tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19694245481719597502024-03-15T17:41:27.772+00:00Sport Is A TV ShowWe just do what we do and if anyone else likes it that's a bonus.Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.comBlogger409125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-16479349934096898022022-12-23T19:40:00.000+00:002022-12-23T19:40:04.062+00:00Fall, submission, knockout: Messi and the World Cup sublime<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1CwwO6bPQjzdilPmq7g3FFgih-vviYCMVVV6GSfoUd68Ljy4VFXsMJbffiUPMjF2SAi8hiZ4f6ZfLkG6lAOt1YgDB-829LtGUzzGGHaXZfNv2Nm2zJiw2liQcN_rQSIHZ0jS3tj-pFiF2XiKsVUyuXlRFcIJJzfkwa2J3U9vM9znWzpzxzoVq3THgiw/s1024/messi1.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1CwwO6bPQjzdilPmq7g3FFgih-vviYCMVVV6GSfoUd68Ljy4VFXsMJbffiUPMjF2SAi8hiZ4f6ZfLkG6lAOt1YgDB-829LtGUzzGGHaXZfNv2Nm2zJiw2liQcN_rQSIHZ0jS3tj-pFiF2XiKsVUyuXlRFcIJJzfkwa2J3U9vM9znWzpzxzoVq3THgiw/s320/messi1.png" width="500" /></a></div>
There are ... let's say ... naming no names ... <em>certain footballers</em>, historically great footballers, harbour-bestriding colossi of footballers, who <strike>can</strike> could perform supreme feats which were as predictable as they were unstoppable, devoid of mystery or confusion, entirely legible, their inner workings laid completely exposed and polished for the world to admire, and indeed these feats were very admirable, tremendously <em>admirable</em>, but left no trace, and the player always going way <em>around</em> the defender, rendering the defender's personal physical space and headspace irrelevant, just like how these feats bypass the viewer’s viscera, a pattern of clean exit wounds...<div><br /></div><div>...but do you want to be a spectator, or do you want to play? Or, rather: get played?</div><div></div><span class="fullpost"><br /><div>Watching sport is an act of humble submission. For all you know, you could be submitting yourself to a pile of shite. But Lionel Messi dignifies that submission by taking you somewhere.</div><div><br /></div><div>He isn't a showman, if you take 'showman' to imply pandering or ostentation. His play is far more generous than that: he takes you right into the game. In allowing you to see that a situation is innocuous, then taking the ball into what appears to be a cul de sac, or strolling into a dead spot off the ball, he gives your sophistication instinct an airing. <em>Sure, I know this is Messi, but I've seen football before, and there's nothing good happening for him here. I am very smart.</em> And then comes the incredible touch, or the death-defying dribble, or the unforeseeable pass, and you realise you knew nothing. Messi is the master of the double cross, and he turns the viewer into the opposition. You take the same sharp intake of breath they do at that moment the picture suddenly starts to shift. But whereas for the actual victims that inhalation can only resolve to a resigned sigh at best, for you, it comes out as laughter. Illusion/reveal. Set-up/punchline.</div><div><br /></div><div>I doubt the role of longevity in a personal pantheon, if that pantheon is based on sensation rather than sobriety. But Messi has done this so often and for so long. He's made me laugh more than any other player. He's the funniest fucker in football.</div><div><br /></div><div>And if you'd asked me before the World Cup for my preferred outcome from the event I would have said, <em>but of course I want Argentina to win, it's only just that a player who has given so much joy should be a world champion and shed the rubbish he's been burdened with on the international stage, why, I'm a partisan for greatness, don't you know, </em>and I'd probably have meant it. But then the tournament started, and I realised that what I wanted most of all was for him to be put through the wringer.</div><div><br /></div><div>For everyone to be put through it, though. The meaning is in the jeopardy, and in seeing how the participants succumb to it or extricate themselves from it. It lies too in the accumulation of such trials over the competition's history, in its layers of petrified narrative (and petrified players). I want to see the pretenders carve their glory out of rock-solid myth.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't believe in the mythical GOAT, but I do believe in the myth of the World Cup, the crucible of crucibles. I believe in what can change in four years and in the eternal truths. I believe in the near impossibility of retaining the trophy and in rotten-fruit homecomings. I believe in the Spanish giants going back to sleep and in Mexico shitting themselves. I believe in Vavá and Władysław Żmuda. I know Maradona didn't win the World Cup on his own, but I believe he did.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't believe in destiny or the football gods but I do believe in teams submitting themselves to forces beyond their control: in twenty-two psyches steeped in the angst of their countries' football past and weighed down by their own past failures, and by their successes. I believe in the World Cup mattering, and in the mattering mattering. I believe that the World Cup makes people mad. I believe in the World Cup overwhelming the strongest. I believe in the roll of great World Cup losers.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzXyenEMmd0S6aJvlGf59cQwPWkE12MPss5ojTWYPCO6zIQXRHU11OHHNeWblN_6dIEGnbBA0K1NXR9z_NcgEYqRWTxo44hoGDAB_z0Nosw-X87J9DQni97U05QQCB95oVo2F07JyRZC_jpaeNZ2PbrpapUHSrVMaLLRV9Z4xINopDm24CWnSFsm-UMw/s1024/messi2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzXyenEMmd0S6aJvlGf59cQwPWkE12MPss5ojTWYPCO6zIQXRHU11OHHNeWblN_6dIEGnbBA0K1NXR9z_NcgEYqRWTxo44hoGDAB_z0Nosw-X87J9DQni97U05QQCB95oVo2F07JyRZC_jpaeNZ2PbrpapUHSrVMaLLRV9Z4xINopDm24CWnSFsm-UMw/s550/messi2.png" width="500" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>Now that we've reached the part of the piece where it's only sickos left reading, let's say this: if you believe in the poetry of the precipice to which all who play in the World Cup must submit, then the prospect of Messi failing again — or of Argentina failing Messi again — was beautiful. Aye, <em>beautiful</em>. Not pretty or sweet, but something majestic, dissonant, unsettling. Club football's behemoth player-processing machine tends to mean that talent gets rewarded reasonably efficiently with the biggest contracts, the grandest championships, and awards handed out by the baldest administrators. Overall, the best get the most. But the World Cup, which everyone wants the baddest, brings the pascals and puts the squeeze on such logical, fair narratives. The pressure can silence the Maracanã, deprive the Golden Team and the Total Footballers and Ronaldo, and arrest Scotland's march on Buenos Aires. Even Pelé only has three winner's medals.</div><div><br /></div><div>That such a force can swallow up the best we can throw at it makes it a character in its own right. Just an inkling of what it's capable of makes its gloomy, lowering ubiquity exhilarating: the thrill of thinking you know what's going to happen, then being double-crossed.</div><div><br /></div><div>Or of thinking you know what <em>should</em> happen. Messi, of all people, <em>should</em> have won the World Cup. But his dreams had been variously hobbled by bad management, bad luck, bad health, bad miss by Higuaín, perhaps even (gasp) some bad play by himself. His failure to win the trophy — to even, let's be frank, have one tournament commensurate with his ability — cast the World Cup sublime in magnificently high definition. The improbability of such a sequence of duds was startling, and exponentially more so with each new addition, such that yet another would positively light up the afternoon sky with magisterially grey fireworks.</div><div><br /></div><div>This would be the case however such a failure may have been arrived at, but in the 2022 edition, Messi really ratcheted it up. He was actually playing a World Cup as Lionel Messi, thoroughly and throughout rather than in explosions punctuating puzzling silences. He was playing like an angel with the devil in him. It was what <em>should</em> have happened, but was nonetheless moving for all that. He was really doing it. Like it or not, it was Maradonian. Or <a href="https://sportisatvshow.blogspot.com/2018/07/stand-up-straight-and-tall-like-your.html">Baggioesque</a>, except that Baggio didn't have a Maradona in his unbidden heritage, or arrive at the World Cup quite so heavily pre-loaded with everyone else's baggage, or have multiple prior failed attempts to carry it home. And still he fell short.</div><div><br /></div><div>Each act of magic brought Messi simultaneously closer to his ultimate victory and to the lowering boom. The World Cup gives you two shows at once: in the foreground, the great practitioners of their craft performing with heady motivation; in the background, fate quietly slipping lead into the boxing glove. The connoisseur of the World Cup sublime embraces and welcomes the triumph of either, even though one may leave them heartbroken, rivulets of snotty tears collecting at their feet.</div><div><br /></div><div>But we know what happened. Imagine Higuaín had converted that chance in the 2014 final. Messi would have his world championship, but after a tournament in which his decisive contributions had been, by his standards, few. In the 2022 finals, he couldn't stop being the decider. He made it happen as surely as any individual player ever has. <em>Any</em>, if you know what I mean. He'd never looked more alive. </div><div><br /></div><div>We could say that Messi's legendary status should not — could not <em>possibly</em> — have depended on him winning the World Cup, such is the formidable nature of his achievements. But sport demands that the abstract be made vividly real. It's really good at it. Football's nearest approximation to the vividly real is the World Cup. Even given all that immensity of talent and his practically habitual realisation of same, and all the times he's set your brain alight, there would have been left, without the big one, that small but heavy part of the Messi phenomenon that remained unformed. But not now.</div><div><br /></div><div>No-one can sidestep the forbidding myth of the World Cup, not even a genius. When someone uses its force to propel them forward instead of being crushed by it ... when they can take that myth and become one with it, knowing full well what they're doing (just look at his face) ... when new myth is being made before your eyes and you know full well it's happening (<em>maybe Maradona's '86 will come to be seen as merely foreshadowing Messi's '22</em>) ... when you get to witness, nay, take part in such a grand act of beautiful collusion... </div><div><br /></div><div> ...well, what can you say? </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHXKQZbcP-O23hiHpvh1ca5ypEQ67xjjzfuYVsHmab5a5hMOctjdAiSlgmldSHkVkDX9PwL-lgyviyqBZjfGS2q_muCroMIBOVvHiXvxsvTF0fX1eu2goAVmJjb6FxtghFgRKDN5LfKO3epBGSRCwiej50pyMox8kOdXyS225kNFKG86dsOP_ZeB_vSA/s1024/messi3.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHXKQZbcP-O23hiHpvh1ca5ypEQ67xjjzfuYVsHmab5a5hMOctjdAiSlgmldSHkVkDX9PwL-lgyviyqBZjfGS2q_muCroMIBOVvHiXvxsvTF0fX1eu2goAVmJjb6FxtghFgRKDN5LfKO3epBGSRCwiej50pyMox8kOdXyS225kNFKG86dsOP_ZeB_vSA/s320/messi3.png" width="500" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div> Except that, if I was French, I'd be pretty fucking pissed off.</div><div><br /></div></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-62756960523285597592019-12-19T20:52:00.000+00:002019-12-20T17:20:16.721+00:00On the Way - or - Do you believe in magic?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3Yq48GAbhDN15bSnrFRALx-itnbC_ZwjKMWQusSDaBieVJLQBvdY7_H0WBNRG_QGg-eh-VqaPRx3iti55EVvGuBl8IiyvazWVnU9XHYegenRyOQDZAPtUV6JI-wNwaB3Fggdwl3kLi3MY/s1600/homerhibbert2.png" data-original-width="512" data-original-height="384" /></div><blockquote><a href="https://sportisatvshow.blogspot.com/2018/06/afc-s-mithering-or-footballs-mr-sorrow.html">Time's up.</a> Here comes Just Another Manager, to be followed, no doubt, by Yet Another Manager.</blockquote>I'd say I hate to say I told you so, but I hate to say I hate to say I told you so. So I say: I told you so.<br />
<br />
Seems like we have a series on our hands. Welcome to part two of Arsenal Managers Get Sacked, Sigh. Farewell, Unai Emery, who couldn't stick around long enough for English speakers to be able to say his name properly. Stress is such a problem for managers.<br />
<br />
In the last thirty-three years, Arsenal have waved goodbye to only four permanent managers. When an Arsenal boss is given a single to Stepaside, it tends to be an occasion with heft – the end of a dynasty, the prelude to a succession. George Graham's sacking was explosive and wreathed in scandal. Arsène Wenger's departure was monumental like a retreating glacier. The end of Bruce Rioch's brief but productive tenure was baffling at first, but soon revealed itself to be part of a plan. The end of a manager's term was a sign that one way or another, something was happening.<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost">Just a year and a half separated late Graham from early Wenger – all there was between that grit-turned-stodge and the first hints of the sublime. More than that: it separated two completely different conceptions of the club. There, apparently, for a steady and remarkably fruitful century, solid and deadly as a cannonball, flew Boring Arsenal; suddenly, in its place danced a company of angels (with surprisingly bad disciplinary records). A totally new fundamental truth had been established, displacing the old one. Within months, Boring Arsenal was so long ago that it may as well not have existed. Today, even further removed from that strange idea, somewhere there is an Arsenal fanatic taking time out from dealing with a second divorce by watching a YouTube clip allegedly of pre-1996 Arsenal and wondering what Rotherham have to do with anything.<br />
<br />
And sure, the start of the subsequent decline long preceded the end of the Wengerian age, and Wenger was a participant in that decline. But his leaving was an ending. Events since then have shown that he may have been the only person at the club who knew what went where.<br />
<br />
Emery’s time as manager had its merits. Arsenal would have qualified for the Champions League if not for the games they lost. There was the occasional display of the elan that had periodically shone right to the end of the Wenger era like a beautiful smile through fading ideals. You might have been tempted to believe that this was just what Arsenal did – that even when times were rough, they would occasionally allow confidence to overwhelm them, if only out of habit. Time gave the lie to such naivety. In part to cover deficiencies in the squad he was given to work with, Emery's tactics from game to game evoked a recurring dream where the protagonist spends an age searching for something before realising they don't actually know what it is they're searching for. The players would second-guess themselves, third-guess, fourth-guess, and eventually just guess. The last year and a half has been a slowly draining battery. The key word is "purposelessness", which enacts itself by starting out full of intent, then hissing to a sorry halt. The sacking of Emery was totally unshocking because no-one had the energy left to be shocked – an unnervingly mundane conclusion.<br />
<br />
Just a year and a half. It's nice to think that a team's highest historical standards are a default to which it should return once choppy waters have been sailed through. The [Club] Way will kick in, especially if the team is helmed by men with [Club] DNA. All that success must have happened for a reason: virtue rewarded. This mythologising of past euphoria is one of the pleasures of being a fan, but it hides the reality, which is that your club is just a lifeless spirit needing intervention by an animating force. Or, as one sage put it: you gotta make it happen. The positive thing about this is that you <em>can</em> make it happen. But you can't just wave your Way at the opposition and expect them to fall in line – they have their own narratives to nurture. A past, and the pride, self-aggrandisement, and nervous aspiration that come with it, are useless on their own. Whatever you want has to be dug out of the cold, hard present, and then dug out all over again next time around. A sustained spell of success should, if you're being reasonable, be regarded as miraculous. It will fall apart if not tended to. It might fall apart even if it <em>is</em> tended to, but the tending is mandatory. An era, a self-image, an amour-propre – they’re fragile conceits. <br />
<br />
And if a club's upper echelons allow a long-serving manager's reign to drift gently into impotence, if they fail to properly plan for his succession, and if they then fire the successor without much of a plan for <em>his</em> succession, you see what happens when nothing happens. Revealed is the default human state: to faff about cluelessly. A club's default state is to sink towards the bottom, which in this sport is a long way down. The basic aim of a club is to counteract this descent. You hope it's up to the task.</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-44277945262755899182019-04-14T22:59:00.000+01:002019-04-14T23:14:53.321+01:00Negative spaceThe first season I followed the English league was 1989/90. Liverpool won the championship for the eighteenth time. (Next on the leaderboard were Arsenal, with nine titles.) Even then, I knew that this was a completely normal, even banal, occurrence. Liverpool won leagues. That was that. It was the natural state of affairs, and would always be so, like the post-Cold War world peace.<br />
