Better rooms in better times

I have this nagging guilty feeling that I should write something about the World Snooker Championships, but I can't. To be totally and unusually unoriginal: since Ronnie O'Sullivan was eliminated, I just can't muster the interest. Is this my problem or the game's?

Either way, know that I feel bad, and enjoy these. The first video has Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor reminiscing about the 1985 final, one of the great sporting occasions. The second shows the final act from that match — goosebump-making stuff.

And to pre-empt anyone who might be thinking of leave some "snooker isn't a sport" crap in the comments: don't. Just don't.

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Under a sarcastic sun, on the corner of Woe and Me

A reader writes:

One thing that has struck me about your blog, Fred, is that behind it is clearly a intellect of such weight that were it matter, it would surely disturb planets' orbits. Can you give us some insight into what makes this so?

Certainly. I was going to say "with pleasure", but pleasure does not come into play here. The path to wisdom is beset by the camouflaged bear-traps of pain and the oppressive humidity of eternal sorrow. Such omniscience, you see, is fed by a preternatural sensitivity to the hidden frequencies of the universe, and the knowledge thus acquired leads one not to bliss but to torment. It's sort of a cosmic equivalent to one of those people whose tooth fillings can pick up dying screams in the still night air from two villages over. It's no fun, let me tell you.

Perhaps, reader, this all seems a trifle arrogant — conceited, even. I trust you will forgive me when I remind you that coyness and a sense of one's true position in the world are no fit states in which to consider — hark! — the Champions League.

In my quest for sporting truth*, the fruits of some of which have been arranged on these pages for your voyeuristic gratification, the world has revealed itself to be a deal more complicated than it previously appeared. And the closing stages of the Greatest Tournament in the World Evereverever (If You Don't Count the Mighty PREMIER LEAGUE™, Of Course) have brought my sporto-existentialist examinations to a crisis.

* Actually, come to think of it, "quest" suggests volition. That should read: "In being brutally yoked to the relentless herd of the oxen of misery against my will, purely by virtue of the practically boundless capaciousness of my mind, in order that lesser mortals may glean some small knowledge and apply it to their measly lives, the fruits of some of which..."


It should be simple. Arsenal, after all, are in the semi-finals. This on its own is a good thing. Let the record show this quite clearly. I could not wish to be more clear about this were I to dream of being perspex. It's only the second time that the Arse has found itself still parked in one of the musical chairs at such a point in the competition. Fans of more impure clubs may mock our excitement, may point out the blood dripping from our collective nose. But sod them all to hell, or Chelsea, whichever is nearer. Given how Arsenal's European record this past decade has been etched with a mediocre groove, this feels good. It's like an old aristocrat who has fallen on hard times being allowed to watch the Queen eat.

It should be simple, but by Christ is it ever not. It would be were I still wired to only enjoy the simple pleasures of monochromatic partisanship and bile-marinated hatred. But, as I subtly alluded to earlier, I have seen the wonders of the heavens, and they have confused me. Yep, I'm talking about Barcelona.

Because everything you've heard about them is true. They are magnificent. I would go so far as to say that the football they've played this season may be the finest of any team in my time following the game — yes, oh please God don't strike me down, better than anything Arsenal have done in the Wenger era.

Now, bear in mind my sickening youth and realise that that might not mean much; but it means something. A team like this is rare, and for them to win the Champions League would be almost as good a thing to happen to football as is possible; not just for the possibility that the spirit of the team might somehow percolate throughout the game, but for its own sake. Let the record show this quite plainly. I could not wish to be more plain about this were I to dream of being the Riverside sculpted from vanilla ice cream.


Simon Barnes recently divulged his "hierarchy of sporting pleasures":

There are three: at the bottom is partisanship, in the middle is drama and at the very top is excellence.

And this makes a lot of sense when applied to Barcelona. Such is the delight in watching them that it almost feels as if drama would taint it. If there must be drama, if there must be uncertainty, it should serve only to catalyse something wildly transcendental. This could be greater even than Spain's win in the European Championships, which was quite warmly received in these parts.

Maybe I'm guilty of overstating it. Sure, we wouldn't all ascend to heaven were Barcelona to win it all. The sun would still rise in the morning. But it would do so sarcastically. The fields would be wet, not dewy; the birdsong a bloody nuisance. The temperature would be 1° below average.

But though Barnes' neat graduations may work for him, and though they may even be fundamentally truthful in a Platonic kind of way, they're a little too neat for me to completely side with. As wise as I am, as visible as such objective truth may be, I'm far from being reconciled with it.

So that's the dilemma, those are its horns. If Arsenal win the Champions League, it would be sad because Barcelona would have failed. One could argue that Barcelona's season doesn't need trophies to validate it, but though that is true to a degree, I can't completely side with it. Not yet, anyway.

If Barcelona win, it would be sad because Arsenal didn't. Wherever I step lies woe. And all this without even mentioning the possibility of Manchester United or Chelsea winning the thing — or worse, Manchester United and Chelsea meeting each other in the final again. If that happens, I'm giving up on this sport stuff and turning this into a Big Brother blog. Do you want that on your conscience, universe?

