Once it is no longer customary on DZfoot, this writing will be an editorial. The choice is made to highlight a growing and dangerous phenomenon: the attitude of Algerians towards any attempt at critical reflection, which alternates between dogmatism and idolatry.
It is true, football can never cross the threshold of light leisure. The phenomenon, however ontologically simple expression of an ordered movement of the body, nevertheless takes pride in embodying the greatest modern bastion of physical representation of the masses. In Algeria, as elsewhere, its observation, the discourse brought to its subject and the criticism of this discourse would even make it possible, thus, to draw the general specter of the Algerian intellectual scene.
This text is inscribed, at times, in the first person singular. If its starting point is my personal reading of the world around me, it nevertheless wants to be a global critique of a situation which is not limited to my being. I have thus had to observe, more particularly during these recent unprecedented months on the scale of my meager existence, striking parallels between the moral behavior of Algerians, on a daily basis, and the physical attitude of Algerians in the face of events grouping them together in large groups.
Endemic search for semblance of unity
This interlude may seem relatively technical, but it is necessary for a good understanding of this writing. I have to confess it, I don’t publish as often as in the past. For lack of inspiration, certainly, lack of involvement, possibly, but perhaps above all – and this is probably what makes me feed the most regrets – by a form of annoyance that has never ceased to be win me over over the years.
I have had the chance to write and speak in many mediums. Ultimo Diez, first, La Gazette du Fennec, then, and DZfoot, finally. On all these platforms, my first desire was, as throughout my entire existence, to transmit, to give without any return a sincerity, an emotion, a conviction. I never wanted to be a professional journalist, naturally preferring action to comment – without any contempt, because understanding and criticizing a speech are the necessary prerequisites for its success – and I never wished no plus perceive special benefits.
After the introduction, avoiding the tautology, place at the heart of the subject: Algerian football and what it has to reveal the absolute dogmatism that reigns in the debate in Algeria. In DZfoot, but also in my daily life, I have it, and I still regularly experience it bitterly.
The Algerian National Team has, despite itself, today become a vector of monster concentration. On the strength of its success at the 2019 African Cup of Nations, some of which may imagine that the least patriot was jealous of fatherhood or somewhat shunned its pleasure (for my part, I had never known joy also immense but in the realm of generalized suspicion, doubt is king!), it shines since then and drains with it a welcome breeze of freshness in an Algeria stifled by its eternal doubts.
Manichaeism and bigotry
Because there can be no EN without his coach and because the latter – by his charisma, his successes, but also by his deliberately oriented public discourse – has been able to unite around himself, Djamel Belmadi has gradually become the absolute referent of the least aficionado of Algerian football.
This search for the providential man is not indifferent to me. I deeply believe in this meeting of destinies: that of a being and that of a struggle. I believe immensely in that one soul can be the world’s first spark of awakening, yes, I hold my conviction intact.
On the other hand, what I do not believe, and I will never believe, is that this symbiosis would be the death of all reflection. No, convictions and critical thinking are not mutually exclusive. No, fate has never begged, for its accomplishment as for its discovery, that human thought and the relentless flow of reflections that compose it be sacrificed on the altar of immediate success.
This state of mind animates me and lives in me constantly. It is, in fact, the translation of a simple logic: he who is sincere does not refrain from reflecting. Otherwise, how could it be otherwise? How could one declare oneself convinced and certain but fear over and above asking certain questions, in particular in that they could waver this same conviction, this same certainty? Would it not then be that said conviction and certainty would in reality prove to be feverish and, logically, not very durable?
All things considered, so much the dubious analogies would delight those who refuse to understand the substance of my point, this logic is therefore invited into the Algerian football debate.
The National Team wins! We must therefore be satisfied with the result displayed on the screen, whatever the story. The coach, behind the victory, made a choice! It must therefore be validated, whether it seems justified or not, since it has been dependent on victories. Analysis, angles of progress, more or less gaping failures and more or less dangerous for the future, all of this is no longer tolerable. You have to consume the result, savor it, be content to relay it. Clear? You have to adopt a fan attitude (whose root, the word fanatic, illustrates the reality well).
This logic supposes another reading since it transforms, in fact, the journalist, the media, the press as a whole, into a simple reporter of facts. All of this is very good, all of it is even necessary. However, in the age of the internet, social networks and the overcrowding of information sources, one can reasonably think that what makes the difference between one press and another is the quality of the analysis and the discourse on the said event.
The reader, whether he is honest or not in his approach to a press article – and the latter, drowned in its morbid need for attractiveness, also takes pleasure in playing sensationalism, another reality that I do not deny in nothing – addresses an article only to nourish its reflection. If it was enough for him to read the score of a meeting or the transcript of the events to satisfy his reflection, why then would he go to the smallest piece of writing that would try, somehow or other, to understand the logic behind the movement, the articulation behind the figures, the projection behind the immediacy of a result?
A healthy body … in a healthy mind.
It is more and more difficult for me to go to the different comment sections of DZfoot, I confess it again. The ambient Manichaeism that reigns there, the incessant accusations that alternate between the coarse (“You are the foreign hand!”) and idolatry (“Belmadi won a CAN, you have no right to express the slightest reflection about his work!”), all this completes the distraction of my desire to debate.
This logic of “For or against me” which deprives of all reflection in the name of so-called great fights which would go beyond the logic of the moment, in the name of alleged great feelings which would take precedence over the slightest concrete fact, locks up and strangles the whole of Algeria (and it is not the only one, the Patriot Act of George Bush is a good reminder of it to those who would have omitted it) in a dogmatism which turns regularly to idolatry, and in an absolute sectarianism which will not emerge victorious, obviously , than the most limited minds but with the strongest baton.
Yet this is the very purpose of our work. Debating, exchanging, analyzing, sharing, breaking down in the name of a common passion. We are all Algerians, living or not on our land. We all love football, whatever our connection to it. We all love our national team and want them to succeed above all else. Djamel Belmadi is neither our friend nor our enemy. We only analyze his work and we wish only his success, without feeling, without interest, without objective other than that of excellence, reflection and intellect.
The so-called follower, by his incessant contempt and desire to install his selector in an ivory tower, is but a court flatterer of modern times. Properly installed in the comfort of power, it will certainly not fail to guide the cabal itself if the wind were to turn. My little finger tells me that certainly Belmadi, too, has done well to distinguish among those.
This is perhaps also that, ultimately, the difference between the one who sincerely loves his team and the one who benefits only from his success of the moment: they scream that they love him but will not care at his fall. , eternally on the right side of the handle, as we take their blows, eternal soldiers, so that she never falls again. Never in the trend, therefore, but always in the right direction.
Walid.