<br />
The league and FA Cup Double (capital D) was much more difficult. Even the mighty Liverpool had only won it once. It had been on offer for over a century, yet on only five occasions had anyone won it. NASA got people on the moon more often. Then in nine seasons between 1993/4 and 2001/2, Manchester United and Arsenal won five Doubles between them and made it almost routine — albeit, like Liverpool's league habit, a routine available only to favoured few.<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost">With the establishment of the League Cup in 1960 came a new pinnacle: the Treble. To date, no-one has reached it. But this season Manchester City, the League Cup already in the cabinet, could well do it. They're in the FA Cup final and continue to maintain a Formula 1 tempo in the title race.<br />
<br />
And though in the first leg of their quarter-final tie with Tottenham, they seemed unsure about how much they still want to be in the Champions League, they're still there. The Quadruple is usually spoken of as something perfectly plausible in theory but unlikely to exist in real-world conditions. Yet here we are in April, and City are only ten games away from taking their place alongside the Celtic immortals of 1967.<br />
<br />
Wouldn't you like to see something you've never seen before?<br />
<br />
Then again, which would be more impressive: City conquering the monster called Quadruple and carrying it home draped across triumphant shoulders; or that beast slipping away from another would-be slayer and living to roam free, mighty, and mysterious for at least one more year?<br />
<br />
The paradox: to fulfil a grand ambition is to diminish it. If something is special because it’s so difficult to acquire, then its acquisition means that maybe it wasn't that special in the first place. <em>It's been done.</em><br />
<br />
The prize is defined by the strain of those who just fail to win it.<br />
<br />
So it would be better if Liverpool were to win the league. Not only would it preserve the Quadruple, but we would get to witness the sating of a once unimaginable hunger, which would no doubt be somehow spiritually uplifting.<br />
<br />
Mind you, if we're celebrating the improbable, their long streak of nothingness is to be cherished. If you'd said, way back when, that at least twenty-nine years would elapse before they won their next title, I shudder to think what your peers would have said about you, I really do. For Liverpool not to have won the league since then seems so wrong and is therefore so right. It's the lean in the Leaning Tower. To see logic refuse to slot into place for so long — to see the elastic band stretch and stretch and stretch, knowing it will surely snap soon but <em>just ... not ... yet</em> — is one of sport's exquisite pleasures. It confirms that the game is too big to be apprehended in full — that no-one has this stuff figured out. Liverpool not yet winning another league (not winning yet another league?) is the essential companion to Leicester's success of 2016.<br />
<br />
(Twenty-nine years before Liverpool last won the league, Spurs, in black & white, did the first Double in sixty-four years.)<br />
<br />
So the ideal shake-out this season would be for City to win the league and then lose to Watford in the Cup final. Then they can do what they like in the Champions League as long as they beat Spurs.<br />
<br />
<imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="253" data-original-width="500" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9OYO4VhZXHZ0fOE0XB2NHHh2N_-rr3dLR29kt-eyFYNMl5PLb8H2Pe4Yw93hezFSVjWxY2XfAgqSP-s_kUfFuWJq-lp-FXt-7tVu0kE7PGURyOHxhb8RfZx_STjxBmn3erXk_Dii0gueR/s320/magic+road.png" width="500" /><br />
<br />
Sorry, what's that you say? <br />
<br />
<em> Oh, I see what's happening here: you're basically just jealous of any team other than no-league-titles-for-fifteen-years-is-that-right-so-called-Invincible Arsenal enjoying the success that you, deep in some foul cavern of your soul, feel is your team's by right, and although you are very grudgingly accepting of the current pecking order of English football, you feel that if other teams attain these accolades, it should be in as joyless a manner as possible</em>?<br />
<br />
How dare you.<br />
</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-62948534802298070302018-07-19T16:05:00.000+01:002018-07-19T16:05:45.691+01:00TWTWCTW<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNb3F0J3tPqNBF9SQnsKLARa9qd-t6aB0TIw1rbbm1-CZDeE0W3I8QkzL8i0AlUb8opnUm6IJaalq852d7bQ6ToLYgT_DilaTz_FKCgcCC2HiRP2TvSycVMcjfKMFBZCL5dzvPXgL5qqG-/s1600/tw3a.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="281" /></div><br />
I read previews to get educated, and I even tolerate the predictions of the learned to help set the scene, but (with due admiration for those experts) it is with glee that I see such attempts to give shape to the future confounded by each World Cup. It's in there every time, the mysterious element just beyond your ability to identify or to understand how it got there: the strange light outside in the night, someone else's bloody tooth in your drink.<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost">This edition, more than most, careened from certainty to new certainty contradicting the previous one. <br />
<br />
After their opening game against Portugal, it looked as though Spain might be emerging from their post-golden era slump, and that their performance might match the talent they collected, imposing as it yet again was. But it turned out they were just the bad old Spain in the good old Spain's too-big suit. Their performance against Russia was a fascinatingly grim self-parody, a sublime monument to mental paralysis: a vast blank slab.<br />
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Germany — as constant for the last dozen years as the old West Germany had been, but more fun — were outeverythinged by Mexico, then knocked on their backsides again by Sweden before getting up and showing, in a desperate flash of pride, that they were still Germany. Their tame surrender to South Korea and their management's offloading of blame onto Mesut Özil exposed a rotten heart and showed that they were in fact the new France (and not in a good way).<br />
<br />
Mexico made their standard exit in the last sixteen, but the joy and hope they sparked with some of their performances at least ensured that had been promoted to the rank of this year's Chile.<br />
<br />
Colombia's goals against Poland, and their outstanding centre-half pairing of Yerry Mina and Davinson Sánchez, made you optimistic to the point of stupidity. Against Senegal, Colombia were nervous, and then Jamesless, but finally victorious. Against England, they seemed terrified. (Why? Jameslessness?) The terror manifested itself first as destructive cynicism, and then, as it dawned on them that they would actually have to play football to win, in a thrilling urgency that almost won them the match. England had looked composed (if blunt as an attacking force); now it was they who looked scared, misplacing simple passes and resorting to the soothing hoof. Yet they paced their way back into the game like a cyclist dropped on a climb, and given a second chance, they kept their heads when it mattered.<br />
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Japan were so frightened of elimination in their last group match against Poland that they ceased to play altogether. Against Belgium, they were courage itself.<br />
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<em>"...and at the end of what was an intriguing first half..."</em> is usually the most professional way a commentator can plead with a viewer to watch the rest of a dull game, but the first half of Belgium-Japan really did load the second with possibility. The game was the best of the tournament because it was a complete piece, the first minute tied to the last.<br />
<br />
The favourites were struggling to impose their desire on the game, while constantly being undercut by the underdogs. Belgium had most of the ball, but couldn't threaten. Japan attacked with quick, smart passing through midfield, then worked the ball around the Belgian half until, almost invariably, a space opened up on the flank (either one), into which a Japanese player was making a run. The ball would find him, and Belgium would be stretched. In the second half, Genki Haraguchi scored following just such a run.<br />
<br />
Then Takashi Inui scored with a long-range shot struck with such apparently maximal transference of energy that he made the ball seem at one leaden and weightless. It was a goal experienced more viscerally than euphorically.<br />
<br />
Japan harried Belgium into error after error, but a fluke goal (albeit a pretty one) triggered a torrential comeback from Belgium, finished off with a hurricane of a counter-attack goal to win in stoppage time.<br />
<br />
In the next round against Brazil, Romelu Lukaku would snake his way through midfield at high speed before setting up Kevin De Bruyne for Belgium's second, in a virtuosic combination of control over his own body, over the ball and over his own mind (picking his path, laying it off to De Bruyne at just the right time before he himself got clattered). He made the winner against Japan without even touching the ball. His outside-in run drew his marker away from the wing down which Thomas Meunier would run to cross for Nacer Chadli to score, the ball having been dummied on the way by Lukaku. He exhibited so many facets of his game in those two moves that without showing it, the striker Lukaku reminded you what a great goalscorer he is too.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijxmywbxeI4w_08OWk1uSNhwAba_Z4WC4F8NfX75oTdXnbmAdcItXzyDOTMaVaf77-pYRaF2bDVllar88XvBQ3_agVFvxc-3sOc6EWGLm7iF-JlZKGhafcPFKkopI8I3L3WOhyphenhyphenImC-fi3n/s1600/tw3b.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="281" /></div><br />
Much of the World Cup is about defeat: teams being beaten by teams soon to be beaten. To watch the World Cup is to become a connoisseur of pain. You get an education in the many ways of the knockout. Japan felt the exquisite agony of giving everything of themselves in almost breaking the order, only to find it twisting violently back into place. Peru sang beautifully, but kept missing the high note. England's consolation for elimination was to step straight into a honeymoon period and to break a cycle of negativity (although we've heard that one before). Poland's defeat to Colombia furthered their Sisyphean run of qualifying and flopping. (Would that Ireland could do that.) Senegal were eliminated on a fair-play tiebreaker: death by bureaucracy.<br />
<br />
The exits of Germany and Spain were those of a privileged class being confronted with failings they can't decide whether they want to acknowledge. That of Argentina was the inevitable fate of a broken team. (For the neutral, though — if being a Lionel Messi fan counts as neutral in this fractured age — the whole weird mess was worth it just for his goal against Nigeria. With some players, you slow the video to understand their tricks. With Messi, you do so to understand his simple touches. An image to go along with those of Lukaku is that of Kenneth Omeruo putting his weight on his left foot as he prepared to make a tackle with his right, because he didn't expect Messi's second touch to be taken <em>before</em> the ball had hit the ground from his first, because who would expect that? We are all Kenneth Omeruo.)<br />
<br />
Panama's first World Cup appearance was so precious that celebration overcame elimination. Russia and Sweden left the stage contented in their overachievement.<br />
<br />
Croatia started the competition looking quite flat, but spent the quarter-final, semi-final and final straining every muscle and wearing away every nerve ending. Their effort was embossed on the latter stages of the tournament. And there in the middle of it was Luka Modrić, whose "gift", as described by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jul/11/luka-modric-croatia-world-cup-england-miracle-worker">Jorge Valdano</a> (a candidate for player of the tournament), "consists [of] filling the game with common sense". He was a still point in a frantic world — but he snapped into tackles as fervently as his teammates did.<br />
<br />
And their hopes ran into France, who proved almost casually that they were the best team in the world. Croatia wound up a punch into which they put a lifetime of hope and fury; France bobbed; Croatia whiffed and fell to the canvas. This was the most confounding thing about the whole tournament: that the prize we attach so much importance to should be won at the cost of so little sweat. It made you wonder whether French has a word for 'insouciant'. It was all a bit anti-climactic. <br />
<br />
My favourite major tournament, and the one that has therefore become the standard by which I measure others (this is the kind of thing that chooses you; you don't choose it) is the 2000 European Championship. France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and (coming up on the rail) Italy — they, and other teams, fulfilled so many of your expectations of what a championship should have: daring, passion, bitterness, beauty, anguish, surprise, truckloads of drama and, crucially, truly excellent sides putting each other through the ringer. It was, like Belgium-Japan, a total story, but one stretched over three weeks.<br />
<br />
If the 2016 European Championship suffered, it was not because the expansion to twenty-four teams allowed more mediocrity to flood in, but because the countries you might expect to be great were not. This World Cup was similar, except that Belgium finally showed much of what they'd been promising for so long, and France showed how great they are by how much they withheld.<br />
<br />
But also by how much they gave. There may have been something disturbingly Mourinhoesque about them: a terribly well-organised defence with an attack loosely connected to the front of it. But Kylian Mbappé called to mind the young Ronaldo. Paul Pogba at times looked ten feet tall (his slashing pass to Mbappé in the final to start the move that led to Pogba's goal stands next to Lukaku's finest moments). While everyone else was busy running around looking for the answer, N'Golo Kanté quietly solved the game yet again. And yes, that defence, as a defence should, glorified the art of responsible spoilsporting: Raphaël Varane and Samuel Umtiti were magnificent. Didier Deschamps did, after all, once win a World Cup playing in front of Thuram, Desailly, Blanc and Lizarazu. Maybe he knows a thing or two.<br />
<br />
So even if it didn't scream out, the exuberance (the joie de vivre, as we say in English) that uncoiled in their celebrations after winning the trophy could be glimpsed in their play all along. <br />
<br />
I wish this year's France could have been serially tested like their counterparts were eighteen years ago by Spain, Portugal and Italy. I've yet to see a World Cup that has lived up to Euro 2000's strengths. But I can hardly say I've ever regretted watching one. Even the bad ones are good. There's too much going on. To add to the above Diego Costa's solo masterpiece of a goal against Portugal, which encapsulated so much about the player (including how he got away with a foul on Pepe to begin with); Nacho and Pavard's twin strikes; the somewhat distressing dominance of European teams; the last half-hour of Switzerland-Serbia; Artem Dzyuba; the flamboyance of Neymar; Iran and Morocco putting the fear of God into Spain and Portugal ... it would barely begin to cover it. So many memorable moments are already forgotten.<br />
<br />
And the World Cup has strengths all its own. It's global, and it matters more. We are privileged to see players in such a vulnerable state — to see how much they can bear, in front of the world and the folks back home, to stake on the outcome, which will eventually be defeat for all but that lone escapee.<br />
<br />
Pussy Riot's intervention in the final shook you out of your arrogant reverie (before you drift off again) and reminded you that this most important of the least important things is bound up with the most important things and the world's worst people. The paradox is that it's also a relief from those things, and others, to devote a month of intense absorption to what is, at best, a celebration of human creativity and enthusiasm. Even if it is run by FIFA.<br />
<br />