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Mise, áit éigean eile

You know that stylistic analysis of the "Panenka" penalty you've always wished someone would write? No? Well, now you can acquaint yourself with it in a guest post your correspondent has contributed to the fabulous Run of Play.

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Ever get that thing where the singer of a song you like looks like Steve McClaren?

No?

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Truth

One feels one should be shocked that anyone could still believe the lies told about the actions of Liverpool fans at Hillsborough on April 15 1989. Then one remembers that it took the Sun fifteen years to apologise for their notorious "THE TRUTH" front page splash; even then, only when backed into a corner, and without passing the up the opportunity to insult their readers' intelligence† in having a go at a rival newspaper group. Since 1989, of course, the editor responsible for the original "exposé" has consistently rowed back on the apology his capo di tutti capi forced him to make, and has gone on to forge a successful career for himself as a media twat-about-town.

That's not to say one should jadedly accept such nonsense. So I doff my figurative cap to The Gaffer, head honcho at EPL Talk. The host of a US sports talk radio show has been — not for the first time, apparently — reciting some of the falsehoods about the disaster which still hang around twenty years on. The Gaffer soberly demolishes his arguments with plain reference to the facts. It's well worth reading, both as a response to the radio host's allegations and as a reminder of the persistence of misinformation and the wilful distortion of history.

† Supply your own jokes, folks.

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'Pataphysical Football: The potential banana skin

Ed.: I was recently talking to Prof. Avril Fish-Wink-Wink, Jerome Sapir-Whorf's fellow footballolinguist, and she put me in contact with an interesting chap called Anastasios Pépin, a 'pataphysicist. Said Avril: "This man could completely change the way we think about sport, if he can lay off the absinthe. Or maybe if he can stay on the absinthe, I'm not sure." She suggested that we could perhaps host one of his articles: "He's pissed off a lot of people and there aren't many places left for him to go. His voice needs to be heard."

Hmmm. You'll be the judge of that, I suppose. Here it is, anyway. And just so we're clear: this dude is, like, totally non-fictional, yeah?

*

With the FA Cup semi-finals but hours away, it would be instructive, I think, to consider the true nature of this fabled competition: the oldest competitive mass-walk-on-a-financial-district-pavement in history.

The FA Cup is a fine representation of the comedy and tragedy of the English class system. It began life as the main competition of an association founded for the benefit of ex-public schoolboys. But it soon became a vehicle for the symbolic subversion of the hierarchical structures of British society: first, as provincial working-class upstarts took over; then, as the professional game formally stratified into leagues and divisions. It is this feature of the tournament that defines it most strongly to this day; hark! the cries of that's what the Cup is all about when the second best team in League One scores early against the worst team in the Championship.

The metaphor of choice for the possibility of a team defeating a higher-ranking club in the FA Cup is the banana skin. The Cup can be considered as the efforts of a group of city gents — wearing bowler hats and carrying black umbrellas — to negotiate the distance between their final Tube stop and the large, faceless financial institution at which they work. However, the footpath along which they must travel becomes narrower and narrower as their journey progresses. Only one can finally reach the headquarters of Power and All Her Evil Accessories. The gents jostle for the ever-decreasing space on offer, and inevitably, some are nudged over the kerb and into oncoming traffic.

We take little pleasure from such an incidence because, even though one upper-class person has met his demise, said demise also represents the survival of the upper-class person who pushed him. Where the fulfillment, such as it is, lies is in the extra obstacles the poshos must dodge: the banana skins. These have been left on the pavement the previous night by merry class pranksters. When a gent encounters a banana skin, there are two possibilities: (a) the gent avoids stepping on it, by chance or by spotting it in time and stepping around it; or (b) the gent fails to spot it, or spots it too late, and treads on it, slips and falls.


In the event of (b) occurring, there is much rejoicing and hilarity to be had. The stiff, pompous snob who is trying to reach the house of oppression has been rendered buffoonish by his pratfall, and horrifically injured by both the fall and the subsequent trampling he receives. The banana skin is propelled forwards ahead of the throng, where it awaits the next potential victim.

In the meantime it is hailed as a heroic emblem, much like the carbon rod that saved the crew of the space shuttle in that episode of the Simpsons. However, the banana skin's very inanimatedness is the first component of its innate tragedy. Its function is simply to cause city gents to slip, and thus be propelled forwards. Without the gents to slip on them, they become no more than detritus to be swept up and binned by noon. This raises issues about the banana skin's sense of identity: It will only be given true meaning when it is trampled on by the upper classes, or it will be ignored and left to rot in a dump.

The second component of the banana skin's tragedy is that it will never succeed in reaching the financial institution and gaining control of a key societal apparatus. The chances of the peel being propelled forward diminish as the journey continues, as there are fewer and fewer gents on the pavement, thus providing them with an unobstructed view of any potential hazards ahead.

You can see how all this symbolises the working class anxiety about the barricades which separate them from true power and influence.


