In last Sunday’s soccer game, England’s manager selected three black players to take the last three penalty kicks. All three failed to score, resulting in Italy winning the game. This led to scads of racist tweets by English fans. Or did it? This video from Paul Joseph Wastson suggests otherwise. Apparently, most of the tweets came from abroad, from odd places like India, Egypt, and even Iran.
It’s possible, of course, that these are fake accounts set up by English racists who have figured out that expressing something racist in a twitter account set up in England is just asking for trouble, so they contrived to set up accounts in these other countries. But still, most of the tweets about these players that were examined were not racist. And even the ones that were racist: just how awful are these people? The left always imagines them as identical to Hitler, but the likelihood is that it is someone who actually bet a lot of money on these English players, including the black ones, doing well, but having lost, they took out their anger in a somewhat regrettable manner.
Let me add that I’ve made my views on penalty kicks clear, that at this level I expect shots to be within inches of the post most of the time. No one on either side did this, as far as I could tell. The first of the three black players hit the post, and the other two had shots that were easily saved by the Italian goalie because he guessed right. In other words, the black players were neither terribly good nor terribly bad, just a bit unlucky.
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