In these days after the end of the tournament, when it's now absent, you can think back to before it began, to the blank slate that was the draw and the fixture list, and think about how much has changed, and how little.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGj8scYN0q8XcMTyGGIPiWBWnpvOz7GtVLhTB1JBM_u6K5H1eF_LZH3X8da4ZWAPugE2wjBAxeIQKIefnbJmtkQWT2LL4pZyXwdwpIPhNMlh2mLzYt1tgdNnUdW0DRFZQwQCqmu_XUS0TT/s1600/tw3c.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="281" /></div></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-48758346530595664192018-07-13T22:49:00.000+01:002018-07-13T22:49:28.595+01:00The Past of Football: The World Cup, 1506-2022<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLZ0K6Lmkxyv4qam1Px5kgprSf_YXZgZN9l0VP_BH75oyqqRGQtQjAyc9_nlCTtfFpUBgasL2xyPh4jJZQ0fSl5CPKXTmgFNRlUfiNmk3cVXj1f9K9uSZZONOwJAbCmiAjV80Y5X6VMekv/s1600/shamefulscenes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLZ0K6Lmkxyv4qam1Px5kgprSf_YXZgZN9l0VP_BH75oyqqRGQtQjAyc9_nlCTtfFpUBgasL2xyPh4jJZQ0fSl5CPKXTmgFNRlUfiNmk3cVXj1f9K9uSZZONOwJAbCmiAjV80Y5X6VMekv/s1600/shamefulscenes.jpg" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="207" title="Shameful scenes. Tsk tsk tsk"/ ></a></div><br />
<br />
<em>Following on from his chapters on <a href="https://sportisatvshow.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-past-of-football-england-win-world.html">Alfbert, Lord Ramsey’s England</a>, <a href="https://sportisatvshow.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-past-of-football-statistics.html">statistics</a>, and <a href="https://sportisatvshow.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-past-of-football-nasal-and-new.html"><strike>the</strike> NASAL</a>, General Sir Frank Lazarus bravely continues his chronicling of the history of the Beautiful Sport by tackling the Large One: the World Cup.</em><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>1506</b><br />
<br />
A spectator slips a ball into the ring during a bout of the traditional Florentine post-pub fighting game <em>calcio stramascio</em> (Italian for "proper twenty-one-man brawl"). No one notices, but football is invented once more. A group of holidaying Frenchmen challenge the locals to a game. The World Cup is born. Things gets heated, and an irate Frenchman charges an Italian much in the manner of a rhinoceros, which had only recently been invented.<br />
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<br />
<span class="fullpost"><br />
<b>1930</b><br />
<br />
The soccering world plead with their British masters to revive the old World Cup idea. The British say no, but gallantly allow the foreigners to stage a competition by themselves, if they were even capable. The winner of this event would face the champion of the Home Internationals, then the supreme tournament, in a showdown for global supremacy. In the final, Uruguay and Argentina can't decide whose football to use, so they use both. The ref can't keep score, and in the confusion declares Uruguay winners. Reminded of their promise of a super global playoff, the British go oh, we don't know what you're talking about, we're busy that decade, we were joking anyway, shut up, go away, there's a Scottish League-Irish League game on.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>1934</b><br />
<br />
With the World Cup hosting rights awarded to Italy, Argentina decide to enter the tournament disguised as Italians, in the hope of profiting from favourable refereeing decisions this time. This fails to work, as the officiating is scrupulously fair and impartial at all times. Despite this, Italy/Argentina win the competition.<br />
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To save time, the 1938 World Cup is held simultaneously. Italy/Argentina also win this.<br />
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<br />
<b>1942</b><br />
<br />
With everyone else too busy killing the flip out of each other, my now late then punctual fifth cousin Bobberidge Lazarus seizes the opportunity to stage the 1942 World Cup in his self-declared microstate Lazarusvania (pictured below). All the other nations of the world being too chicken to turn up, Lazarusvania are declared champions and remain the only unbeaten team in World Cup history except Scotland. The FIFA still won't recognise this because ooh that bloody Sepp Blatter.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjjpN_8RhNojz4g7ew3okwwfmW00cdy90YEwwnAoky6xcFjymKSx7tWcc_VuEZuIh2n0umpl7N6Gxd3gZLyy4Jkjkg-T9ch2TDob8lhkpTp8rqytDgv4XT7GHSdhbgOHjxV_78NUW1FF4P/s1600/lazarusvania.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjjpN_8RhNojz4g7ew3okwwfmW00cdy90YEwwnAoky6xcFjymKSx7tWcc_VuEZuIh2n0umpl7N6Gxd3gZLyy4Jkjkg-T9ch2TDob8lhkpTp8rqytDgv4XT7GHSdhbgOHjxV_78NUW1FF4P/s1600/lazarusvania.PNG" data-original-width="218" data-original-height="243" /></a></div><br />
<b>1946</b><br />
<br />
The whole world clean forgets about the World Cup! They promise they won't do it again.<br />
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<br />
<b>1950</b><br />
<br />
200,000,000 people cram into the brand new Maracanã to watch the final game between Brazil and Uruguay. The Uruguayans are victorious, but Jules Rimet has left the Him Trophy under the bed from the war. To cover up his mistake, he points out that since the competition format did not technically include a final, the World Cup actually has no winner. Everyone shrugs their shoulders, goes home and never speaks of the match again.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDM1qadJKJEiBvRGwu8lYyjPmeOQlbxMVRH4Uy3eRfaVcyw-dNdEjy831P2idMef-NKO50MRT5PTrcygCK-l6yIeBQDGpUKPtgZdnZAmknJpmJKHHOE-wmPolMqKE4sJUA-dTTO9-YYmi1/s1600/rimet.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDM1qadJKJEiBvRGwu8lYyjPmeOQlbxMVRH4Uy3eRfaVcyw-dNdEjy831P2idMef-NKO50MRT5PTrcygCK-l6yIeBQDGpUKPtgZdnZAmknJpmJKHHOE-wmPolMqKE4sJUA-dTTO9-YYmi1/s1600/rimet.jpg" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="218" title="Jules Rimet patiently explains the situation" /></a></div><br />
<b>1954</b><br />
<br />
The FIFA decree that all games will be first to 100 or until it gets dark. The Germans stun the world by beating Hungary in the final. They celebrate by being very friendly to strangers, drinking lots of water, and dancing all night to acid oompah.<br />
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<br />
<b>1958</b><br />
<br />
Brazil power to glory behind young phenomenon Edson, who celebrates by stealing a name from the tournament's Swedish hosts. He will henceforth be known to all as Pelle. In his victory speech, Pelle declares: "I am much better than Maradona."<br />
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<br />
<b>1962</b><br />
<br />
Chile and Italy get into a massive fight, but a dog runs on and pees on everyone, and people rejoice in the sheer bloody beauty of the moment. Pelle misses the latter stages of Brazil's triumphant run due to injury, but nonetheless collects his medal in full kit.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn2P2W3Dj3LxQ5a9TKhiY9nRcPbe5LraNAPdlN6I5KXWj216S5UqOqb0wjLFksvBAIaYPuHXFKiR3vR2Rl3W60R3CObrQG2fYhHqj4qs6zQdiMArluo30I8RUTj9oA6_s3RAnd05dwvzsr/s1600/garrincha.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn2P2W3Dj3LxQ5a9TKhiY9nRcPbe5LraNAPdlN6I5KXWj216S5UqOqb0wjLFksvBAIaYPuHXFKiR3vR2Rl3W60R3CObrQG2fYhHqj4qs6zQdiMArluo30I8RUTj9oA6_s3RAnd05dwvzsr/s1600/garrincha.jpg" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="332" title="Don’t know who he is" /></a></div><br />
<b>1966</b><br />
<br />
England's triumph and subsequent fall from grace have already been <a href="https://sportisatvshow.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-past-of-football-england-win-world.html">extensively covered in this series</a>. Suffice it to add that further research has revealed that a large shipment of grain was dispatched from Felixstowe to Leningrad the day after the final. I'm just leaving that piece of information there.<br />
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<br />
<b>1970</b><br />
<br />
whoooooooooaaaaaaahhhhhh duuuuuuuude have you seen this it's all like colours and stuff it's so bright and shiny and bluuuuurrrrrry and like green and yellow man look at that yellow it’s the yellowy yellow lellow lellyowest yellow I’ve ever seen where is this place it's sunny like aaaaaaaaall the time dude is it just me or is this game going reeeeeeal sloooooow like they're barely even moving wait did Italy just win their group 1-0 is that weird looking German dude okay he can't stop scoring goals for some reason look at the yellow and the white it's like there's a party in my retinas and everyone's invited OH MY GOD HE'S SHOOTING FROM THE HALFWAY LINE AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAAAAA wait wait what they were two up weren't they weren't they answer me man what the fuck dude I want a Peru shirt is that guy playing in a sling like an actual fucking sling HOLY SHIT HE JUST WENT ROUND THE KEEPER WITHOUT TOUCHING THE BALL FUCK FUCK I CAN'T TAKE THIS THIS IS GETTING TOOOOOOO MUCH they keep passing passing passing what are they doing passing passing passing I feel sick passing passing passing he's just passed it to nobodFUCK MAN IT'S THE FULL-BACK I'm going to die<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ8dSQNtESVHLlu_yUJSp3RZGL9cqiRVHB1qp87DXXc0chIPQoJZ0X38gzzNyBi3VcsDqtUw03SsPei5D4Ap9fORn8GRCl-6rGbjpQR2y4vnh0uxv69KXbJ0LIku7m6MXF6mMa8RUw0RKf/s1600/caita.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ8dSQNtESVHLlu_yUJSp3RZGL9cqiRVHB1qp87DXXc0chIPQoJZ0X38gzzNyBi3VcsDqtUw03SsPei5D4Ap9fORn8GRCl-6rGbjpQR2y4vnh0uxv69KXbJ0LIku7m6MXF6mMa8RUw0RKf/s1600/caita.jpg" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="338" title="FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK" /></a></div><br />
<b>1974</b><br />
<br />
A World Cup of firsts: Scotland truly become Scotland for the first time; future 40-year-old Dino Zoff concedes a goal for the first time in his life; and the Dutch qualify for their first World Cup (apart from that other time when they were called the Dutch East Indies).<br />
<br />
The Dutch had created an entirely new soccering philosophy called Sexy Football, which was a development of the Brazilian style, O Sexy Football, named after Irish missionary priest Fr. Peter O'Sexyfootball (an t-Athair Peadar Ó Soichsighphiotbál). It was invented by Czechoslovakia's 1962 goalkeeper Johan Cruij/yff, who would for inspiration stare for hours at paintings by the old Dutch goalkeeping masters: Vermeer, Mondragon, van der Saenredam, &c. Sexy Football involved players running around all over the place and kicking the crippins out of the other team.<br />
<br />
In the final, the Dutch do it so astoundingly magnificently that after 22 minutes the Germans concede defeat. The Germans' captain, Franz 'The Director' Peckinpah, personally hands over the new cup, bought in a trophy emporium in Munich because Brazil had left the old one under the bed from the Mardi Gras. But Cruy/ijff isn't satisfied and holds out his hand again, whereupon Peckinpah gives him the European Nations Trophy cup the Germans had somehow accidentally won two years earlier.<br />
<br />
Crui/jyff moves to Spain where he assassinates Franco and retires to stud, siring a master race of footballers with some very short women.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>1978</b><br />
<br />
In the last minute of the final, a goalbound shot by the Dutch's Derek Manninger is stopped short of the line when an Argentinian general runs onto the pitch and shoots the ball. The ref waves play on, and Argentina win in extra time. Buoyed by this boost to national confidence, Argentina immediately invade Derrylondonderry but are trampled by a herd of plucky British sheep.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>1982</b><br />
<br />
The first ever official World Cup anthem is recorded by The Fall. It is a searing commentary on recent FIFA history: <em>"Put the blame into FIFA Haus, go round there and kick out Rous ... Rous rumbled, Rous rumbled ... I'm João Totale, the yet unborn son ... PELLE'S COBWEB EYES!!!!!"</em>. Called "The Goal of Love", its b-side is a reworking of "Bingo Master", telling the story of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwE9_rg3vf0">Sepp Blatter's impeccable handling of the draw for the '82 finals</a>. The single is a global smash in several German cities.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZLHWlQ08ATwIbvCPSGlfRxWKxcrmh9PQlHfd5GW7K_8hJXsDyEkuABM7TJNO1H8pf-qVn76JLiSAbPsRhOrimi0qZl7kF8EpL8ZvSIGAO948SSGQg9NxcLqVikRUUCRUtJU5hYtXbCOuO/s1600/fallfootball.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZLHWlQ08ATwIbvCPSGlfRxWKxcrmh9PQlHfd5GW7K_8hJXsDyEkuABM7TJNO1H8pf-qVn76JLiSAbPsRhOrimi0qZl7kF8EpL8ZvSIGAO948SSGQg9NxcLqVikRUUCRUtJU5hYtXbCOuO/s1600/fallfootball.jpg" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="276" title="fallfootball.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<b>1986</b><br />
<br />
Uruguay's José Batista sets a new World Cup record by getting sent off against Scotland before the draw has even been made. Sócrates refines his penalty technique to the point where he doesn't even have to score anymore. Bryan Robson's sling and Gary Lineker's cast make arm injuries a hip new trend for English kids bored of stealing VW badges. Peter Shilton is outjumped by a tiny man and is quite rightly still unhappy about it to this day. Said tiny man, Diego Maradona, waltzes his way through the knockout rounds, but his effectiveness in the final is blunted as he is marked out of the game by Pelle.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>1990</b><br />
<br />
The 1990 edition is filled with cynical, negative football, if football is indeed the word. Tactics are horribly defensive. Goals are almost impossibly hard to come by. Games are a stop-start travesty of fouls, dives and whines. Claudio Caniggia is assaulted by three Cameroon players in quick succession in the opening game. Maradona spends his entire tournament being hacked down or diving to avoid being hacked down. A record number of red cards are handed out. Frank Rijkaard twice spits at Rudi Völler, yet Völler is sent off. Gary Lineker dives to win a penalty that helps to keep Cameroon out of the semi-finals. Argentina drug water bottles they then allow Brazilian players to drink from. Ireland 'arrange' the closing stages of their match against the Dutch to secure qualification from the group stages, and make the quarter-finals despite winning no games and scoring two goals. Argentina finish as runners-up after winning just two games. The Germans win the tournament scoring three goals in their last three games: two penalties and a heavily deflected free kick. Not one but two players are sent off in a terrible final. This remains the greatest World Cup of all time.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAU22lRkG0pjFMIUg5GCkyUwC0PHwL1q_HvVTsfJQMLZ6qnxXVtaVpvLqn_sBd3gSAawQIoa8bEb07km7JOYZFRPWNHMNzQkQqJuYK3UjDwoy3XyXDZbt9GoL_7Im5DnmKJkwBJGYLYr0Y/s1600/germansflowers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAU22lRkG0pjFMIUg5GCkyUwC0PHwL1q_HvVTsfJQMLZ6qnxXVtaVpvLqn_sBd3gSAawQIoa8bEb07km7JOYZFRPWNHMNzQkQqJuYK3UjDwoy3XyXDZbt9GoL_7Im5DnmKJkwBJGYLYr0Y/s1600/germansflowers.jpg" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="332" title="Look, it even had flowers and everything" /></a></div><br />
<b>1994</b><br />
<br />
The United States yet again ruin soccer by calling it soccer and going to the matches in huge numbers. After Argentina's game against Nigeria, Diego Maradona is led away for a drugs test by an official who looks very familiar although no one can quite put their finger on it. The Germans merge with the East Germans to form superteam The Germans. This somehow makes them worse. Stefan 'Effin'' Effenberg is sent home by manager Berti Vogts because you would, wouldn't you. Many games are played in temperatures that are blatantly discriminatory against teams from northern Europe. Sweden finish third.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>1998</b><br />
<br />
Adidas claim that their official World Cup football, the Obélix, is the roundest ever, thus solving a great problem that has long bedevilled the game. Dennis Bergkamp does not stamp on Siniša Mihajlović. Zinedine Zidane turns up fashionably late and steals the plaudits as France win. Fontaine, and just Fontaine, presents the Raymond Kopa to Didier Deschamps. Lilian Thuram, Marcel Desailly, Laurent Blanc and Bixente Lizarazu are dismantled, shipped to China and reassembled brick-by-brick to dam the Yangtze.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>2002</b><br />
<br />
The World Cup is awarded to the sci-fi technotopia of Japan/South Korea. To celebrate, the organisers decree that it will be the first tournament ever to be staged in the future. Unfortunately, the confusion over dates leads to many of the favourites not turning up. The official ball of the World Cup is made of pure neon, making it the most visible football ever. Keepers still complain about it.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>2006</b><br />
<br />
Swarthy Latin Cristiano Ronaldo grabs Wayne Rooney's foot and stamps his own gonads with it, thus getting the greatest player in the world sent off. Ronaldo finds his camera and winks, taunting the English by slyly referencing the derivation of the word 'connive' from the Latin for 'wink'. The next day he reveals his nefarious plan in a tell-all memoir called How I Got The Greatest Player In The World Sent Off.<br />
<br />
To celebrate the 500th anniversary of the World Cup, a special re-enactment of the first ever World Cup game is held. Everyone goes home happy with no lingering bitterness or recrimination.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>2010</b><br />
<br />
I don't know?<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>2014</b><br />
<br />