A very interesting thing has happened to the way we understand the FA Cup. Some time in the mid-to-late 'nineties, the metaphor of choice began to shift from banana skin to potential banana skin. This may appear to be a simple linguistic quirk, a mutation of a cliché. But language is never just language. The small club may be a banana skin, but equally, it may not be. The peel is no longer sitting there on the footpath — it is in a state of intermediate existence, between existence and non-existence. Much as Schrödinger's cat is both alive and dead until we observe it, the banana skin both exists and does not exist until the gent approaches it.

What we have here is an additional layer of potentiality. Two things now determine whether the skin gets trodden on: the very existence of the skin and the gent's ability to manoeuvre around it. Thus is the skin even further removed from the great prize at the end of the race, and more gents prevail than before. The connection between this and the growing chasm between the haves and have-nots in football need not be pointed out, I'm sure.

The recurring angst over the FA Cup's relevance is also tied into all of this. The potentialising of the banana skin's existence is both an anxiety dream and a mild guilt trip caused by the well-testified embourgeoisiement of Britain's working class. How the ongoing recession, and the de-embourgeoisiement of the working class, will affect the perception of the FA Cup is uncertain. The anger at those who control the nation's financial health and the desire to see them topple are greater than ever. Will the hanging of effigies of bankers be a substitute for the FA Cup or a spur for greater interest? We must wait for next season to see.

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Things to do while searching for a working stream for Arsenal vs. Villarreal

Consider just sitting in front of the telly and watching the Porto-United match. Decide against it on principle — the principle being that RTE are a shower of United-loving pricks and shouldn't be encouraged to PICK A UNITED GAME OVER AN ARSENAL GAME FOR THE BILLION-AND-FIRST TIME.

Refresh liveblogs for both games. Say "Pfft, Ronaldo's goal wasn't that good", even though you haven't seen it.

Eat some leftover Easter chocolates in semi-darkness, not knowing what the centres are. You live on the fuckin' edge, man.

Wonder whether ex-Liverpool defender Steve Harkness ever got called Steve Darkness at school. Bet he did, but probably only at primary school, unless the people he went to secondary school with were a bit thick.

Check reflection in the back of a CD (The Great Eastern by the Delgados) to ensure the unexpectedly chewy toffee hasn't turned your winsomely gap-toothed smile into a vision of true, manky disgust.

Turn on the light, goddammit.

Find a woefully stuttery stream. Get lulled into a vague trance by random words uttered by Alans Parry and Smith.

Cogitate on the possibility of a "vague trance".

See that Arsenal have possession. Watch as the picture freezes for a few seconds, then quickly fast-forwards to a minute later. Notice that the score overlay in top-left of screen now says ASL 1-0 VIL. Woot.

Wonder why they abbreviate Arsenal as ASL, not ARS. You don't think anyone is embarrassed that "Arsenal" begins with the letters A-R-S-E, are they?

Start to feel sorry for this Tommy Smyth chap everyone's been vilifying today, even though the only time you've ever seen him was when the video thing in the sidebar of Soccernet's main page autoplayed and you were somewhat shocked to hear a thick north Louth accent blaring from your laptop speakers. Then have the thought strike you that you've met plenty of people's uncles who are exactly like him and reason that you'd probably want to do harm to him after a few minutes of listening to him as well. Feel a tad more sorry for him as a consequence of this thought.

Sketch out an idea for a screenplay about a man who becomes caught up in a cycle of violence and guilt. Like Neil Warnock. With guilt.

Remember how much you hate Neil Warnock. You hate Neil Warnock.

Actually watch Ronaldo's goal. Wow.

Think to oneself that Grafite's goal of the millennium has already been superseded by Senna, Adebayor, Torres, Keita/Barcelona, Ronaldo and probably approximately two hundred goals worldwide.

Find a Spanish feed with a frozen picture but uninterrupted audio. Notice how the /s/ sound seems to almost disappear much of the time in the middle or at the end of words. Wonder how you might convincingly drop this thought into a future conversation.

Wish you knew more about phonology.


Spend half-time likening your plight to man's helplessness in the face of an uncaring universe. Stare wistfully at a spot on the wall just behind your computer. What is that, pencil? How did that get there?

Check your Analytics account and marvel at the global reach of your media empire. Hello Ipoh, Malaysia!

Long for the Justin.tv chatterers' comforting brand of hideous xenophobia.

Find a stream. Isn't working.

Find another stream. Is working!

Audio provided by Generic English Commentator and Generic Ex-Pro Scottish Co-Commentator. Like watching someone play a mediocre computer game. Have it make you realise how, like, this whole "watching television on a computer" thing, is just, you know, kinda freaky when you think about it, and shit?

GOAL! Adebayor scores. GE-PSC-C says something to the effect that it's the only good thing Ade's done all night. Ponder the benefits of the lack of stress from not having been exposed to Adebayor's apparent earlier mishaps.

Sketch out an idea for a screenplay about a machine that lets you edit out the bad parts of your life and allows you to live in eternal bliss until you die, wait, dying's not good, how are you going to get around that?, you haven't really thought this through, have you?, when...

Stream freezes just after goal, in the midst of Arsenal celebrations, on this picture:


Think it's sweet of your computer to try and provide you with a happy ending like this, but resolve that you must press on with your quest.

