Dear editor: Do Fifa appeasers want everyone to ‘shut up and dribble’?


“[…] Before the Black Lives Matter movement gained global momentum, one Fox News  anchor admonished NBA star Lebron James to ‘shut up and dribble’. Put another way she meant: ‘bat in your crease’—stick to entertainment and don’t be so farse as to tell powerful people how to run ‘their’ country.

“Maybe we in Trinidad and Tobago should do the same and ‘shut up and dribble’, albeit on a football field instead of on a basketball court…”

In the following Letter to the Editor, former St Augustine Secondary principal Andre Moses shares his view on the Fifa-TTFA impasse:

Photo: Fifa president Gianni Infantino (right) bears gifts for then Trinidad and Tobago President Anthony Carmona in a courtesy call at St Ann’s on 10 April 2017.
(Courtesy Sean Morrison/Wired868)

A lot of injustice is and has been perpetrated by guns and violence. Paradoxically another reason for the persistence of injustice is the successful propaganda gambit of the oppressor, which is to destroy the manhood and self-esteem of the oppressed to the extent that they become unwitting but fierce defenders of the unjust status quo, while at the same time reserving their impatience and ridicule for those willing to fight for what is right.

Thanks and praises to Hy Arima, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nelson Mandela and Muhammed Ali, who all stood their ground and swam against the tide. Their actions affirmed that Spanish decimation of the First Peoples, slavery and apartheid as well as the Vietnam War were crimes against humanity—no matter how powerful were the oppressors they faced, or how futile their resistance and advocacy may have seemed to some.

Everyone has a right to their own opinion. But someone who has devoted almost 30 continuous years to the development of youth and community football, and another who has spent a comparable two decades as an educator and a first rate administrator in two co-curricular disciplines, are cast as the heartless villains of the piece, whilst others who only remember Trinidad and Tobago exists when it suits their self-interest, get a free pass no matter what their history might be.

Photo: TTFA president William Wallace (right) and Sport Minister Shamfa Cudjoe (centre) present prizes during a schools football event put on by former football legend Steve David (second from left) in December 2019.
(via Ministry of Sport)

Before the Black Lives Matter movement gained global momentum, one Fox News  anchor admonished NBA star Lebron James to ‘shut up and dribble’. Put another way she meant: ‘bat in your crease’—stick to entertainment and don’t be so farse as to tell powerful people how to run ‘their’ country.

Maybe we in Trinidad and Tobago should do the same and ‘shut up and dribble’, albeit on a football field instead of on a basketball court.

At the end of the day it comes down to cost versus benefit and every stakeholder has the right to make their own calculation on that score. But as the young people say, ‘miss me with that BS that right is wrong and wrong is right’.

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