Spiegel Online's excellent English language website today carries a heart-warming report on the culmination at the weekend of an international football tournament that inexplicably has been pushed off the sports pages in Britain.
The Fifi Wild Cup Final, staged in Hamburg before a crowd of 4,122, was won by North Cyprus on penalties after a hotly contested goalless draw against Zanzibar. The two teams had overcome opposition from Gibraltar, Tibet, Greenland and the infant nation state of St Pauli to reach the final.
The competition, open only to regions that aren't recognised as independent countries by either the UN or Fifa, snowballed from a request from Tibet to play a friendly match against St Pauli. If you're wracking your brains to remember exactly which South Pacific atoll St Pauli occupies, don't. It's the district of Hamburg that is home to the city's Reeperbahn red light district, and it declared independence specially for the tournament.
This isn't the first act of iconoclasm from FC St Pauli, which boasts an anarcho-libertarian punk fanbase and was the first club in Germany to codify its anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-sexist stance in its constitution. Its badge is the skull and crossbones and home games are opened with a rendition of AC/DC's Hells Bells.
The club has enjoyed several spells in the Bundesliga, although it currently languishes in the lower divisions, and has fan clubs all over the world, including this one in Birmingham.
The tournament was a flamboyant affair, with a streaker, frenetic cheering for teams that had already been eliminated (in particular crowd favourites Tibet, who nonetheless lost their two matches by an aggregate 12-0) and for Greenland at least the novel experience of playing on grass, which doesn't grow in their northerly abode. Full results are available here. Marvellous stuff.