Find a new feed, this time from Russia. Feel slightly too proud of yourself that you know what СПОРТ means.

See that, oh, it's 3-0 now.

Keep an eye on Porto-United liveblog. Get the feeling that something might happen yet still refuse to watch it. Hah! Take that, complacent semi-state monolith!

Note how the Russian dudes really don't give a shit. Cheer up, guys! Arsenal are winning!

Games over. Wonder how long it will be before The Man sends a cease-and-desist to the Guardian for their liveblogs.

Start to get over-confident about Arsenal's Champions League chances and wonder whether you should symbolically delete that post you wrote after the Roma tie in which you essentially likened Arsenal's role in this season's Champions League to that of a twig Zeus trampled on as he galloped through a forest to have sex with a mortal.

Imagine that RTE will probably still find a way to deprive you of Arsenal in the semi-finals, even though they're playing United; say, by showing old Live at Three clips accompanied by the Angelus bell whenever Arsenal are in possession. Chuckle bitterly like the wheezy aul' cynic you aspire to be.

Consider writing a profoundly profound situationist analysis of the effect of watching, or attempting to watch, live football on the internet on an already atomised culture.

Consider writing a fake profoundly profound situationist analysis of the effect of watching, or attempting to watch, live football on the internet on an already atomised culture, attaching the name of a moderately well-known academic to it, sending it to a deconstructionist journal and seeing what happens.

Realise that you're rambling now.

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Ryan Babel presents: Diameter Subtends Right Angle

Via

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If it had been a cheese roll

Allow me, as Peter Drury would say, to nudge you in the direction of The Duckworth Lewis Method, the new venture of Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and Pugwash's Thomas Walsh. The pair are in the midst of recording an album about cricket, and from the sound of the two tracks previewed on their MySpace site, it's going to be spiffing. Particularly fine is 'Jiggery Pokery', about Shane Warne's legendary dismissal of Mike Gatting in the first Ashes test of 1993. Do give it a listen.

A couple of weeks back, the Guardian's Andy Bull took the opportunity presented by Messers Duckworth and Lewis' partnership to highlight his eleven favourite cricket songs. Included on the list was 'Fuckin' 'Ell, It's Fred Titmus', from Half Man Half Biscuit's debut album, Back in the DHSS. It's all about bumping into to the "England bowler and ex-England selector, slightly deficient in the toe department", and its sporting connection is but an excuse for me to once more post a HMHB song on this site. Enjoy.

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The report of the Warnock Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy

He wasn't shot — the motorcade drove into the bullets. These things happen in politics. Now bugger off wi' yer and let us have us tea in peace, yer bastards.

Video via 101 Great Goals.

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The discreet disarming of the bourgeoisie

Okay, this is starting to get a bit weird. The other day, I stumbled upon a YouTube conversation between two ancient Athenians (two dead ancient Athenians, lest clarification be needed). And yesterday evening, I got this email:

from Claude Choiseul (duc.de.choiseul.stainville@gmail.com)
to fredorrarci@gmail.com
date Sun, Apr 12, 1789 at 6:42 PM
subject Re: Trouble amongst the bourgeoisie?
mailed-by gmail.com

Your Royal Highness,

I note, with reference to Your Majesty's correspondence dated the 11th inst., that Your Majesty's concerns may be, praise the Lord, of little foundation, certainly if activities in our parts are to be credited. As Your Majesty knows, portentous word has often reached me of late of the anger amongst the bourgeoisie of Lunéville, directed towards the aristocracy. Some of my more nervous aides have even spoken of the possibility of revolution. However, it now appears that they are content to squabble amongst themselves, and I believe this indicates a weakening of their resolve, which I predict with utter confidence will be demonstrated across the nation in the coming months and years. I am sure Your Majesty's forthcoming stay in the Royal summer residence will not be unduly interrupted!


Your Majesty's humble servant,

Claude Antoine Gabriel, duc de Choiseul-Stainville

Has anyone else been getting these? Is it a virus or something? Is it, dare I ask, one of you, dear readers? You're not pulling some freaky prank on me or something? Look, I know that Jerome Sapir-Whorf's guest post a couple of weeks ago was, um, controversial; but that's no reason to mess with my head like this, surely...

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Quote of the season...

...comes from Chris Toy, creator of Studs Up, who sums up the phenomenon that is Sam Allardyce better than anyone ever has:

Yes, his methods get the results he wants. But so does scratching an itch on your arsehole with your bare hand - that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do things.

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Spotted on YouTube

(Click on images to enlarge.)






Weird.

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Very brief notes on (the first 68 minutes and little bits thereafter of)† Barcelona vs. Bayern Munich

• There comes a time in Pro Evolution Soccer when you build up your Master League team to such a standard that matches become too easy: when you're playing on autopilot yet still having 80% possession, barely noticing that you have just scored half a dozen goals; when you realise it's probably time to play at a higher difficulty level. (Unless you're like me and you're already at the highest level. *Sigh*) That's kind of what this game felt like. Barcelona were that good and Bayern were that bad. One almost entered into a meditative state watching this, before jolting oneself back into full consciousness with the realisation that no matter how the rest of this season pans out for Barcelona, this is a team to savour while you have the chance.


