight incidents of violence that might have been tolerated before,” he said.
Also at the conference, sociologist Perry Share of Sligo Institute of Technology said that the jumbo breakfast roll, immortalised by comedian Pat Shortt, was “perhaps the ultimate symbol of our contemporary Celtic Tigerland”.
A study presented by Share traced the jumbo breakfast roll’s history to Victorian Britain, where roadside vendors set up stalls selling large soft rolls with ham, a sausage or an egg to workers en route to factories. The 21st-century Ireland version of the vendors are petrol-station forecourts, which sell jumbo breakfast rolls with tea or coffee – about 1,200 calories in total.
Share’s findings are included in Belongings: Shaping Identities in Modern Ireland, co-authored with Mary P Corcoran and published at the conference.
