Sun of Sakhnin: There's no place like home

This may be a Jewish state, as Ganaim acknowledged, but I gradually began to realize that Sakhnin is an Arab island unto itself, one on which I was presently marooned.

By TEDDY FASSBERG
Sun of Sakhnin 88 (photo credit: )
Sun of Sakhnin 88
(photo credit: )
There's no place like home After a long evening of tired, uninspired soccer there was nothing, really, to say. So they played it again. Thirty years after Freddie Mercury wrote it, and 22 years after he said, "I can't believe that somebody hasn't written a new song to overtake it", the national stadium of Ramat Gan was re-filled with the notes of Queen's ubiquitous sports anthem, We Are the Champions. Maccabi Haifa were the champions, the new holders of the Toto Cup by virtue of their 2-0 triumph over Bnei Sakhnin, but the second rendition of the song served only to underscore the irrelevance of their title, as if the public address announcer was unsure whether it had been heard the first time. His doubt was rooted in a not unreasonable question: if a team wins the Toto Cup in a stadium empty but for its own fans, does it make a noise? Well, if you listened carefully, you could hear the rustling of a different kind of notes, notes of money exchanging hands, hands thumbing through wads of bills being counted. In the Toto Cup, prize money is all that counts. Read the rest of this blog
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