• Bayern were that bad, though.


• Pep Guardiola has been very impressive thus far, and he became even more so to this observer when he was sent from the line for protesting the yellow card shown to Lionel Messi for diving. But then, I come from a family of touchline-shouter-fromers, so that kind of thing impresses me on a profound level. I'm not proud of it, but hey. And it was no yellow card. If Messi ends up missing the final...


• Speaking of Messi, the brain spasm suffered by a defender whenever Messi has possession near him is one of life's great pleasures.


• But Bayern's defenders suffered brain spasms whenever Henry got the ball, either, or when Iniesta had it on the left after Henry went off. Now, those players are excellent, but remember...


• Bayern really were that bad.

† Unreliable streams, yadda yadda.

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Goal theory

A few months back, I made the case that to watch great goals as discrete, on-demand YouTube videos is to miss some of the essence of the moment; not watching it as it happened, as a part of the match it took place in, deprives it of context, and therefore of some of its meaning. I gave as an example Dennis Bergkamp's goal for Holland against Argentina at the 1994 World Cup. But I may have erred in using such a monumental goal to illustrate my point. Sometimes, it may be that nothing — or as near as makes no difference — is lost in a great goal's transfer to webular semi-immortality.

This struck me a few months ago when I saw that Yoann Gourcuff goal:



I struggle to see how this goal would have been better experienced live. I reckon this is because the goal was largely inconsequential and didn't add much to the drama of the match as a whole. Bordeaux were already 2-0 up in a mid-season league game. Perhaps, shorn of any greater meaning, its aesthetic quality is all (all!) that remains.

One beautiful goal this weekend was most certainly dramatic and consequential:



This goal is stunning, whether seen live or later. Sweet Jesus, it's amazing. I'm tempted to say that this goes against my initial assertion: that to see it out of context would cause it to lose something. I'm really unsure on this...

On a somewhat related point, you will probably have seen this over the weekend: Grafite's goal for Wolfsburg against Bayern Munich:



Various people have been proclaiming this as one for the ages ("the most superlative goal of this or any season").

Am I missing something? Don't get me wrong: it was a lovely goal and all. Any time someone scores with a backheel, it's worth seeing. But he was running at a demoralised defence (Bayern were already 4-1 behind at this point) too stupefied to do anything about his run. Not to turn into Alan Hansen or anything, but for him to be allowed to get into the heart of the penalty area so easily is just bad defending.

Lionel Messi has scored several goals better than this one this season alone. Surely we haven't begun to take Messi for granted already, that we may be dazzled by Grafite's goal and pass over efforts like this one?:



That is a great goal. That is the kind of thing you need to worship. And Federico Macheda's may be better still. And I'm an Arsenal fan, for god's sake...

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The Official Sport Is A TV Show Champions League Quarter-Final Preview: Nostradamus All to Hell!

It's nearly Champions League time again. We're down to the really exciting part now, where the nasty continental muck is evenly balanced out by good old honest English grit. And what better time than before the Champions League quarter-finals to run a Champions League quarter-final preview? I certainly can't think of any!

Our normal procedure in such instances is to gather data and input it into our hypercomputer, Maisie (located in the world's third largest underground vault right here in County Sportisatvshow), a process which would furnish us with 200-proof truth. You may remember that this is how we produced our Premier League preview in, um, October, and our groundbreaking Premier League Goalkeeper Power Rankings. This time, unfortunately, Maisie gave us this message:



That binary string went on for twelve days, you know.

There was nothing for it, then, but to ingest a large dose of hallucinogens specially-formulated by SIATVStech, delve into randomly selected verses from the great seer himself and tune into what the cosmos was telling me. And here, as part of my sacred duties, I share that eternal knowledge with you, dear reader.

So, here is our preview, brought to you by Nostradamus...from beyond the grave.

---

MANCHESTER UNITED vs. FC PORTO

Near Perpignan the red ones detained,
Those of the middle completely ruined led far off:
Three cut in pieces, and five badly supported,
For the Lord and Prelate of Burgundy.

This is going to be brutal. United ("the red ones") will be "detained" by the spirit of '99 and their famous triumph in Barcelona ("near Perpignan"). Driven by the memory of one of their greatest days, and by revenge for their defeat to Porto in 2004 (when Porto were managed by José Mourinho, who now manages Inter, who come from a city near Perpignan), they set about their opponents ruthlessly.

Jesualdo Ferreira's decision to opt for three central defenders flanked by wing-backs backfires. Their midfield is overrun ("Three cut in pieces") and their defence is left exposed ("five badly supported"). United run in double figures over the two legs, giving famous oenophile Alex Ferguson — "the Lord and Prelate of Burgundy" — another glorious victory, and leaving Porto with a gnawing sense of emptiness that stalks them without respite for the rest of their days.

Result: United win; minute's silence to be observed before semi-final first legs

---

VILLARREAL vs. ARSENAL

The great Pontiff taken captive while navigating,
The great one thereafter to fail the clergy in tumult:
Second one elected absent his estate declines,
His favorite bastard to death broken on the wheel.