The world is plunged into mourning as Neymar is shot dead by top bad Colombian Pablo Escobar. The World Cup is cancelled in what many suspect to be an elaborate Brazilian conspiracy to deny Lionel Messi the chance to win the World Cup on his own. As part of Neymar's funeral, a game is held between Brazil and the Germans. Brazil honour Neymar's memory by being completely shit at football without him.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>2018</b><br />
<br />
Croatia win the final on penalties after a 1-1 draw with France.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>2022</b><br />
<br />
The FIFA controversially decide that the World Cup will be held in catarrh. The tournament is moved to the winter to allow more catarrh to be produced.<br />
<br />
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</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-689109358221949672018-07-12T15:32:00.000+01:002018-07-12T15:32:35.966+01:00Contact<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZyicx7PlXKNY2m1tSQP2kTPmjE705L8Y5GULUzCd-YCXYzhXN2uC4_3mw-dUOSf5kDJK2TLFeVQ4r4jHEliBfaT1XkPPHO9g2YtxYHE0tBnFklJXqp5kIrxqzLrqjfgainMXYgD8IMKus/s1600/gooooooooooool.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZyicx7PlXKNY2m1tSQP2kTPmjE705L8Y5GULUzCd-YCXYzhXN2uC4_3mw-dUOSf5kDJK2TLFeVQ4r4jHEliBfaT1XkPPHO9g2YtxYHE0tBnFklJXqp5kIrxqzLrqjfgainMXYgD8IMKus/s1600/gooooooooooool.jpg" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="333" /></a></div><br />
There is a growing fashion in football for attacking players at corner kicks to huddle close together in groups of three to five in the middle of the penalty area, waiting to split off in different directions as the kick comes in. (Ninety percent of England’s attacking strategy at the World Cup has consisted of this.)<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost"> It's striking, because football is one of those games where colleagues tend not to make physical contact with one another during play (or even in a moment preparatory to the ball being put back into play). Instead, the ball is a stand-in, conveying contact from player to player. <br />
<br />
There used to be a fashion for mocking footballers for 'over-the-top' goal celebrations involving any physical contact beyond a simple handshake and maybe some hair-tousling if the would-be tousler was feeling particularly exuberant. Maybe, on some level, players want to turn the touch-at-a-distance that playing football entails into something more direct for a moment.<br />
<br />
Rugby players do it all the time: the pack bind intimately in the scrum; they form phalanx-like mauls; they pile into rucks; they lift each other at line-outs. Footballers can't do that.<br />
<br />
In fact, when players from the same football team do make contact with each other during play, it's usually bad news. I was at a game recently where two teammates collided with one another in a manner traditionally described as 'hefty'. Both ended up on the ground. One, lying on his back, lifted his leg; the foot, instead of pointing to 12, was, let's say, unnaturally directed towards the setting sun. There were many minutes of injury time.</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-65016628821889691962018-07-08T18:43:00.000+01:002018-07-08T18:46:27.542+01:00Let's have some new clichésThose acutely conscious of the fact that football wasn't invented in 1992, you know, will have been delighted by how Fyodor Smolov decided to open Russia's World Cup quarter-final penalty shootout. It was an inspired homage to a penalty taken by none other than Diego Maradona in Argentina's 1990 shootout against Yugoslavia: a gentle game of catch with a Croatian goalkeeper (then, Tomislav Ivković; now, Danijel Subašić). Behold, ladies and gentlemen, the state of this:<br />
<br />
<center><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/VxE7JJNi7AI?rel=0&showinfo=0&start=65" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br />
A cherished World Cup memory of mine is Maradona's penalty in the shootout of Argentina's next game, the semi-final against Italy. He allowed Walter Zenga to dive to his right, and oh-so-slowly rolled the kick far away to the other side, the ball perhaps (it's a little hard to tell) even kissing the inside of the post as it went in.<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost">Looking back at the video, I realise that's not quite how it happened.<br />
<br />
<center><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/qhpaKSU9XVQ?rel=0&showinfo=0&start=763" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br />
But then, I never said that's how it happened. I told you what my <em>memory</em> of it is, and imagination has improved on reality. (The reality wasn't bad either, mind you.)<br />
<br />
Perhaps this is what afflicted Smolov. In his mind, he probably saw himself performing the perfect Panenka. What he got was the horrific reality of trying to coolly swim in that particular shark tank.<br />
<br />
The Panenka is a devalued currency. For one thing, as chapeaux go, it's quite the vieuxest. For another, all kinds of nonsense have been awarded that grand title. Here's Antonín Panenka's original (and best, according to Tina Turner):<br />
<br />
<center><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Bd1Hr96IenI?rel=0&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br />
And here's Zinedine Zidane's from the 2006 World Cup final:<br />
<br />
<center><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ilk8rVdcXRw?rel=0&showinfo=0&start=13" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br />
Chipping a "Panenka" that high is a safe way to do something that ought to be dangerous. Calling it a Panenka is like claiming to have circumnavigated the globe by walking around the North Pole and it at arm's length. A Panenka should softly stroke the goalkeeper's hair and whisper in his ear: "ya prick".<br />
<br />
There are three perfect penalties, and on this I'll hear no argument. One is a genuine Panenka. Another is the Pressman:<br />
<br />
<center><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/SSMi02ghN3s" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br />
The other is one yet to be made manifest in the inadequate construct dignified by the name "the real world". As Maradona did with Zenga, it uses the goalkeeper's propensity to pick a side to dive on. The taker would then kick the ball to the other side of the goal <em>at the slowest possible speed for it to cross the line</em>. It's a penalty that says: "This is how little energy I need to waste on this charade".<br />
<br />
This penalty also comes in a deluxe version wherein the keeper, sprawled on the wrong side of the goal, has just enough time to realise what's going on, get up, dive back across the goal and ... just ... get ... a ... fingertip to the ball ... which only directs it towards that spot where it simultaneously hits the inside of the post and the beautiful, beautiful side-netting.<br />
<br />
Proof, still more proof, that in my mind — where it really counts — I'm a better footballer than Zinedine Zidane.</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-20460828796987003382018-07-06T19:06:00.002+01:002018-07-06T19:06:52.557+01:00Stand up straight and tall like your back’s against the wall<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="222" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmcl-FemVaRLkQ04c65tvEjAmCmR3BP0FFYnwsV8vWgUsuA1IAnotTLAzkRCyKHw5PKTB00brrNsHqrbk5cgCzHcxakQ-56xQpGDnMzKr4Or6oo98qM2IwG6NZaApM815GH-Kgz6_-jVPP/s1600/F1+500.png" /></imageanchor></div><br />
So there he is, fed the ball in the right-hand channel by Mascherano. He's in enough space to allow the ball to run past him as he turns to face the Germany goal. Now thirty-five yards out, he meets Schweinsteiger. His first touch starts the engine; the second sets him on his way past his opponent. But just as it looks like he's about to reach that point of no return — the momentum that will commit him and the line of five defenders at the eighteen-yard line to whatever will be — Schweinsteiger slides in and brings him to the ground.<br />
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<span class="fullpost"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="350" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTZOMzVt9h5EkDCsZHlTQQrF6t0WzVIOISwKOboGCjGeepWEyzyEsIH8LmvRpM2i7w4ovKPznfjgerWLRfgYAhYo0TDXsNkQkRSLjFXGBglso7bE86gQyECq94NNgxPVvfHSUCxngzRwRv/s1600/F2+350.png" /></imageanchor></div><br />
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By the time Schweinsteiger has had his cramp/premature rigor mortis tended to, two more minutes have elapsed. The World Cup final is now well into stoppage time at the end of extra time. Argentina have a free kick thirty or so yards from goal, and there's only one man who can take it...<br />
<blockquote>his entire World Cup reduced to him standing there, right in front of the penalty spot, head bowed, hands on hips, lame of hamstring, burdened of shoulder, stuck in the warmth of the SoCal sun (<i>it won't ever diii-iiie</i>) on what turned out to be a Copacabana teeming with a jubilating samba school led by — say it with feeling — <i>Dunga</i></blockquote>If there was justice in fiction, the film might end there. With no resolution offered, you would have to consider what was so important about a resolution anyway. Why should so much rest on this one round of what-happened-next? By now, he has done so much in football for so long that everyone has their minds made up about him anyway. Hangarfuls of evidence already exist for anyone to use to support or dismiss any theory or belief about him. This moment would merely be another exhibit in the case of whatever you want it to be.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="166" data-original-width="75" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-ERQmvI4JDuZ7t9pRoNj-EP2ooXmg6BlA5fRxIhAyGQK9H85WCcdTnOwbZMi95jjgNVivq-oEbos5emDUeixtAmtfOb0cnHDnvAhdkKlqfa2Tr790p4858GkVZkHAH2RO2u_9WQdYaxLF/s1600/bgg+0+166v.png" /></imageanchor></div><br />
The trouble is, the future can't be trusted with itself. It's a beautiful, pristine void. Leave it be? Really?<br />
<blockquote>and then everything that had gone before: him (after a group phase in which he and Italy were muck or not much cleaner) bursting through the knockout rounds in fits of desperate elegance all those other chancers could only dream of: a breathtakingly nerveless first-timer to equalise with scant time remaining against Nigeria, topped off with an extra-time penalty to clinch the win</blockquote>With someone else's talent, you can really go places. It's fuel for fantasy. You can make whole worlds from the stuff, and no-one can stop you. And you owe it nothing; you can do what you like with it. You are stealing something without guilt or fear of retribution. It practically <i>begs</i> you to steal it, and it sitting out there in the open: football is a public work, not the jottings of a shy poet. It invites wanton irresponsibility.<br />
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In such conditions, prudence is a bore. One trap, one finish, one drop of the shoulder can be enough to make you want to see more. Until then, you can imagine it. Once you've seen it in the stadium in your mind, you want to see still more. Until then, you can imagine it. People go mad this way.<br />
<blockquote>cordially inviting Zubizarreta to allow the ball to be taken around him to set up the late winner against Spain (even making up for the subsequent touch that had taken him "too far" wide) </blockquote>A player between games isn't really a player — just another human being, tragically like you and me. It's almost a duty to dream big on his behalf: it re-animates him; it allows him to be at his grandest even when he's fatigued.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj28BEU21djKXGnJo1RWcnJV_lDPzhGFcuLNhBcGdLI4UzXAS_LI4Ch0DOm1VIwmx1bbQ5XuuZLAvBj7cfdnkEvCAgNKoQbqTBsirjlWvi0sVkDcn1uR92DNK-sHRPD1Lw_iIHt-du5jbda/s1600/bgg+4a+500.png" data-original-width="486" data-original-height="165" /></div><br />
It's a way of taming the terra incognita that is the future. You fantasise, or speculate, or guess. You wear lucky garments and follow hopefully beneficial routines. You create torrents of previews, predictions, tinpot precog. You turn the game into an exam in which you set the questions and mark the papers. You try to define 'legacy': to determine in advance what those in times to come will think about what hasn't happened yet. It's a strange kind of legacy: one that mixes up past and future, legator and legatee. It's as if, despite what Kierkegaard said (okay, it was the Manics), life can only be understood forwards but must be lived backwards.<br />
<blockquote>that shimmy along the 18-yard line, good God, for the first against Bulgaria, then his blessing of Albertini's gift of a pass to make it two</blockquote>It's some kind of compensation or revenge for always being a split second late to whatever happens on the field. A player does something, and you can only react. The demarcation is strict. You're a moth crashing into a window. You don't have the privilege of being able to write the chapter that starts like this— <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0_WuOorCo0" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="681" data-original-width="1361" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCPabKKBKFCtksUlCGyF8Adc1i3jJI05jZkrGU7o1h8wEzWdGQCvreJQIFsANeV5ehSGw-nWInUQYHLXnzsJAW-GQCCX4J7iQ2iN38BLWnn8LvlRHdDJNBFMpVkbly6lwWNEB_bXaXnKvL/s1600/BILBAO.png" width="500" /></a></div><br />
—or that starts like pretty much anything. All the intuition and science — continuously and vigorously refined though they may be — that are brought to bear on mapping the game must at kick-off take their proper place behind the players and fortune: together, the permanent advance guard, the prow of the ship. Eduardo Galeano said: "It definitely depends on fate, which like the wind blows every which way." If there's any poetry to be had, it will come from the earthbound reality of ball, boot and grass, which you have no direct access to.<br />
<blockquote>and how it looked as if he was the one person capable of looking the World Cup in the eye and actually acting in concert with it. He was using its inexorable momentum, as it sheds half its pretenders at a time, in his favour, rather than allowing himself to get stampeded by it</blockquote>Afterwards, though, you can lay claim to whatever has happened, and go to town.<br />
<blockquote>True, <i>World Player of the Year plays well at the World Cup</i> makes a certain kind of sense. But sense has nothing on the World Cup. As the tournament progresses and the vice tightens, nerves prickle and wound even the best. With courage and panache, Baggio was both ennobling the World Cup by giving it something to contrast with and complement its reputation as an easy destroyer of men, and using it as an instrument to project and amplify his talent beyond even what the cathedrals of the almighty Serie A could do</blockquote>Your conception of the future is constrained by your knowledge of the past, which tends to shed complexity. It seeks emblems on which to place a gross retrospective burden, which, via these emblems, becomes someone else's present-day burden. Hence the epithets given over the years to those blessed/cursed with potential: all those Cruijffs of the Carpathians, the Eusébios of the Steppes, the Drogbas of the far side of Drogheda, last month's Next Maradona. You know Maradona? The lad who won a World Cup all on his own?<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZeFk3JWxAc66xS8_WQA3MPE-lxIbTug5R9-yKSqYNT-drrCdOKfm1Q1U2YpILD-NTvgAWyulZxXnMcskOgpR87I6y_NQu973fcFPBicR-yx7b_voyp7qO5b6pzLx7rJc0LvewnUV75JXz/s1600/ZAB+2.PNG" data-original-width="354" data-original-height="478" /></div><br />
Fantasy makes demands at once simplistic and grandiose.<br />
<blockquote>Moreover, in both his style and the timing of some of its most exquisite expressions, he seemed to be displaying a deep sympathy with football's dramatic potential. He was playing in dreams, which involve a scabby early goal and an hour and a half of desperate clinging on only in the minds of specialists</blockquote>'Dominant' is a word too ready to the tongue in sport. It evokes a bowling ball skittling skittles, and defences haven't been that obliging in centuries. If dominance was what this caper was really about, then LeBron James would have a hundred points a game and the other fella five hundred hat-tricks instead of a measly fifty-odd. But they don't: they have to pick their paths just like anyone else, and those paths are limited in number and by time. They're just better at picking them, and what's a path for them might be a dead end for others.<br />
<br />
'Dominant' doesn't tell you how something happened so much as it describes the effect of having witnessed it. It refers to you on the floor, the blast having thrown you there; it doesn't describe what caused the explosion. You don't have to know every forensic detail, the thousand things that conspired to set it off. Someone does. But you don't, for your ears to be ringing and your face to be set in a stunned smile.<br />
