How Balkan politics dominated the Switzerland-Serbia game

Enjoying the football? The politics of it, obviously. The Switzerland-Serbia game was a cracker in this context. The innocents in the BBC box obviously bought the fiction that this was a Swiss team though the two Swiss goals should have put paid to that notion. The hand gesture from Shaqiri when he scored his goal, replicating the more subtle version by Xhaka may have escaped the unfortunate pundits who were focused solely on the sport, but it was, obviously, the Albanian eagle – flapping fingers, got it? And the gesture certainly wasn’t lost either on Serbian observers or on the crowds going nuts over the game in Pristina. This was a Kosovo game by proxy, and it derives from the Kosovo diaspora in Switzerland, where an awful lot of Albanians went during the Milosovic era, not least to avoid conscription into the Yugoslav army and because the regime sacked Albanians in the public service and factories.