The "great Pontiff" is obviously Arsene Wenger, incumbent for life at the Church of Arsenal. After a nervy 1-1 draw at El Madrigal, the second leg becomes tetchy and boils over. Arsene Wenger is furious, rightly, when a Villarreal defender dares to imagine that he belongs in the same sector of the galaxy as Cesc Fabregas. Wenger is unjustly sent from the line for remonstrating with the fourth official, amidst some unseemly pushing and shoving on the field.

The third line's meaning is elusive. At first, it appears to mean that Pat Rice was somehow held up and unable to attend the match, thus leading to Arsenal's hopes of qualification crumbling in the absence of leadership from the touchline. This is wrong. Arsenal's assistant manager is not elected but, like the great Pontiff, appointed by God. This is a clever red herring by devious aul' Nozzie. Since there is no "second one elected", the "second one elected" cannot be absent. That leaves the question: can, then, his "estate decline"?

Not if line four has anything to do with it. This places Nicklas Bendtner at the heart of the outcome (though calling him a "bastard" is a bit harsh, I feel). Nozzie's lax punctuation may lead one to believe that this line condemns Bendtner to a sorry demise — a red card for a reckless swing of the elbow, perhaps, or a miss when one-on-one with the keeper fifteen yards out. But it is not Bendtner who is broken to death. The wheel symbolises the circle of life. Bendtner has been journeying around the wheel, and just when it appears that he has reached death — the final missed sitter which ends his top-flight career — he notices that the death-spoke has been broken, possibly by the great Pontiff. Thus, he cheats death, finishing with a neat, low side-foot shot past the keeper.

Result: Arsenal win; eternal life and, therefore, eternal suffering bestowed upon humankind

---

BARCELONA vs. BAYERN MUNICH

For the Gallic Duke compelled to fight in the duel,
The ship of Melilla shall not approach Monaco,
Wrongly accused, perpetual prison,
His son shall strive to reign before his death.

Frankly, I'm a wee bit surprised Nostradamus has anything to say about a game between two non-PL clubs. (And how was this allowed come to pass, anyhow? Sort it out, UEFA!) Still, Nozzie was nothing if not conscientious, so here we are.

Uh-oh. Looks like Thierry Henry ("the Gallic Duke") is in trouble. Here, Nostradamus correctly foresees Henry's famous nickname, "the ship of Melilla". The real ship of Melilla, Melilla No. 103, has been blackisted by Greenpeace for "fishing in the MED during closed season". Similarly, Henry strays offside several times in early exchanges. He responds by looking at the linesman disbelievingly, mouthing some curses and walking away sulkily.

This does not endear him to the officials; later on, some offside calls go against him, even though he was onside ("Wrongly accused"). Hence, he is unable to "approach Monaco" — "Monaco" is the Italian for Munich, and here symbolises the Bayern goal. This oppression of Henry's spirit becomes a "perpetual prison", and he complains some more to the referee, earning two quick bookings ("his death"). Happily, "his son" (Lionel Messi) is on hand, his astonishing dribbling ability nullifying the Bayern offside trap.

Result: Barcelona win; Thierry Henry suffers existential crisis, takes sabbatical to write volume of nihilistic verse

---

LIVERPOOL vs. CHELSEA

In the city of "Fertsod" homicide,
Deed, and deed many oxen plowing no sacrifice:
Return again to the honors of Artemis,
And to Vulcan bodies dead ones to bury.

The first thing to note here is that "Fertsod" is actually ſertsod, ie. Sertsod. "Sertsod" backwards is "dostres": that is, "dos tres", "two three" in Rafael Benitez's native tongue. Add two and three and you get five, or the number of Champions' Cups / Champions Leagues (or "homicides", as Nostradamus calls them) Liverpool have won. This PROVES that Nostradamus could see into the future.

The tie is going to be even more brutal than United-Porto, but in a different way. The first leg is marked by a dearth of good technical play; though the many oxen plough (Dirk Kuyt?), attacks break down in the face of big-match nerves and overly-cautious defending ("no sacrifice"). Nozzie uses a palindrome, "deed", to represent the circular futility of the game, like a dog chasing its tail. He even has to double it to adequately capture this idea.

Ever more afraid to make an error, the teams retreat into even more entrenched defensiveness in the second leg — they "Return again to the honors of Artemis". (According to an unattributed piece of information in Wikipedia, the name "Artemis" (αρτεμης) may mean "safe and sound".) The simultaneous urge to protect their respective goals clashes with the deep primeval need to attack. This internal conflict proves impossible to resolve, and becomes outwardly manifest as frustration, which boils over into sheer, senseless violence. There is blood. Viewers wonder why they didn't watch that documentary about volcanoes ("Vulcan bodies") instead.

Result: Everyone dies in the end, some of boredom

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So then, the semi-final line-up will be as follows:

The dust and the screaming vs. The yuppies networking
The panic, the vomit vs. The panic, the vomit

Oh, this shit's on, muthafuckas.