<blockquote>Or, you might say, he was playing in a World Cup, a dreamland all its own. The heightened and often preposterous tenor (howya) of a World Cup is built on big demands seldom met (starting with the demand that the football be any good, which is just plain unreasonable). Baggio matched that tenor and made it seem fair and unpreposterous. Or maybe righteously preposterous. Either way, he played that thing</blockquote>An appreciation of a simple (or not so simple) act of beauty, a rational assessment of a player's body of work: they are pleasures in themselves, and only a maniac would be so unfair as to deny a player such consideration. (There are a lot of maniacs.) But you also yearn for symbols of that talent: moments that condense its truth into a form that will leave a permanent mark on anyone so much as passing by. You need to see that it's more than just another pretty evanescence. You need to see immensity in that talent, to be shown its life-affirming properties with graphic exaggeration. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTU-uM7dINM0hNGqD0njeEDrLpRgdbaTjSoETc8uG7YKReuh22xwnFzmJUhc_pTO0pqMQvx0jAjP4nfAw6IYdXTuBh-zcJ6hXIMgVjy4_Q708fSv4GYZKDZ5OVaTSsfNOsSHZy4xStGNDn/s1600/Muller+500.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="296" /></div><br />
In other words, you need it to see it as a story. Sport is stories on stories on stories — stories all the way down. Stories are selective, partial; they usually involve jeopardy. The simplest story is: will he or won't he? <br />
<br />
Maybe there's some cruelty in that, something a tad sadistic in the wish to make someone play a role in such a production, and in the refusal not to simply accept every manifestation of their talent as uniformly valid currency.<br />
<br />
Talent in sport is non-transferable. A player can't bank it and wait for it to mature and grow plump, or wear it round his neck as an accolade — it's only useful when it's being used. This must haunt him.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdEu7HG0kDTGeEbLriQv376bidkEPHMfvZ33FdX0fvLQuQXfnii-KBjWVIy_o3VhgTbYucCgKeLIFfQAXxVldMrsGpdEbqUj-sxunFVF4egH2N4Vhp9I5g75bTL4uRpLCHXwgHht649pp6/s1600/bgg+10+500v.png" data-original-width="380" data-original-height="500" /></div><br />
What does Lionel Messi make of it all? He has to play his football touch by touch, at one moment per moment. It’s a life where he’s all performance, but everyone else is the editor.<br />
<blockquote>and although it would be nice, even generous — bearing in mind that we don't talk much about, say, yokeybuzzer who missed in the 1988 European Cup final shootout, or the player who cost Sweden a place in the Euro 2004 semi-final, who was it again, och, you know who I mean, I think his name had an <em>e</em> in it — to forget about the bleeding miss, which people only bang on about because before the crash, he soared</blockquote>Perhaps he resents the fact that greater command over his game should yield greater freedom, but actually becomes an encumbrance. He has to live everyone else's lives for them before he can live his. <br />
<br />
Or maybe he wants to make the story his alone. Maybe he sees it as a chance to allow the pride he surely has in his ability to shine like the sun, and to connect the pleasure he obviously feels from playing the game to the pleasure of others — to complete the circuit. Maybe — just maybe — he wants to be recognised as the greatest.<br />
<br />
I fantasise, or speculate, or guess, that he feels both sides, alternately or even simultaneously. When things are going well for him, that slight hunch in his back looks like the source of his propulsion as he runs. When they are not, it looks like a symptom of having to drag the weight clinging to his left ankle. He probably welcomes the weight and curses it at the same time.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghrxGzRiWN7sj1WKmZz4zoi4KFd1x8PurUUVvK6ZmWaY0bvIy7RxVGVHnWS6aiEU3t7eGBG_2xGcKh2fGbQqQuLiEpxN5X4zMkwTeGLvwDhveKXqd5WWbLy5LqRNP6gJ_pjMAxJbZZ0tJr/s1600/MSRF.PNG" data-original-width="470" data-original-height="359" /></div><br />
Not that I know. He doesn't tend to favour us with the confidence. Jorge Valdano says he is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/jun/25/argentina-what-is-wrong-lionel-messi-football">"one of the best-known men in the world but whose silences no one can interpret"</a>. He leaves a space for you to fill — a beautiful, pristine void.<br />
<blockquote>to deny the ending would be to deny the excitement that led up to it — when each successive goal rippled back to those previous, and rippled forward again, spilling over boundaries, altering meanings, creating expectations — and to deny the act of letting go and submitting to what's happening is akin to undoing a chain reaction of chain reactions, which might just be possible to do afterwards in cold blood, but at the time only in a state of bloodlessness</blockquote>The simplest story is: will he or won't he? The biggest story is the World Cup. In 2006, Messi wasn't trusted by Pékerman when it counted. In 2010, he got buried beneath Maradona's shockingly Maradona-like qualities. In 2014, he has hacked out of granite defences first place in their group for Argentina. But he's ghosted through much of the knockout phase, hobbled by injury. (Galeano saw in Maradona "the body as metaphor": "He was overwhelmed by the weight of his own shadow. From that day long ago when fans first chanted his name, his spinal column caused him grief [...] his legs ached, he couldn't sleep without pills.")<br />
<br />
Even so, Argentina have had just enough about them to haul themselves inch by inch to the final; they got through the first three knockout rounds by an aggregate score of 2-0. Today, in the final, they've forced Germany to go the long way around. Germany finally went ahead in the one-hundred-and-thirteenth minute.<br />
<br />
Now, well into stoppage time at the end of extra time, Argentina have a free kick thirty or so yards from goal. They are not a great team. Perhaps they shouldn't even be here. But here they are, with one last chance to keep themselves in the World Cup, and the German players on the sideline and fans in the stands are looking very happy for people who’ve seen the 2012 Champions League final.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho3sWBYH5O-XUZ2FmTK5JTuHJxqlGtgQkKPCra5dREMKnB5U6wMB-GoOBoxt2RljR8BoVUHpxY8aoqIY33OG-ubW9RknqwCkBMIRpUGB_7fuHmmXX7wC5r9ImqC8vZj_XyF6kTrlfHnKfw/s1600/PK+0+250.png" data-original-width="250" data-original-height="168" /></div><blockquote>and even though he was crocked from the semi-final, all that had happened had combined with fine timing to ensure that for a World Cup final, he was undroppable, then unsubbable, and when it came to the shootout, securely bound to be one of Italy's first five takers</blockquote><em>When the legend becomes fact...</em> Fact is ball, boot and grass; legend is how you lay claim (or he lays claim) to whatever has happened, or might yet happen. Fact moves constantly around the field; legend pursues it and tries to make it do its bidding.<br />
<blockquote>(did Sacchi, even Baggiosceptic Sacchi, select him at number five because of that kick's importance, should it arrive, or was it because he wanted to protect Italy by pushing Baggio as far down the list as he could bear?) </blockquote>So there's only one man who can take the free. In theory, he could dink it into the penalty box to one of the many blue jerseys waiting to pounce on it<br />
<blockquote>(or even protect Baggio?) </blockquote>but the fact of the legend is that there's only one thing he can do: he has to shoot. It's his job: God forgives; Messi answers prayers. He's meant to be the greatest, or one of the greatest, or potentially the greatest, of this time, or of that place, or of all times and places, or something. To try and set a teammate up instead would be an abdication of his duty — if it didn't result in a goal, anyway. He wasn't given his gift so he could pass it up, at this of all times.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1FSta9HgLke-WCOocdrigsJ3W7PzdUtdIv2f1wjd5STRLqOHyQrx44ZHtr7sDuJxlmNeqF6-xrKc06Sfw26Mr4dmYGsM5adZh4s8qqvBO_vuxA_JeD2rCYD4mrcSqEm_Vt2ftEGd97yDv/s1600/PK+1+350.png" data-original-width="350" data-original-height="334" /></div><blockquote>and sport never promises what you will see, only that it will make you look</blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjE5nQILqn328tvS4jUI-MuoqqaJ95Jl-0bHOzAuZuBNoPnGmwTvAOY-d4kJJEOvna0lzu1NroWLpocj2h1jDJZxLdUJvGz7-jBZcD6ZfjGWkvFdULwgaW-5TjYpCJZNBuOkGPWxykZc0Fm/s1600/PK+2+450.png" data-original-width="450" data-original-height="431" /></div><br />
So even though the free is right at the limit of his range, perhaps slightly beyond it <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYN1dQu04TkJ_Jhu_nJnZOPdAfhooP09NgzebQlHr31PMoOhbaq76uvEdJCuXj2AAzLzV9o5-hrV9Lx0vhHFWOORe2Gkukse_bLtg47FJRzYRlYIlj5sxnqCAxyz61x0EskUnQ8TU_7QYO/s1600/PK+3+500.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="451" /></div><br />
even though he's injured<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqjx4A1GBd4NgGiRE7JBKVJSkponjm5Lj4toYKOR0RlwZwLKXv9O2znY3DnlX786HRT8U_TDy4cKwoT2Nk-Zgpi14RUyDx2j2cwYZtXMmU6Wo88lzd4C11FXE5zuhSzX64NIR_l1sEzWuj/s1600/bgg+4a+500+rev.png" data-original-width="486" data-original-height="165" /></div><br />
even though he's probably feeling some deep tiredness at the end of a long game, a long tournament and a long season<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL0u-ncN7HaVtBJxF6gI8mdzkwKN_Q7HYZpIE4qXWHwC6BwTo3ENCpgXqRaJ1yXcZWN2bTSIKfbknViFCy4FQZrxKEY0H7fFKUQ9BJZW1myUBBLulz61YY7dz48cgLtORXE_HDsiv50bXM/s1600/PK+4+500.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="507" /></div><br />
even though his muscles must be afflicted by the tension of the biggest match of all<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaF4GgX_1YOF35ffW9haTCl870RrL3z_mFej7nsjTIs8mTrbd_jJN1wFgxk4FeXFfl2ZJAdVFWc32gVZgyP-hpRXxEyXTOZbFDQ6_gxrPq3flZWZsDsaKjSXS1L3KNwovqrcvJLyHCd6CE/s1600/bgg+5+rev+500.png" data-original-width="460" data-original-height="264" /></div><br />
even though all these factors will mean he'll have to try and strike the ball with considerable power, at the expense of a great deal of control<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKWmV5HaLylSibBXSZ6p4f-sQX6N_6WOnbU-XOoBhTogE7MtwSrPAQiJWIREC1pmjaZJrULWZ6pB3HF6bAB0NlW74mxIkcagV7T11rN5UsnXgb0u3oJEVT5PMX9lckT1PY8RtZg2qZNznY/s1600/PK+5+500.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="525" /></div><br />
even though this will mean there's only one direction the ball's going to travel<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_aUOs4nWe7JjHfb7Ma07QoyIiNXIYuHgNwnqQOLZ9aVD93-_BQLW6MnIPKAlutmShkjXZM7uOHUX7LkboEEhy1GVODfe3uaUeI5wS1vv2zokJrL7FNL9m3a2_gA118fJ08e6iDAgAWa1U/s1600/bgg+6+rev+500.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="637" /></div><br />
he has to shoot.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_yPNkhODLp3D9UcQU7gsfHooNhjvMB4K2UknhtgpCK1U3admAd8Hejt4wPWSUcVtfS7yhuO7nAgLRyZh02yzAbC7AnA3CETl1-j_P_hAH8JkumK6e08LTga6l25jRP-XQx_JIUBYDYNS-/s1600/taff+500.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="414" /></div><blockquote>and besides, he was hardly going to say no, was he? </blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRFN6zr0emX6Izf2Dhj4gSuCHi7wGtkJKm8C701nMyp9xzZ2ScKoy4TOHsR5CeKbuTLKb9wLudKmBaC9DwOVjNRv-oevnPfw0fpM9NkuRqVu8_X8JKEa2jDEZpXSRwMqJWT-QJw9LfD35a/s1600/PK+9c+500.png" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="275" /></div></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-5458638364096518792018-06-28T18:52:00.000+01:002018-06-28T18:52:47.701+01:00A fixity of fixtures<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKWYv-D_2Oqr55IwyZKnuVDSoORwDpV1m_vQtOghFl74SdPaup4Md3G7C53g4mNHUIEcf2ZTWh0rkpOhLRvxgGdE1nbcjxNEsEBhba_GCi2aFQ6_HpKvud7OYoUsw5bLAuQRz_HygCdIWd/s1600/fix.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKWYv-D_2Oqr55IwyZKnuVDSoORwDpV1m_vQtOghFl74SdPaup4Md3G7C53g4mNHUIEcf2ZTWh0rkpOhLRvxgGdE1nbcjxNEsEBhba_GCi2aFQ6_HpKvud7OYoUsw5bLAuQRz_HygCdIWd/s1600/fix.jpg" data-original-width="400" data-original-height="533" /></a></div><br />
World Cup Permutation Week, concluding today, brings to mind the infamous West Germany-Austria game that finished Group 2 of the 1982 World Cup. This was the one in which the teams knew that were Germany to win 1-0, both sides would qualify for the second round ahead of Algeria. And wouldn't you know, Germany scored early and both teams lazed conspiratorially in the Basque sun for seventy-nine long, crooked minutes.<br />
<br />
Eager to know what such a deformity actually looks like, I tried in vain to find a video of the full game. However, I did find <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kQJDEaNXyU">this brief video</a>, which hints that there was more action after the goal than is usually recalled. <i>The Guardian's</i> Rob Smyth, meanwhile, has seen the match in full, and has written a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2014/feb/25/world-cup-25-stunning-moments-no3-germany-austria-1982-rob-smyth">fascinating piece</a> on it. Per Smyth:<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost">"The video of the game is thus a surprise. You expect side-to-side stuff, players standing around picking spots and scratching backsides, not giving 10% never mind 110; the greatest sham on turf. That only really happens in the final quarter of an hour, when the game properly livens down, and even then it is no more brazen than subsequent examples of two teams settling for a specific score."<br />
<br />
Which makes it sound a lot like Ireland-Holland in the final round of games in the draw-laden Group F of the 1990 World Cup. With the score at 1-1, and England winning 1-0 against Egypt, the live table looked like this (F-A Pts; two points for a win in those days):<br />
<code><b><br />
ENG 2-1 4<br />
IRL 2-2 3<br />
NED 2-2 3<br />
EGY 1-2 2</b></code><br />
<br />
The Irish and Dutch players knew that were the scores to remain the same, Ireland and Holland would finish in joint second place in the group: level on points, goal difference, goals scored and head-to-head results. (Fair-play records — the tie-breaker that has done for Senegal in this year's edition — did not come into it.) This would mean that they would have to be separated by lots. Both teams would qualify for the last 16, because whichever of the teams fell to third place would guaranteed a place as one of the best third-place teams. (This being the last group to conclude, the teams thus had an advantage over the third-place teams from other groups. Ireland enjoyed the same advantage at Euro 2016.)<br />
<br />
Ireland and Holland bet on Egypt not scoring, and gently played out the remainder of the game. The bet paid off, and the lottery went ahead. Ireland 'won' it, claiming second place and a second-round tie with Romania, which went pretty fucking splendidly. The Netherlands had to play West Germany, which didn't.<br />
<br />
But suppose Egypt had equalised against England. That would have meant all four teams would have had the exact same record. The final standings for the entire group would have decided by <i>a four-team lottery</i>. It would have been the greatest moment in World Cup history.<br />
<br />
Another scenario. Let's say one of Ireland or Holland somehow accidentally scored a second and unfortunately clumsily won 2-1. For the purposes of this thought experiment, we'll call that team Ireland. (You'll have to imagine Ireland scoring more than one goal in a tournament game, but you can do it if you just <i>believe</i>.) That would have put Ireland top, ahead of England on goals scored. Holland would still have finished in third, ahead of Egypt by the same means. But they would not have automatically qualified for the second round. Their record of F2 A3 Pts2 would have given them the joint fourth-best record amongst the third-place teams, level with Austria and Scotland. With the four best third-place teams qualifying, Holland, Scotland and Austria would have been the lucky lottery contestants, only one of which would have gone through.<br />
<br />
As it happens, in the 1994 World Cup, Ireland again finished their group with the joint second-best record; this time, the other team was Italy. Ireland, you may recall, had beaten Italy, so finished in second place without need of Sepp Blatter's balls/bowl carry-on. All four teams in that group had four points and a goal difference of zero. Mexico won the group on goals scored; Norway ended up in fourth, hitching a lift home on a long ball from one of their centre-halves. (Ireland would never do such a thing.)</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-64742587277324797192018-06-17T05:37:00.000+01:002018-06-17T06:03:12.516+01:00As good as a goalThere are great misses. Pelé's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj2k5xKs-lg">two</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UzRsvCsC4c">classics</a> in the 1970 World Cup are well known. There's also this from Pavel Nedvěd in the stupendous Czech Republic-Netherlands match in the group stage of Euro 2004:<br />
<br />
<center><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rssWJr99f3k?rel=0&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br />
<span class="fullpost">And this header by Henrik Larsson against Russia in the succeeding Euros would have been famous had it dropped in:<br />
<br />
<center><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/D7idmy4WakM?rel=0&showinfo=0&start=164" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br />
