The Weekend: 24th July 2023
Haiti pushed England all the way at the World Cup, and they're playing for something special.
Haiti may have lost to England, but their team is showing a fresh face
It was certainly much tighter than had been anticipated. England laboured to a 1-0 win against Haiti in their opening game of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, needing a re-taken penalty kick and some outstanding late goalkeeping from Mary Earps to get them over the line. There had been some cause for concern their pre-tournament matches. Injuries to key players looked like a definite cause for concern, considering their lack of fire-power in front of goal. Those concerns will not have been allayed by their first group match, even though it is well-known that Sarina Wiegmann teams tend to start tournaments slowly.
But England weren’t really the story, here. Haiti is a country that cannot be separated from its history, and it’s that history which makes the performance of this team in this tournament so very special, even though it ended in narrow defeat. Haiti’s slaves rose up for their own freedom in 1791. The country was formed thirteen years later, the first independent majority black country outside Africa, but it has been paying for such impudence ever since. Two decades after declaring independence, the French forced formerly enslaved Haitians at gunpoint to pay reparations to the people who had enslaved them.
It was calculated that the nation paid the equivalent to around $560m to satisfy this. For generations, Haiti’s revenues went to service its “double debt,” depriving its people of schools, hospitals, and basic infrastructure and pushing the country into a cycle of debt, poverty, and underdevelopment that persists today. Had that money stayed in the Haitian economy over the last 200 years, The New York Times calculated, it would have added at least $21 billion to their economy.
Disaster has repeatedly visited the country this century. In January 2010, between 100,000 and 300,000 people were killed when a magnitude 7 earthquake struck the capital city Port-au-Prince, resulting in the collapse of the city’s infrastructure and the first modern large-scale outbreak of cholera, which killed a further 9,000 people. A second earthquake of a similar magnitude hit the country’s Tiburon Coast, killing a further 2,300 people. The government, riven with corruption and with gang activity practically out of control, seems on the verge of perpetual collapse. President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021. Foreign intervention, particularly from the successive US governments, has been ruinous.
The Haitian team have achieved a lot just by getting this far in the first place. Having finished third in their CONCACAF group behind the USA and Jamaica, they then had to travel to New Zealand in February for an intercontinental play-off, securing their place with wins against Senegal and Chile. The win against Chile was certainly something of a surprise result.
Haiti deserve their place in the finals, as they demonstrated in their opening match. Fourteen of their players already play in France, with a further seven playing in the USA, and the most shining star among this team is Corventina, who’s just agreed a contract with Lyon after impressing over the last two seasons with Reims. Despite defeat in their opening match, the narrow margin of that loss holds the possibility of still getting through this stage ajar.
Football cannot by itself heal such tragedy and ill-treatment, but it can provide a degree of respite, some local pride, some much-needed relief when the world feels tilted against you. The men’s team achieved this in 1974, when they qualified for the finals and even took the lead in their group match against Italy before losing 3-1. That team is still fondly remembered by Haitians, but they’re also becoming a fading memory.
We can continue to catastrophise Haiti, should we wish to. We can continue to wring our hands at the horrors that befall this country while doing practically nothing to help it to get itself onto its feet and deal with its myriad problems. But the achievements should also be celebrated, and the Haiti team against England were excellent and pushed the European champions all the way. Perhaps the women’s team can lead the way in showing the world that there can be a different Haiti, a peaceful, prosperous and free country.
Watching a video documentary about Port-au-Prince in 2023 as I write this, it’s striking that by the halfway point in the film the only women that I’ve seen have been a couple of anonymous forms walking up a street balancing baskets on their heads, silent and voiceless in comparison with the angry young men with Kalashnikovs. In some respects, this is just a mirror for the way in which the world views Haiti, a country dominated by these angry young men and their guns, the corruption and the grinding poverty. Haiti needs a corrective to this perception. It needs the hope, and to be able to show another face to the world. Perhaps this talented group of sportswomen can deliver it.
What on earth was he thinking?
Think what you will of the Bild hack who rocked up to a Spurs press conference in Australia wearing a Bayern Munich shirt with “KANE” printed on the back of it and asked Ange Postecoglou what he thought of the fact that the England striker would definitely be leaving the club for Munich this summer, but it’s impossible to see a ways in which such behaviour could possibly benefit the club.
Such behaviour only seems likely to harden the stance against selling Kane to Bayern, with the prevailing noise now coming from The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium seeming to indicate that the club would rather keep Kane for this seasson in the hope that they can do something, anything to persuade him to sign a new contract before he beceomes available for nothing.
Bayern felt like an option with which Spurs supporters could be comfortable. They won’t be playing them this season, that much is for certain, and the likelihood of them meeting the season after that doesn’t much higher, even allowing for the fact that expanded entry into a bloated new Champions League structure is a-coming. It should already be obvious that sellling such a player to another Premier League club immediately and considerably ups the sale price, and a couple of the clubs who could theoretically afford him would appear to be verboten.
So Bayern were in an excellent position, but the overbearing arrogance of grandstanding CEO Uli Hoeness coupled with this sort of stunt only and their low-balling initial offer for him seems more likely to push the price of Kane up to a point at which he no longer makes economic sense than anything else.
If Bayern Munich are desperate to sign him, this is the window. He’ll be able to sign a pre-contract from the new year on and leave for nothing, but there’s little doubt that offers will be rolling in from all over the place in that eventuality and Bayern are far from the richest who’d be vying for his signature. Harry Kane may well yet sign for them, but if he does there seems little doubt that it would be in spite of this sort of stunt rather than because of it. Regardless of what the outcome may be, this is no way to carry yourselves as a professional football club.