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Gio knows

Forgive me for the egregious use of the first person when talking about the national team — can't be helped, sometimes...Thoughts on Ireland worth checking out from the Okey Doke Football Blog and Jump the Fence, Baby. Here are mine.

I was going to begin by noting how odd the national relationship with the Ireland team is, but on reflection, it's probably not that exceptional at all. Two aspects of international football give it a quality distinct from that of the club game: nationalism (used here in a general, not-necessarily-pejorative sense) and the scarcity of fixtures. European qualifying tournaments usually give each team between eight and fourteen games, spread over a year and a bit. So much more, therefore, rides on an average qualifier than on a domestic league game. The particular intensity that this lends to such games may often be absent for larger countries whose qualification is more or less guaranteed, but it's there for most of us; and every aspect of the matches appears far more significant than it otherwise would. Ireland, having usually been there or thereabouts for a couple of generations, are a fine example of this.

There are a few other elements which go into the mix here, such as the strange sense of entitlement many people seem to feel about the team. Several things feed into this. The Charlton era left us first giddy, then grouchy when things didn't go our way as often as they did during that golden age. Most Irish fans experience their football as a Sky production; some, such as the small but heard group who booed the team at the final whistle of the Bulgaria game, seem unable to see what is in front of them as the imperfect reality it is. (As Jump the Fence noted, "it's not X-Factor you're watching".)

Perhaps there is some residue from the chimeric Celtic Tiger bluster which filled our sails not so long ago; more precisely, from the invocation of the national miracle in the aftermath of the Saipan affair* by the type of people who believe we would have won the World Cup if not for Mick McCarthy.

Furthermore — at the grave risk of appearing to enter into some gratuitous meeja-bashing — the coverage of the team's exploits has become ever more tabloidesque, and not just amongst our, ahem, beloved redtops. That is, it's bipolar: the highs are very high, the lows impossibly low. Every slight is a catastrophe that demands an immediate sacrifice. Impatience is the drug, whose dose was increased in 2002. Add to that a national broadcaster as dominant in determining the national sporting discourse as the rest of the news agenda, and who continue to employ a certain demagogic ex-Millwall player who many people actually take seriously, and you have a nice little mudpit for irrationality to wallow in.

Of course, this isn't all-pervasive; thankfully, there is enough reasonable talk to keep things sane (things haven't got as bad as the steaming pile of nonsense that gets written about England). But it's there, and it's inevitable.

The beauty part of Giovanni Trapattoni's tenure is that he bypasses all of this. So far, he has appeared not to care about the circus. However eager the media is to play up his supposed eccentricities, he has been the most normal of the lot of us. By assessing the available talent, devising a plan and sticking to it — in other words, by going about his managerial business as any good manager would — he's been damn near subversive. While some decisions have been questionable in isolation (PaulMcShanePaulMcShanePaulMcShane), Trapattoni isn't from the mould of the previous unfortunate holder of the office, who made us unsure as to whether he wasn't just making it up as he went along.

The truth is, despite the risible claims of some, Ireland are not a world-class team, or favourites to win the group. We have qualified for four finals tournaments in seventy-five years. More talented Ireland teams than this one have failed. This very team failed dismally in the last campaign. That four games remain and we're still in contention is itself a small victory. If we fail to qualify, it may well be because of a calamitous error by Trapattoni (it hasn't happened yet, though). More likely, it would be because sometimes these things happen. We're not owed a place at the World Cup. We've always had to fight for every goal and every point. It seems to me that's exactly what we're doing right now. Let's see where it gets us.


*Is anyone else depressed and a tad embarrassed that the word "Saipan" now calls to mind not one of the bloodiest battles of World War II but a spat between a footballer and his manager?

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Guest Post: How language explains football

Happy cruellest month! We have a special guest post for you today from a good friend, Jerome Sapir-Whorf. Jerome is Professor of Patalinguistics at Trinity College, Dublin, and here gives a fascinating insight into his research of a rarely-studied part of football history.

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Much exciting literature has been produced in recent years on the relationship between a nation's culture and its style of football. Writers such as Simon Kuper, David Winner and David Goldblatt have tried to determine whether factors such as art, politics and sociology can explain the differences in how soccer is played from country to country. While these works have enhanced the popular understanding of soccer, this is a sadly neglected field in academia. Furthermore, the impact of language on the game has hitherto been completely overlooked. Such a gap in knowledge has prompted Prof. Avril Fish-Wink-Wink of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Paris and myself to examine the issue.

It is a fact that language shapes thought. Readers of George Orwell's fictional Nineteen Eighty-Four, for instance, will be familiar with Newspeak, by which the Party aimed to systematically reduce the vocabulary of English, eliminating words which corresponded with concepts deemed by them to be undesirable, thus making the imagining of those concepts impossible. Extending this, it seems logical that the language of a group of people could determine how they conceived of a game, such as soccer.