And yesterday, Peru's Paolo Guerrero sent a backheel hopping towards the neighbourhood of Kasper Schmeichel's far post. It took many years to reach its destination. Watching, you don't spend that length of time in suspended animation, waiting to register the outcome: instead, that outcome where the ball goes in draws itself in your mind. You get an advance copy of the goal to come; or if it's a miss, you get to see a wonderful alternative future.<br />
<br />
Guerrero's shot went just wide — agonisingly so, to use the commentator's fitting cliché. But the agony is sweet, because on the pitch in your mind, Guerrero scored his beautiful goal.<br />
<br />
Sweet, that is, for the neutral. If it's a player on <em>your</em> team who's missed, it can be sickening.<br />
<br />
Another miss. In the last minute of extra time in Chile's last-16 tie in the 2014 World Cup, Mauricio Pinilla fired a shot from the 18-yard line high towards the Brazil goal, and before it opened up the extraordinary reality that <em>Brazil were going to lose</em>. It had been theoretically possible before then, of course. It was apparent that this Brazil team were not the finest vintage, and Chile were a very good team themselves: certainly good enough, on their day, to beat Brazil. The game had been in the balance throughout its thrillingly bitter two hours. But this was Brazil. The notion of Brazil — Brazil! — getting knocked out in the second round of their own World Cup was unreal. It couldn't happen. No matter how perilous the waters they might find themselves in, some piece of fortune (or a kindly referee) would lift them to safety. But there it was. The ball was in midair, and everyone was helpless. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApW1y5fY_5M">The shot did not go in</a>. A whole world of which this catastrophe was the creation story had been made by Pinilla's boot, then destroyed by the crossbar, all in the time it took for the ball to travel eighteen yards. Brazil won the penalty shootout and felt relieved that their humiliation didn't materialise on that field in Belo Horizonte.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/jul/01/world-cup-2014-chile-mauricio-pinilla-miss-tattoo">Pinilla got himself a tattoo commemorating the moment</a>. He knew something.</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-52342906632200788172018-06-16T00:38:00.001+01:002018-06-16T00:38:33.802+01:00The gift that keeps givingCristiano Ronaldo scored with an exquisite free kick to complete his hat-trick and secure a 3-3 draw with Spain in the World Cup today. If you haven't seen it: it was almost the equal of Aleksandr Golovin's for Russia against Saudi Arabia. Yet if he had contrived to shank it fifty feet high and wide, it would have been just as wondrous, just as pleasurable. Football's mysteries are unfathomable.Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-56697017047656748892018-06-06T02:26:00.000+01:002018-06-06T02:31:02.522+01:00AFC-S Mithering – or – Football’s Mr. Sorrow<br />
<center><a href="https://www.wikiart.org/en/sonia-delaunay/rythme-1"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0jG8fue0esTti9L0AaYMJSH9DqwxMs7EyW7rI8GZZUFjU4ScRc8napfgich3IB82POffBhRWpc4PH3EEeukpfcOqg_Ldg4TER84tUXxGPUx7PmZ_uer5-DVlQUzSjHWPJcCXIAcMUOnJY/s1600/sdryth.jpg"></a></center><br />
There's no good reason why a team like Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal, 1996 to 2004, should exist. There's nothing inevitable about it. Much of football is an expanse of earnest attempts at creating a beneficent order, leaving behind a trail of small individual moments of triumph or beauty each of which could, nonetheless, have been a happy accident, a rogue episode, a cloud that momentarily looks like Australia. Maybe even something <em>you</em> could have done. You could, of course, happily mark your time by such moments — at the very least, they show that something is happening out there. <br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost">But when some of those points of light are threaded together; and, deeper still, when more follow, and the threads begin to connect, and the connections proliferate ... I don't just mean winning, or even winning frequently (how mundane — there's <em>always</em> a winner), but a team that seems to be operating with a higher intelligence — nothing mystical or transcendent or other such shite, but something very human. They create something new and unforeseen with the same materials available to everyone else. They don't defy the laws of the universe or the mind: they know those laws, their convolutions and nooks; they know how to work them. They know the hardness of reality. You can't transcend it, only ride its contours — and perhaps in so doing bring a fresh eye to them.<br />
<br />
The "beautiful game" can be an abstraction if you forget that even the bowling greens of the Premier League leave muck between the players' studs. It's always a balance between <a href="http://sportisatvshow.blogspot.com/2015/05/goal-by-galeano.html">sun and shadow, fun and serious purpose, play and fight</a>. (And the cascade of red cards that fell upon Arsenal in the early Wenger years shows they certainly used to fight. Or did they just lash out?) It's power and grace, sleekness and blunt force hinting at violence...<br />
<br />
Maybe it's not even really a balance. There seems to be a sweet spot where apparently opposing notions like teamwork and individualism are no longer in inverse proportion — where they don't conflict, but enhance and transform one another. Reach that state and a team can become so entirely fit for purpose that they give you the illusion (it's all illusion) that football has at last been solved.<br />
<br />
That's beauty beyond prettiness. Most of football's primary pleasures are small and subtle: a well-controlled ball, a nice floodlight pylon, the opposition goalkeeper slicing a clearance out of play. It's mad, but it's not that mad. It's nice to have something bigger in reserve, though.<br />
<br />
And for it to happen to your team, i.e. the side of all that's holy and righteous … I was already an Arsenal fan before Wenger became their manager. I was hardly "long-suffering": I was far too young for that; and besides, I came to Gooner consciousness during the George Graham era, which brought titles a-plenty, as well as a style of play that would make many a more recent convert puke. (When it worked, it was fabulous, by the way.) Nor, evidently, can I claim to be one of those converts, seduced by the beauty, drawn ever deeper by the refined pleasure of a Wenger team. I just got lucky. Jammier than the M50. Right place, right time.<br />
<br />
If, as Roger Angell says, baseball is about belonging (Angell seems to have belonged to about four different teams, and fair play to him), so is football. And better that the good stuff belongs to you than to <em>them</em>.<br />
<br />
<center>*</center><br />
The trouble with sport is that it's a never-ending story. Rare is the conclusion that is not provisional. No matter what you've done lately, there'll always come along a new table full of zeroes that somehow has to be shaped. To the defeated, "there's always next year" is a consolation; to the victorious, it's both a seduction and a threat. Next year gives you the chance to parlay your achievements into something more, and to deepen your exploration of the game's unknown possibilities. More than that — it demands it. It also, of course, gives you a chance to lose it. Whatever comes to pass, it's impossible to preserve the present glorious moment just as it is and leave the future well alone. Or the past.<br />
<br />
The memory of those early Wenger teams was too vivid. Even as the constant forward movement congealed into the Islington Shuffle and thence into something even less self-assured, there were frequent manoeuvres and performances that rhymed with those from what increasingly became the old days. Even as good form failed to turn into a title challenge, or a title challenge was halted by the inexplicable refusal of a fence, there'd always be a reminder that the old spirit was still there — even if it rested solely in the person of Arsène Wenger, who seemed to be less and less able to get it to connect with the players in his charge, or with the changed realities of the game, or with the expectations of five-star football on a four-star budget, or with what tethers idealism to the ground.<br />
<br />
(It’s by some pretty warped standards that losing to Bayern and finishing fourth could be seen as abject failure, but losing to Bayern and finishing fourth losing to Bayern and finishing fourth losing to Bayern and finishing fourth losing to Bayern and finishing fourth losing to bayern and finishing fourht losingto bayern and finishing fourth losing to Bayern and finishing ourth losing to bayern anf finishing fourth lsing to Bayrn and finishing fourth losingin to Bayern and finishing fourth lsoing to Bayern and finihsing ofurth losinginto Bayern and finishing fourth losing to bayern and finishing fourth losinginto Bauern and finsihing fourth losing to Bayern anad finsihing fourth osing to Bayern and finishing fourth losing to Byern and finishiing fourth is at least a tester, like being a weatherman in Punxsutawney.)<br />
<br />
The hope prompted by that spirit, its myriad little inflations and deflations, was a gambler's hope. It became wearing, exasperating, ever more difficult to sustain. I don't know whether Wenger should have gone after the 2017 FA Cup final; I don't know how much of a difference another year in twenty-two really makes. That game was a stunning recapitulation of the Wenger way. In 2017, it was also a reminder of the bits in between the rhymes, and thus of the W. w.'s waywardness. It was proof of the faith, and of its opposite.<br />
<br />
There was no real shock of finality at the announcement of Wenger's more-or-less forced exit: the end of his tenure was a slow dissolution, not a point in time. More final was the send-off at his last home game, which could have been called "Fuck Off & Thanks for Everything" but for Wenger's graciousness making it less weird for (almost) all concerned. But it hit home the hardest once the whistle blew to end the second leg of the Europa League semi-final against Atlético Madrid. Arsenal were not the pre-tie favourites — but on paper, and then on grass, it was winnable, and they lost. The thing slipped through their fingers one final time. And that was that. <em>What would a Europa title have been worth anyway...?</em> Too late to answer. Time's up. Here comes Just Another Manager, to be followed, no doubt, by Yet Another Manager.<br />
<br />
The long-time Wenger-Outs – hard-line, hard-headed, possibly hard-hearted — were probably right, or at least accurate. Me? Like someone said after another doomed, damned escapade, I'm a little bit stupid regarding this type of thing.<br />
<br />
"It's very unusual," says Amy Lawrence in the documentary <em>89</em>, talking about Graham's Arsenal's title-clinching win in The Anfield Game, <br />
<blockquote>when you're experiencing something in the present, that's happening to you <em>now</em>, and you know that it's going to be something you'll cherish for the rest of your life.</blockquote>The corollary thought is: <em>it may never be this good again</em>. Into that moment which seems, magically, to be a frozen present tense, is fed the past, with all its hopes and disappointments, and the future, which won't be as good as this. There it is, right there: that strange figure in the background staring at the camera, who you only noticed the hundredth time you looked at the picture. Things fall apart; it's as true as the ecstasy. Everything a team does after they assert what greatness they have to assert is an attempt to hunt that thought down, capture it, and subdue it. Alex Ferguson's Manchester United chased the thought relentlessly and ruthlessly, plucking its wings off with savage glee. Arsenal did not, or could not, do that, so it constantly buzzed around them: occasionally swatted, never squashed. They became its emblem.<br />
<br />
</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-72211175271648842002018-04-08T22:01:00.000+01:002018-04-11T18:05:06.723+01:00The Past of Football: NASAL and the New York/New Jersey Cosmos<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDLI3SK_H70lpAEqsVcj40neDT9OtLxNEwBvOCC6lW_GYKtvExfXpFEWvFuIBj1jCU8WsDbdYA-0kaDTRd_HbhVHmFY1UpuInDJKh2gYsKf-xJPe_bU3a768v3-LeP0zC_jPAwlkrSTd5K/s1600/kennedynasal.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" title="President Kennedy makes his fateful announcement in the company of Stretchford Armstrong (note the misspelling of NASAL)" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDLI3SK_H70lpAEqsVcj40neDT9OtLxNEwBvOCC6lW_GYKtvExfXpFEWvFuIBj1jCU8WsDbdYA-0kaDTRd_HbhVHmFY1UpuInDJKh2gYsKf-xJPe_bU3a768v3-LeP0zC_jPAwlkrSTd5K/s640/kennedynasal.jpg" width="500" height="396" data-original-width="1600" data-original-height="1268" /></a></div><br />
<em>The man they will try to stop once they've heard of him, Dr. Frank Lazarus, professor of football history at Frank Lazarus University, pieces together the scant remains of history and teaches us about that great enigma of world football, the United States of America</em><br />
<br />
Back in the sixties, the whole world watched agog and non-north-Walian alike as Buzzward Aldrin, Stretchford Armstrong and a third man whose name is lost to history heroically fought off space communists trying to appropriate the United States of America's rightful claim to the moon's Teflon deposits. As the moon's eerily lunar landscape lay strewn with the corpses of America's enemies, Armstrong swung a bebooted foot at the head of one of them, and he uttered those now-famous words: "That's one small step for a man, one giant boot to the face of this space commie!" The dead red's head detached from its body and described a beautiful arc as it soared through the low-gravity moon sky. With this one act, the course of history changed. America was entranced and exited by the new futuristic possibilities that now stretched out before them. President John "F-word" Kennedy addressed an expectant nation. "We simply cannot wait for the NFL to come up with a better name for their championship game than the ludicrous 'Super Bowl'," he said, "and with the designated hitter rule, baseball has committed an unconscionable assault on the double switch, the most exciting move in all of sports. Stretchford — along with Buzzward and, I believe, some other guy, although I'm not sure about that, Ralf, check that one out for me — has shown us that soccer is in fact as American as an apple pie wearing a cowboy hat that has a detailed knowledge of anti-anxiety medication. I therefore proclaim that by the end of the decade, soccer will be our one true national American sport, game, or pastime."<br />
<br />
And so, in a country with absolutely no history in the game whatsoever full stop period end of story move along nothing to see, soccer was invented for the eleventh time. Would this number prove auspicious?<br />
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<span class="fullpost"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfz_2SVaG31Mf2GT5ixMt3FrtqMSwPm-ffW1TYJhq7TVVnE13He9HLwQst4FmQjSj6370kBAOGNLvew31J5GEGGFcjxObxWuFHdSpcQ7XZgcD8P4X-7P-n0mYid5jTuHTIZMhhrpaIrq2_/s1600/soccermoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" title="America turns the moon into a giant soccerball in an early NASAL promotion" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfz_2SVaG31Mf2GT5ixMt3FrtqMSwPm-ffW1TYJhq7TVVnE13He9HLwQst4FmQjSj6370kBAOGNLvew31J5GEGGFcjxObxWuFHdSpcQ7XZgcD8P4X-7P-n0mYid5jTuHTIZMhhrpaIrq2_/s640/soccermoon.jpg" width="500" height="333" data-original-width="800" data-original-height="533" /></a></div><br />
No. In response to the President's decree, a league was hurriedly formed which, to tap into America's mania for all things spatial, was named NASA League, or NASAL (never <em>the</em> NASAL). <strike>The</strike> NASAL decided to inject some zeitgeisty narrative into proceedings by creating a league consisting of two teams: the patriotic, red-white-and-blue-clad Hero Legend Eagles, and the tie-dye wearing Super Freaky Electro Acid Commie Draft-Dodging Sunshine Gang. Without a dedicated soccer stadium, however, the league had to make-do with using other sports' facilities. Games were played on an iced hockey pitch, a stocked car pitch and a drained swimming pitch. In desperation, they tried playing on a baseball pitch, which worked perfectly well for several milliseconds until they were propelled from it by jealous baseball forces. Even after they found a more settled home on the infield of a go-kart track near Piddlesboro, Wyoming, the league struggled. Nervous about the American public's desire to sit through a soccer game, organisers stretched out the halftime entertainment — an incredible four-legged horse called Horse — until it became the main event and the soccer the halftime show. Horse became a star and is still sorely missed to this day. There was a new star in heaven the day he died.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuwWE_x-ixIxOMbNC6ljBawFZhVsgRHgKrp3SbdB-yz87q8THEqy_23pwVVywcRL9MwfzzR2e1Ugx5KKa6zPqT-792wrtbLimanmnfH9AFWW2x302FySBEH9ga8uXHGVNoCtrNOv-Fp5rY/s1600/horse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" title="The one and only Horse" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuwWE_x-ixIxOMbNC6ljBawFZhVsgRHgKrp3SbdB-yz87q8THEqy_23pwVVywcRL9MwfzzR2e1Ugx5KKa6zPqT-792wrtbLimanmnfH9AFWW2x302FySBEH9ga8uXHGVNoCtrNOv-Fp5rY/s640/horse.jpg" width="500" height="333" data-original-width="1200" data-original-height="800" /></a></div><br />
