As the Spanish football giants were on their way back home after a friendly match with one on the most modest teams of Albania’s most football, forty other players, of international repute, including Zidane, Kaka, Eusebio and the like, are about to kick off the VII Match Against Poverty in Lisbon, a UNDP initiative in support of wretched Haiti after the tragedy the impoverished country suffered a few days ago.
The humanitarian initiative to aid the innumerous victims of the Haitian tragedy does not leave out the competition for a trophy. The aim of UNDP, however, as well as that of the football stars themselves, is not the trophy, but the financial assistance necessary in a fight against poverty.
Many of those who have heard the news of the Real Madrid stars coming to Albania for a friendly match with a team of one of Albania’s small regions, might have been led to believe that charity or disaster-relief lay in the background. After all, even though Albania has not suffered a tragedy comparable to the Haitian one, it is still one of the poorest at the outskirts of Europe and in the past two weeks its northern part has had to face a once-in-a-century kind of flooding.
However, the Madrid giants were not in Albania on a charity venture. They returned home after the match in Tirana, with a trophy, and a probably unmatched world record, and with 2.5 million euros. The trophy is the oil cup that Rezart Taci offered, the oil magnate and president of the humble football team Gramozi (a cup previously awarded in Tirana to AC Milan). The world record that Albania actually reached with the help of Real Madrid was a ninety-three-minute-long black-out in a stadium, after the first half of the match. The second half of the match was in fact played after those 93 minutes of darkness. The third trophy or record or however one might want to call it is the payment of 2.5 million euros of the Albanian oil magnate for Madrid’s football stars to come to Albania to play against his very, but very modest team.
This country seems to be home to the strangest of things. And the problem is not that the strangest of things occur, but that the strangest of things are accepted as normalcy. And let there be no mistake, the bizarreness does not lie with the stars of Madrid, Milan or Manchester United or whoever might be brought in by Albania’s magnates in the future. No. It is related to the fact that a match like this is glossed over with the word ‘charity’ when its realization – the bringing in of stars like Christiano Ronaldo and the like – costs 2.5 million euros. It is beyond cynical that a sum like this is spent in order to collect fifty thousand dollars from ticket sales to be donated to the inhabitants of the flooded district of Shkodra. Albania is a poor country and it would be welcome for Albania’s magnates and nouveax riches to donate some of their money to charity, to help the many poor of the country. Likewise, Albania is in need of schools, books, cultural centres and it would indeed be a welcome initiative for our magnates to establish foundations to assist society, culture, the arts, research and studies etc.
Secondly, strange things are related to what happened in the match between Real and the modest team of one of the poorest region of Albania. To keep the long story short, 2.5 million have been paid for a perfect anti-advertisement of Albania by cutting off the electricity at the stadium where the match was being played for more than one hour.
Last but not least, this black-out is another strange thing that in Albania is accepted as normal. Rather than looking for the “internal enemy” that sabotaged the match with Real Madrid, the Albanian officials should reflect why such things continue to happen in Albania.
And this is not the first case. If the corruption story of the blast in G쳤ec that killed 25 and injured 300 citizens is yet to be proven, it is crystal clear that in that village a primitive workshop where all the technical rules were broken and where children, women and unqualified workers were employed, was allowed to operate.
Despite common sense, it also remains to be factually proven if the flooding of Shkodra came as a result of mismanagement or of natural causes. In the meantime, it is already a matter of fact that much of the damage would have been avoided if citizens and law-executing bodies had not allowed the unauthorized erection of houses, the destruction of canals and the general infrastructure of the area.
Likewise, Tirana’s best stadium would not have broken this unmatched world record of darkness if its managers, and all other related agencies, had abided by rules and laws, an attitude that continues to form the essence of our normalcy.