One obvious example is in the area of vocabulary. We are all familiar with the idea of the Eskimos having fifty different words for "snow". This preponderance of words for something for which English, say, has but a handful is a reflection of the importance of snow in Eskimo culture. Similarly, if you examine other languages, you see the effect this idea has on football. Italian has 33 words pertaining to cynicism, expressing such nuanced connotations as "the cynicism with which one regards the mandated speed limit" and "the cynicism which leads one to take a piece of fruit from a shopfront display without paying". German has 28 words for different types of efficiency. Most Romance languages have a higher than average number of terms for various kinds of simulation. Dutch has a truly incredible 84 words to do with selfishness. Whereas European Portuguese has a standard number of ways to describe beauty, Brazilian Portuguese has twelve times the average. It is clear, I trust, how this has influenced the style of play in these countries.

One of the most significant linguistic factors in determining style is in the matter of morphology. There is a clear causality between the German case system and the success of the West German national team and Bayern Munich in the 1970s. German is a heavily inflected language, with nouns, pronouns and adjectives inflecting for case. Whereas English has lost most of its inflection, meaning that word order bears much meaning in a sentence, German word order is freer as a result of each word's function being made clear by how it is declined. This mindset paved the way for the development of Germany's form of "Total Football", in which Franz Beckenbauer's role as an attacking sweeper - subverting the normal order of things - played an essential role. It is inconceivable that a Franz Beckenbauer could have emerged from a culture which was not supported by a heavily inflected language.

The prime exemplars of "Total Football" were, of course, the Dutch. While much of the inflection in Dutch has been lost over the centuries, some is retained in a range of idiomatic expressions. Thus a sort of folk memory has been retained of the old case system, much as a homeopathic medicine will retain a "memory" of the substance which has been diluted many times over in order to create it. The freedom offered by an extensive case system had an obvious relation to the fluid position-switching of Ajax and Holland in the 1970s.

Latin's case system also devolved into a reliance on word order in the Romance languages. While the consequent rigidity of word order in the Romance languages may seem incompatible with the beautiful flowing football of the Latin countries, this is not so. This rigidity is offset by the mellifluous sonics of the languages, with their monophthong-centricism and heavy use of elision to aid the smoothness of speech. In Brazilian Portuguese, the nasalisation of vowels and the softening of word-final /d/ and /t/ indicate a playful, even daring character, with obvious consequences on their football.


English is full of telltale signs as to what effected the peculiarly English approach to football. Old English morphology was highly inflectional. This system gradually broke down into the word order dependent system we know today. This was uncannily mirrored in the development of soccer. The chaotic, free-for-all mob football games (flexible word order) became more organised, with positions becoming important, but still relatively loose (case system breaking down, word order beginning to set) until the 2-3-5 system became the all-conquering default, with players' roles strictly determined by their position (position of a word in a sentence denotes its function in the sentence). Small wonder that England were baffled by Hungary's withdrawn centre-forward in 1953; Hungarian's more creative sentence structure allowed the Magyars to view the game more laterally than the English could, with the latter's more constrained linguistic approach leaving them woefully unprepared.

The issue of rhoticity has gone criminally under-acknowledged in the history of football. The accent of most English people is non-rhotic; that is, word-final /r/ disappears, "colouring" the preceding vowel. Scottish accents, however, are rhotic, giving full value to /r/. The English propensity for short-cuts unsurprisingly led to the dominant "kick-and-rush", long-ball style of football. The Scots, however, were naturally given to exploring possibilities to their fullest extent, which led to their invention of the passing game. It's obvious why the latter style took hold in Latin countries and Eastern Europe -- places with rhotic langauges.

Rhoticity also plays a part in explaining the radical developments which occurred in football in rural Somerset, a part of England where a rhotic accent dominates. Here, simultaneously with and independently from Scotland, a passing game developed, only to be swamped by the long-ball game of surrounding areas. That so little is known of this today is due to the scandalous refusal of the metropolitan elites to acknowledge it. (That's an issue for another day!)

One of the most fascinating developments in footballolinguistics is happening right now. It doesn't take a linguist to notice that the English language has been in decline for quite some time. Corrupt governments, inadequate educational systems, stupid young people and illiterate greengrocer's have turned English into gibberish. The misuse of apostrophes, the neglect of whom and the cherished subjunctive mood and the degenerate barbarisms of text messaging, chatroom conversations and Americanisms have dealt an almost fatal blow to this most noble of tongues. Such was the depth of the outrage generated by this horrific spectacle that the long overdue backlash eventually began. Lynne Truss heroically stepped into the breach with her marvellous 2003 book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, which alerted the world to the butchery of English and fuelled people with the righteous anger of the personally scorned. Finally, the grave, grave problem was recognised, and the brave warriors self-appointed to protect our very decency gained their due legitimacy.

Similarly, English football has fallen sharply in the years since she ruled the world in 1966. Just like it took a Truss to stem the decline of the language, now England have Fabio Capello to rescue the national team and banish the memories of past failure and the general degradation of the English game. It is clear that Truss' work has had a ripple effect throughout English society, including in football. Will Capello rescue English football? Well, we don't yet know whether Truss has saved the English language, so it remains to be seen. One thing is for sure: in football, as in everything, you are what you speak.

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Careful what you wish for

For the sake of Newcastle, I hope this is an April Fools joke. For Match of the Day viewers, I so hope it isn't...

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