Nothing the league tried seemed to work. The owners came up with a plan: win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. This didn't work. Then, realising that any American sports league needed a strong New York team in order to thrive, they tried to create one: the New York Vets. But cynical New Yorkers were too busy stylishly injecting drugs in an abandoned factory or moving to Hollywood to bother watching. In trying to salvage things with a desperate series of name changes — the Gets, the Yets, the Let's, the Stets, the Quets, the Prets, the Regrets, the Lil-lets, the Alphabets, the Capulets, the Letrasets, the Marmosets, the Sobriquets, the Peat Briquettes, the New Marvelettes, the Pair of Quintets (Plus One), the Xkblsgfvhstdffqkhets — the owners only made matters worse.<br />
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With NASAL gaining no support but life (life support), a miracle was needed. It came in the form of two of the entertainment biz's primary Italian-American supernovas: Sylvester Stallone and Foghorn Leghorn (<em>né</em> Fabiano Livorno). Eager to bring a taste of the old soccering country to the United States of A, they purchased the ailing Ets, promising to use their showbiz lure (money) to transform the fortunes of America's new obsession. They started with a new name for their team: in honour of America's brave space fliers, they were to be called the New York Cosmonauts. Then they gave the team some brand new kit to wear, and commemorated this special event by changing the team's name again: they were now the New York/New Jersey Cosmonauts. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEm_ETDbKN6uRc_2-XOS6Z-s0DY-0iQsjIMjpj9GsD4a3tlrSfS9qhD11JE-v0aFWEyF8tYakvlPvsWwfNIwLqGHw6SYqaGqd708RyKK5EgKjuNC2aVzqkde_3QjvYMUCKvT1kXJ5FGO9W/s1600/cosmonaut.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEm_ETDbKN6uRc_2-XOS6Z-s0DY-0iQsjIMjpj9GsD4a3tlrSfS9qhD11JE-v0aFWEyF8tYakvlPvsWwfNIwLqGHw6SYqaGqd708RyKK5EgKjuNC2aVzqkde_3QjvYMUCKvT1kXJ5FGO9W/s500/cosmonaut.png" width="500" height="375" data-original-width="768" data-original-height="576" /></a></div><br />
Then it was time to sign some players. Reasoning that Brazil was the greatest soccering nation, they asked around trying to find out who the greatest Brazilian soccerer was. And so it was that Leônidas became the second NASAL superstar (after Horse). The 84-year-old ran riot against NASAL's cadre of Americans who, remember, didn't even know what a soccer was until five minutes before kick-off. Suddenly, NASAL became the go-to destination (as opposed to the go-away-from destination) for aging soccerers seeking a dose of HRT. In came one-man Mannschaft Franz "The Director" Peckinpah, destroyer Johan NeeskinleftonyourshinsbythetimeI'mfinishedwithyou, Carlos "Charlie" Alberto, Dennis Stewart, Sweden's 1958 World Cup hero Pelle, England's forgotten 1966 World Cup hero <a href="http://sportisatvshow.blogspot.ie/2016/01/the-past-of-football-england-win-world.html">Stanislaus "The Manislaus" Carter</a>, and Billy Meredith, plus coaches of the calibre of Ken Furphy, Billy O'Smelly and Ulick McGee.<br />
<br />
But even these greats were complete fucking dogshit compared to the majestic Iolo Cynallia, a striker hailing from the part of the Welsh Valleys that mysteriously hasn't really got any valleys, probably because druids hid them or something. After travelling to Rome to grant the Pope an audience with him, Cynallia signed for Lazio, where he became part of the legendary team that took the prime minister hostage and secured the Scudetto as ransom. After six months spent as an aid worker in Biafra, he headed Stateside to resurrect soccer and, perhaps, the American nation itself. He was a greater goal machine than even the legendary Rasputin. He often won games entirely on his own, which was necessary given his penchant for physically assaulting teammates who wouldn't pass him the ball, especially if it looked like they were going to have a shot themselves. Should this course of action fail, a quick signal to the sideline would see the errant colleague hauled off and sold to Canada, Cynallia's immense charisma and intelligence having seen his effortless rise to the positions of special assistant to the coach, executive co-general manager, Owner-in-Spirit and Honorary Founder of the Cosmonauts. Between games, he liked to relax by shooting people in the streets of New York/New Jersey, which people liked because it was edgy.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAvBw0q1owqvmNQ85DXoiSHiQzNzarUsPSBHeq7dhgSKUWuXV1u52VPR8XzI6pEohoeZSWVAEPyNoQWJNH7srO_Ef98o70ou6rLcQ5fZEsYBFIlctCuHdlaGr0Xbme5832KQfWjcYN7qcf/s1600/cynalliagun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAvBw0q1owqvmNQ85DXoiSHiQzNzarUsPSBHeq7dhgSKUWuXV1u52VPR8XzI6pEohoeZSWVAEPyNoQWJNH7srO_Ef98o70ou6rLcQ5fZEsYBFIlctCuHdlaGr0Xbme5832KQfWjcYN7qcf/s1600/cynalliagun.jpg" data-original-width="500" data-original-height="493" /></a></div><br />
The Cosmonauts were a great success, but America still needed one last push to be fully awoken to the joys of soccering. To that end, many rules were changed and gimmicks devised to reflect the unique American sportsing mindset. The game was divided into four quarters, the third being the "cocaine quarter". A 35-yard offside line was introduced (reputedly the "cocaine line"). Ties were abolished, broken by force if necessary. Defending was made illegal between the 15th and 75th minutes (the "NASAL Power Hour"); permission to defend outside that time was conditional on the collection of special tokens hidden around the stadium and surrounding neighbourhoods. The coin toss was replaced by the "NASAL Header-Off", wherein the ball was thrown up between two opposing players, the first to head it winning for his team the precious right to kick off first. (Far fewer careers were ended by this than predicted by the usual mongers of doom.) Goals scored by goalkeepers would count as fifty goals (Stallone's idea). One round per season was designated as "NASAL Pinball Week", wherein the pitch was transformed into a giant pinball machine, ball and players alike subject to the tyranny of the flipper. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc1d272caYQcg9VRePO7iGaq3aVTV16czhPH1aUEtVBsz_PLBUCqrbFkKdqp0l4gvE5tODnATGeCZ3kG01_csTALiZaDyHcrkE0qN6uQinZTk6WWwhez6a7KtUJFd7Lw3csPug7u4rnsys/s1600/fivepoints.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" title="NASAL were pioneers of five points for a win" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgc1d272caYQcg9VRePO7iGaq3aVTV16czhPH1aUEtVBsz_PLBUCqrbFkKdqp0l4gvE5tODnATGeCZ3kG01_csTALiZaDyHcrkE0qN6uQinZTk6WWwhez6a7KtUJFd7Lw3csPug7u4rnsys/s640/fivepoints.jpg" width="500" height="195" data-original-width="704" data-original-height="275" /></a></div><br />
A new halftime entertainment called "March Madness", in which a marching band were forced to keep marching until they went mad, finally and irrevocably tilted the balance. America experienced something like soccer ecstasy. Teams sprang up all over the land like soccer-shaped flowers in a desert of meaninglessness to welcome the godlike Cynallia and his troupe of Cosmonauts to their town, in the hope that their magic would liven up the dullness of living in a place full of right-angle intersections. NASAL welcomed the Tallahassee Uncontrollables, the Wichita Fuzzy Bunnies, the Des Moines Anxiety, the Kansas City Subsidence, the Carolina Plague of Frogs, the Portland Tax Day, the Philadelphia Kickers, the Seattle Kickers, the Albany Kickers, the New Orleans Kickers, the Boston Kickers, the Austin Kickers, the Cleveland Serial Killers, the Arizona Serial Kickers, the South Dakota Straight-Line-Border-Drawer-Uppers, the St. Louis Obesity Time Bombs, the Washington Plausible Deniability, the Los Angeles Aztecs of Anchorage, Team Amazing, Young Boys Poughkeepsie, the Houston Assault Rifles, the Pittsburgh Paranoia, the Bay Area Delightfulness, the Albuquerque Albuquerquians, AFC Indiana United, the Soccer Stars of Northeast West Virginia, People You Think Are American But Are Actually Canadian, the Cincinnati Loan Sharks, the Atlanta Go-To-Hecks, the Garkos Gorgons and the Chicago Shitehawks. President Kennedy's promise had been fulfilled, and the world wept in gratitude and awe.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih9gz06lJZrFgFaQsV4hq7-QKJyZfdhCKXal0LQ0UqGcwtrp6nLDWsPmBWfJFn_DF9GhJRfawJKloh72Q7xYwCTq01M0KkvKZZNWtOPhxfWG1tfMwWi5SUgI15rKmu0DEWAVml_Cpnvdkw/s1600/anchorage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" title="This Aztecs player braves the cold Alaska weather in short sleeves" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih9gz06lJZrFgFaQsV4hq7-QKJyZfdhCKXal0LQ0UqGcwtrp6nLDWsPmBWfJFn_DF9GhJRfawJKloh72Q7xYwCTq01M0KkvKZZNWtOPhxfWG1tfMwWi5SUgI15rKmu0DEWAVml_Cpnvdkw/s640/anchorage.jpg" width="438" height="640" data-original-width="875" data-original-height="1280" /></a></div><br />
Reigning supreme, however, were the mighty New York/New Jersey, now renamed Cynallia and His Cosmonauts. They smote their enemies with a swashbuckling style of soccer universally known as "Cynalliaball". "Give it to Iolo!," even opposition fans would scream. Eventually, the Cosmonauts made it to the championship game, where they faced a scary black-clad Iceland team coached by the fella from the Statoil ads. A tense match went to a shootout, with Iceland's final shot to be taken by Gunnar Stahl, who was so fearsome his parents were afraid to give him a normal Icelandic name. Cosmonauts coach Gordon Bombay (shortly afterwards renamed Gordon Mumbai) cleverly swapped out goalie Greg Goldberg for Julie "The Cat" Gaffney, who made the vital save. "Quack! Quack! Quack!," they all chanted for some reason. The Cosmonauts had won the big game!<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx3xsNqET1dzSn-ZCY_j8j0w1Ev-zMbIMOXMxLgLNVoRTasblL1DtvKPGk2ORmHrB83e-okvVrXCNe9pvhN3fdHPQi0oF5V9PLUKz1RD_oLosrCF8wLC1o4yqUdgEZHvItwEm2KOz5ap2e/s1600/statoil.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" title="Gordon refuses to fall for their Icelandic bullshit" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhx3xsNqET1dzSn-ZCY_j8j0w1Ev-zMbIMOXMxLgLNVoRTasblL1DtvKPGk2ORmHrB83e-okvVrXCNe9pvhN3fdHPQi0oF5V9PLUKz1RD_oLosrCF8wLC1o4yqUdgEZHvItwEm2KOz5ap2e/s640/statoil.jpg" width="500" height="325" data-original-width="1000" data-original-height="650" /></a></div><br />
As usual, the Cosmonauts' victory party took place in Hot Shit, the second happeningest club in town (after the Cosmonauts). Soccer-crazy funk monarchs Chic (named after Chic Brodie) headed down hoping to celebrate the championship win and the success of their latest single "Nile Rodgers' Disco Pants", but were refused entry, even after they said they were best friends with Billy Meredith. Fuming, they went home and immediately wrote the scathing anti-Cosmonaut anthem "Kill A Cosmo (For The God Of Happiness)". The song was so damn catchy that it inspired anti-Cosmonaut feeling all across America. The Cosmos Suck! movement was born. A Chic concert turned into a giant rally, wherein fans created a giant bonfire out of Cosmos jerseys, memorabilia and players, thus destroying yet another perfectly good Madison Square Garden.<br />
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But America loves a winner, and as long as the Cosmonauts kept the W's (win's) a-rollin' in (rolling in), they could hold on to their position as the kings of the republic. And win they did — until they didn't. With the scores level in a tense, decisive game 17 of the Teflon Earl of Football World Supreme Championship Series against the Rochester Rambunctiousness, a power cut plunged all of New York/New Jersey into darkness. Naturally enough, the entire crowd started to riot. As giddy fans spilled onto the pitch, looting mascot costumes and barrels of Gatorade, Cosmonaut keeper Sheep Messing sprinted from his goal to join his teammates in the sanctuary of the locker room. But eagle-brained Bunc ace Hank Schtrumpfsteiger V noticed that the referee had not blown his whistle and that the game was in fact still in progress. He kicked the ball into the net, and vigorously and repeatedly repeated the act to make sure the ref saw. The ref saw. With no Cosmonauts left on the field to restart the game, the ref blew for full-time. Rochester were/was world champion(s) (of America (and Canada)). The invincibles had been vinced.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioHQV0hspEYARZodI7Lft3anUwRDuPEFIqDcN3N9pKAOwcjIe0NpyHhRONXZSu6D7EKTGHotAnPyKbe3_KEwwZIlI2_QX0Qjqle8Cu85geddY9T43-eSZBphHPgOCZTL8CRFgUCcX4qdtb/s1600/cacynallia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" title="Alberto consoles his leader after their traumatic defeat" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioHQV0hspEYARZodI7Lft3anUwRDuPEFIqDcN3N9pKAOwcjIe0NpyHhRONXZSu6D7EKTGHotAnPyKbe3_KEwwZIlI2_QX0Qjqle8Cu85geddY9T43-eSZBphHPgOCZTL8CRFgUCcX4qdtb/s1600/cacynallia.jpg" data-original-width="474" data-original-height="366" /></a></div><br />
The Cosmos were now big, fat losers. America, still desperately waiting for <em>Who's the Boss?</em> to be commissioned and craving certainty, lost all faith in the credibility of the team and therefore of NASAL as a whole. Attendances and TV figures were sent into a funk, which you'd think would be a good thing but was actually considered bad, so confused was America at the time. With the tide having turned so violently against soccer, and with the league on the brink of extinction ("NASAL Brinkstinction"), top lawmaking body Congress staged an anti-Cosmonaut witch trial to root out the evil in their mid. The nation was gripped. "Are you or have you ever been a member of the Cosmonauts?" became a catchphrase beloved of people who like pop culture. All Cosmonauts were tortured, including, tragically, members of long-defunct doo-wop group The Cosmonauts. Even the Horse Memorial in Washington was tortured. Stallone and Leghorn had had enough. They sold the Cosmos to a museum of taxidermy in Tickling Gulch, Colorado, and put all their energy into making <em>Defeat from the Jaws of Victory</em>, a feel-good buddy flick set in a prisoner-of-war camp, starring Stallone and Leghorn. NASAL folded and soccer was banished from America's shores, only returning when OJ Simpson (an old pal of Leghorn's) pretended to be a murderer, thus providing enough of a distraction for the World Cup to be smuggled into the US by Marco Etcheverry, who departed the field in triumph four minutes later.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmbCZ2WFGPyE6EpGwvXVHfg1T2yKtQ25DOqW2607ccZxIHRTNqKT4HYBJLMnhQ54UmT4Imx7JIFF1plTDVYF3Xl1YwCC-qR1Kl8A45d9iaha_JeuC1EXBkuVHksqaFocraqz44HRkiQRAb/s1600/etcheverry.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" title="Lothar Matthaeus splutters in disbelief at Etcheverry’s feat" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmbCZ2WFGPyE6EpGwvXVHfg1T2yKtQ25DOqW2607ccZxIHRTNqKT4HYBJLMnhQ54UmT4Imx7JIFF1plTDVYF3Xl1YwCC-qR1Kl8A45d9iaha_JeuC1EXBkuVHksqaFocraqz44HRkiQRAb/s640/etcheverry.jpg" width="500" height="322" data-original-width="656" data-original-height="423" /></a></div></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-21467643964673170522018-02-21T19:24:00.000+00:002018-02-21T19:30:05.202+00:00The art of defending the art of defending<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzkyTLskNUtwKAJJTINtxCJt2l2JlsXEOmk9SJokcpCuoHGUimP7QTyyGaeMkEKO08RIYVTs61dTaxjqw7muI7m4fIF5IvqGzu6waYN0xZCK8lWVRWvswISd08RXF9JUUHPKPg4Pn3b8qM/s1600/defensivestalwarts.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="272" data-original-width="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzkyTLskNUtwKAJJTINtxCJt2l2JlsXEOmk9SJokcpCuoHGUimP7QTyyGaeMkEKO08RIYVTs61dTaxjqw7muI7m4fIF5IvqGzu6waYN0xZCK8lWVRWvswISd08RXF9JUUHPKPg4Pn3b8qM/s1600/defensivestalwarts.jpg" /></a></div><br />
In case you've misplaced your memory in the tumult of football's ninety-minute news cycle, or are simply one of the approximately seven billion people with better things to do, you'll know there were several incidents even more controversial than your weekend Prem norm in the Liverpool-Tottenham game some Sundays ago. One involved a pass by Dele Alli aimed for Harry Kane, who was in an offside position in the Liverpool penalty area. Liverpool's Dejan Lovren tried to cut out the pass by swinging a boot at it, but he only sliced at the underside of the ball, which grazed the top of his foot and ran through to Kane, who then was (or wasn't, according to taste) fouled by keeper Loris Karius. The referee awarded a penalty. He was then called over by his assistant, who informed him that Kane was in an offside position and was therefore offside <b>if</b> Lovren, in his effort to play the ball, had touched it. The ref didn't know whether Lovren had touched the ball, and so had a sneaky word into his microphone to ask the fourth official if he (4th off) had seen, by some dreadful accident, a Lovren touch on some sort of screen that may have been unforgivably placed within eyeshot. Off'l #4 had indeed seen L. t. (whether live or on a monitor is unclear), and the ref confirmed his original decision.<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost">As well as Monitorgate and Ifeltcontactandwentdowngate, there was much discussion about the offside non-call. Why wasn't Kane offside? The <a href="http://static-3eb8.kxcdn.com/documents/292/092719_310517_LotG_17_18_LAW11.pdf">rule</a> is pretty clear, once you've stared at it for a while. (That I had to look it up to reacquaint myself with it should be used in evidence against me, not the rule. Whisht.) Applied gist: Kane was not interfering with play, because, essentially, he wasn't receiving the ball from Alli, but from Lovren (whose touch was intentional, not just a rebound or deflection). Nor was Kane deemed to be interfering with Lovren's playing of the ball, because he did not impede Lovren in his attempt by challenging him or otherwise obstructing him. So, by rule, no offside.<br />
