For 30 years, until three years ago, I would go to 50 games each season.
Two games a week, sometimes three.
Here, there and everywhere.
In every stadium, in every city.
Leaves early in the afternoon, returning often in the middle of the night.
In recent years I have been watching football at home.
Although I have a reserved seat in the press booth, despite the improved stadiums, even though I can ride a bike along the Herbert Samuel Promenade to Bloomfield, and within a quarter of an hour be on the fifth floor of the booth.
Since 2018, I have reduced the dose by 90 percent, from 50 games to 5.
I don't want any more, because I'm tired of seeing this shit in the stands, which also drags the players into violent, unfriendly behavior, which slides into madness.
I once dreamed of taking my girls occasionally to games.
Each time again I give up the experience.
No for who, no for what.
The football arenas in Israel are an extreme reflection of the fiery atmosphere in Israel of 2021.
Israel has long been a scene of battle and strife among its citizens.
Choose a place to wander, and meet crazy violence there.
In the Knesset, at memorial rallies in cemeteries, in TV studios, in new editions, on social networks, in line for a writer, at a traffic light, on the road, in reality, in "Big Brother," in "Survival."
Attacking each other and getting to bed on the belly at night.
Everything is flammable and explosive.
Even when Israel was calmer, the football stands were the inferior arenas, and a meeting between Hapoel and Betar is in general an opportunity to distill all the ugliness in its pasture.
An organization that took over an entire club.
Photo: Alan Shiver,
Hapoel's Ultras, in all industries, are vicious and violent people at the highest levels, and to a large extent they have been responsible for years for the destruction of the basketball team, which never knew how to repay them.
They have leaked to football, and they are disgusted like their brothers in the other teams.
Betar is another case, in the eyes of a lost and hopeless story, in which a terrorist organization took over the club in its narrative, and liquidated it. Stick.
The deal remained here, running urgent and frightened letters to justify its existence.
Hili Trooper, before becoming a minister, acquired his reputation as a Branco Weiss high school principal in rehabilitating lost students.
I really think Betar is a lost cause, but if Trooper gets her a cure we don't know yet, he deserves the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement.
