Clint Eastwood's film combines international sport and politics

Sport and politics? Before the election, some people said that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to blame for Iran's bad football results. "For the last four years, our national team has kept being beaten," a supporter of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi told The Observer. "Under [the more liberal Mohammad] Khatami we did really well. But when there is no trust in politics, footballers don't play with trust either. If Mousavi becomes president, Iranian soccer will improve along with everything else."

The players appeared to agree when some of them wore armbands in Mousavi's green protest colour during Iran's crucial World Cup game against South Korea on 17 June.

Four members of the team have been "retired" by the Iranian government and FIFA won't help them either, because sports organizations are quick to penalize players for doing anything political. Two Zimbabwean cricketers who wore black armbands at the 2003 Cricket World Cup to protest the "death of democracy" in their homeland were fired from the team. The International Cricket Council not only supported that decision but, four years later, threatened to punish Australia when it considered a boycott of Zimbabwe.

Still, sport and politics can mix, inspirationally, as in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, when black and white South Africans united to celebrate the Springboks' win. The story is told in John Carlin's book Playing the Enemy, and it will be in cinemas in December as Invictus. The film is directed by Clint Eastwood and stars Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as Springbok captain François Pienaar.