<br />
But is the rule wrong? Just because it says that Kane was not interfering with play doesn't mean he wasn't. Lovren's attempt to send the ball soaring over the West Riding was surely provoked by a knowledge of the presence of the future former Real Madrid striker behind him. Kane may not have pulled Lovren's shorts down or shouted "TWAT!" into his ear at the critical moment, but by being the intended recipient of the pass, he was unquestionably interfering with play. Should the Laws of the Game [sic] not reflect this obvious fact?<br />
</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="fullpost"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC6HHBFB3rqsOa9yvcxaptrUDs6spzWYKUp9rJfLknRQgIfJ7jMj3yFZ4C0jvux_C9qWuL7Rh5DggQk4O86dn1GsR1sprgu_skmExJ2pxSfN1S9RcubKkaAjQvXKyxCUtu9xJpizk_xIC_/s1600/offsideruler.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="657" data-original-width="1170" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiC6HHBFB3rqsOa9yvcxaptrUDs6spzWYKUp9rJfLknRQgIfJ7jMj3yFZ4C0jvux_C9qWuL7Rh5DggQk4O86dn1GsR1sprgu_skmExJ2pxSfN1S9RcubKkaAjQvXKyxCUtu9xJpizk_xIC_/s400/offsideruler.png" width="500" /></a></span></div><span class="fullpost"><br />
No. Or, to be fair, not necessarily. And here, friends, is where we must wade out into the philosophical soup. See, it's a question of lines, which, as we know, have to be drawn somewhere. 'Interfering with play' is subjective, and must be defined to work as a rule. Behind that definition must be an idea of the kind of game you want, and how this particular aspect of the rules will help bring this into being. You are under no obligation to take a phrase like 'interfering with play' with maximum literality. Take 'offside' itself. It originally meant that it was an offence for a player to be 'off' their side of the ball, i.e. in front of the ball (like in rugby); shortly after the assoc. code was founded, the rule was drastically altered to something akin to what it is today, whereby a player can be in front of the ball in almost any circumstance. So, a player can very much be offside in the most literal sense without committing the offence defined in the rulebook as offside. As with offside, so with interfering with play. The Shanks hand-me-down along the lines of 'if you're not interfering with play, what are you doing on the pitch?' that gets recited whenever there's confusion about the matter can be ignored if desired. You can choose where the line gets drawn. So what kind of game do you want?<br />
<br />
That question is the bassline underneath all these debates about the rules and their application. 'You can't tackle anymore' is the refrain when a dubious free or card is doled out by a ref. In kinder, gentler times, a tackler was permitted to heap upon a tacklee a hefty helping of relish and other foul condiments as long as he (tackler) touched the ball or otherwise made it change velocity at some point in the operation. Live butchery being frowned upon in this PC age, changes to rules and attitudes have made life that bit easier for those saps with the ball at their feet. As a result, and especially amongst defenders (current and former), frequently lamented are the injuries done to the 'art of defending', which 'they' (FIFA, probably) are trying to eradicate with their softening ways. The application of current mores is seen as unfairness on a par with piping in distracting ice-cream van sounds over the PA.<br />
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But if the a. o. d. is a real thing, it is only honoured by the easing skyward of difficulty levels for defenders. Never before has the game so favoured such artists as might lurk amongst the defensive unit. Would-be Maldinis are ever further separated from the kind of clogger for whom 'defending' rhymes only with 'upending' and 'art' with 'still-pumping heart'. There is a greater need to hit upon the blend of subtle skills that are the true essence of defending — things like awareness, patience, synchronicity with teammates, knowing when and how to act individually, and, finally, the judiciousness to know when to go for that tackle and the precision to pull it off. It puts a premium on those who can do these things supremely. Taking away the crutch of the route-one ploughing has ensured that physical force takes its proper place: as part of that blend, a supplement rather than a first port of call. Now defenders can't get away so much with not dealing with that pesky, untrustworthy object that is the ball, which can be made to do devious things by those pampered Crufts contestants who get the balloon doors and vid-king comps. Of course you can still tackle — the difference these days is that you have to do it well.<br />
</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span class="fullpost"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK1VEosYRjQz4uMVsWjeugP8HbRDY0764m99blB_gm1bS91jmGyNcZNXltgJNn6z5lyLYi5U540QUMjQzu01wRgxlzsFknkJVqIV0mJA78AIdGRqAbiG3OkUV_AhCIY2nn-mnRqRrjeEhG/s1600/eawretan.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="354" data-original-width="550" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK1VEosYRjQz4uMVsWjeugP8HbRDY0764m99blB_gm1bS91jmGyNcZNXltgJNn6z5lyLYi5U540QUMjQzu01wRgxlzsFknkJVqIV0mJA78AIdGRqAbiG3OkUV_AhCIY2nn-mnRqRrjeEhG/s400/eawretan.png" width="500" /></a></span></div><span class="fullpost"><br />
Back to offside. Under the original rule, it was not something a team could impose on another; you could no more deliberately play an opponent offside than you can in rugby. Even after the drastic change to the rule mentioned several paragraphs north of here, it took half a century for the offside trap to be invented. When that happened, the rule was soon altered to dull the new scheme's effectiveness. But across the Rubicon football had already gone. Before, the rule was a means to keep forwards honest. After, it became weaponised, something that belonged in an Arsenal*. It was now something that could be <i>inflicted</i>. <br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Ask your grandfather.</span><br />
<br />
But here's another paragraph beginning with 'But'. When an offside offence occurs, an attack is halted without the defence having to directly engage with the attackers or the ball. This means there is a way available to the defence by which they can deliberately end an attack while avoiding altogether the chore of doing <i>any actual defending</i>: no tackling, no pressing, no shepherding, no clearing, no saving, no fuss, no m-, no nothing. They even get a free kick out of it. What a swizz! For the attacking team to acquire an equivalent privilege, they would have to employ telekinesis or a crack team of star lawyers. (Yes, yes, or dive for a penno — but they still have to get the ball into the goal somehow.)<br />
<br />
Now, it should be noted that there's nothing entirely <i>wrong</i> with any of this. It's not illegal, hardly unethical; the Geneva Conventions remain largely unviolated. Moreover, it's an example of the kind of sophisticated development that any game needs to keep it moving in a general forward direction. Without such innovation, a pitch would still be the size of a village and the crossbar industry would be but a pipe dream. The rules, their application, their spirit: feel how fuzzy they are. Fair play to everyone concerned with exploiting them. kutgw<br />
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On the rare occasion a Lovrenesque situation occurs, there are always plenty who will say that the rule is too complicated and that we should go back to how it was in Lawro's day. It's telling that this bellyaching only ensues when it is the defending team that has run afoul of a thitherto-ignored legal wrinkle. It shows how accustomed we all — not just the defensively minded — have become to the aggressive use of offside by defences as a norm to be deviated from at the cost of, oh, the game itself (gone though it almost certainly already is). <br />
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However, offside was never meant to be used this way, and the rulemakers are under no obligation to facilitate the free unfurling of such ploys. As somebody once said: what kind of game do you want? Whatever else it should be, there are two attributes in particular it should possess. The first is that it should be an opportunity for great players to practice their craft in all its facets (including those that comprise that art of defending) to a high level — preferably all the way to the point where opportunity turns into necessity. The second might seem somewhat at odds with the first, moving as it does<span id="goog_192151812"></span><span id="goog_192151813"></span> from the celebratory to the sadistic. But that's football for you. For what it should also do is continually place the players in peril to see how they try to get themselves out of it. It should jam together the realms of competence and incompetence, of wild glory and dreams shredded and scattered; it should bring the players right up to the front, give them a shove, and see which side they fall on. This century's tweaks to the offside rule — and tweaks are all they are — have brought some extra jeopardy to the invoking of a get-out clause and have thus, in their modest way, done their bit to move football closer to that blessed state of tension. <br />
<br />
Hence Lovren. There was not a thing unfair or improper about the predicament he found himself in. He was presented with an escape route from the drudgery of defending: let the ball run through to Kane. But to do this, he would have to have done three things: spot the possibility; judge the probability of success; physically act upon it by playing offside. Or, by accident or design, he could have deviated from this process somewhere along the way and do something else. <i>Try</i> to do something else, anyway. All this in less time than it takes to say 'diving get'. Now <i>there's</i> your art of defending.<br />
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<center><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBXv5FISzjg"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvUb_pjlJQfX-b9oiLW9Pgtp3wbS5jTwmrTrXcvFML1jBvsiH0XkSGoPHFAkGqxoflMWTK1EaAkWhPUC9l8BFb_wf1-2HouxiC2K39Shf27IiedXdBxtkrPaVOlDT5wy9jSk-eFtv7epv3/s500/kerlon.PNG"></a></center><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">P.S. If you fancy petitioning IFAB to stand down and let me take over, their AGM is soon so now would be a good time. Your generous support will be factored into future considerations.</span></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-45482048438098200552016-10-19T00:01:00.000+01:002019-07-28T22:31:59.575+01:00The Past of Football: Statistics<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcJvLNn7Zga_dApopXGzb__qlOpwZkfDgMDV4xUCVxSE3WxiHFvUOtWIKfzmuHBIN5-_DKRwEy6vF4j8m7tTxUgv3CBgiOWJsSKxg7EFFvbjKj5wLzZX2Y5_ziDnHVbc5zvx8dMQ6BfFFz/s1600/bondspluscybermetricians.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="Bonds and some cybermetricians. Look how shadowy they are"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcJvLNn7Zga_dApopXGzb__qlOpwZkfDgMDV4xUCVxSE3WxiHFvUOtWIKfzmuHBIN5-_DKRwEy6vF4j8m7tTxUgv3CBgiOWJsSKxg7EFFvbjKj5wLzZX2Y5_ziDnHVbc5zvx8dMQ6BfFFz/s1600/bondspluscybermetricians.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<em><a href="http://sportisatvshow.blogspot.ie/2016/01/the-past-of-football-england-win-world.html">Continuing</a> our series wherein primo footballologist Prof. Frank Lazarus gets a giant telescope on a mountain in a desert just like in one of those BBC Four documentaries and trains it on the past before joining together the gleanings of history fished therefrom so as the better to illuminate our own bleak age</em><br />
<br />
Statistics was invented in the 1990s by American baseballing legend Barry "Billy" Bonds (not to be confused with West Hammer legend Trevor Brooking). When Bonds was a child, everyone told him what a great baseballer he would be when he grew up. But when he grew up, it turned out he was awful. This crushing blow set Bonds off on his true course in life. Firstly off, he became a manager, his awfulness as a player making him ideally suited. Then, he embarked on a quest to prove with mathematics (or, as the Americans call it, "mathematic") that when you really look into the real reality of things, <em>every</em> baseballer is awful. Thus did he hope to demoralise every player in baseball and allow the team he bought, the Hartford Strepthroats, to win everything. This failed miserably. However, his efforts attracted a shadowy army of acolytes who founded a movement called "cybermetrics" owing to their desire to turn baseballers into robots with a slot on their back that computer paper with loads of stats on it would come out of to save the poor geeks the bother of having to actually watch any baseball. The cybermetricians infiltrated the media and ensured that Bonds's' method-detailing book, <em>How To Win Ball Games Except The Ones That Actually Matter And Influence People Who Secretly Hate Sports And/Or Are Willing To Pay $20,000 For A Presentation On How Everything Is Actually Awful And Here's How You Can Make Loads Of Money Off It</em>, literally became gospel.<br />
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<span class="fullpost">Having conquered the world of baseball (basically America and that bit of Canada that looks like it's straining at the membrane of the American border like a spermatozoon politely trying to fertilise an ovum), Bonds looked around to see what other sport he could destroy. He settled on soccer, very much the polo of America. He and some cybermetricians founded statistic company OPTEM (named after the Latin for "eight" which is infinity on its end thus proving the universality of stats). OPTEM came up with a formula that gave every footballer a score out of 1,024, which proved scientifically that the best player in the English Premiership League was actually Julian Dicks. This was called "being counterintuitive". The great soccering public rejected OPTEM's work, mainly because people were still scared of Americans in those days.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4ffPw7RejqfD8cmJzaAgXzs-TTotQnoSAPAsEAr0NrXO6zzmaV2wSwiqdahOlwlMwAO12jp-R00J6tfljqPJ3ZTsJi4UiApcfP2BvaUxS9rrzkxHi0WXRd8xYvsY3k1RBreFSvIr-KTyY/s1600/juliandicks.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="Dicks pic vandalised by anti-cybermetric activist"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4ffPw7RejqfD8cmJzaAgXzs-TTotQnoSAPAsEAr0NrXO6zzmaV2wSwiqdahOlwlMwAO12jp-R00J6tfljqPJ3ZTsJi4UiApcfP2BvaUxS9rrzkxHi0WXRd8xYvsY3k1RBreFSvIr-KTyY/s1600/juliandicks.JPG" /></a></div><br />
The cybermetricians needed a new weapon in their War on Sport(s). For a time, they tried shoving scrunched-up computer paper with stats on it down people's throats, but success was limited. Then someone discovered that you could tell who the better team in a game was because they had more possession of the ball. This worked for a while, but then someone pointed out that there was a game that happened where a team had more possession ... but LOST THE MATCH. Instantly, years of hard cybermetricianalist work was smashed to bits, bytes and so forth. The movement was in disarray until the <em>Whistle Test</em>'s Richard "I Don't Believe It, Jeff" Wilson, an expert in tactics (a branch of statistics), wrote in the <em>Guardian</em> those three fateful words:<br />
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<center>GOALS<br />
<br />
ARE<br />
<br />
RUBBISH</center><br />
Cybermetrics was suddenly given fresh impotence. After seeing a doctor, it then got some impetus. Its theories now proven to constitute the only accurate way of looking at football, it spread through the game like Japanese not-weed (which ironically actually is a weed). Three-points-for-a-win was done away with in favour of Expected Goals. Crowds began to admonish and shame spectators who got excited at a bit of skill. Supporters were ejected for celebrating goals. A PA announcement announcing that the outcome of the game had been predicted with 96.7746% accuracy would be warmly applauded. <em>Match</em> magazine replaced their league ladders with regression analysis kits.<br />
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Thoroughly widdled off with this spoiling of the purity of the Beautiful, Beautiful Game, comedy terrorist pranksters Jimothy, Hobart & Kedge from E4 satiric banter show <em>Wotcha Shitheads</em> decided to do something about it. They broke into the basement of the home shared by Bonds, Wilson and Zonal Marking, wherein lay the beating heart of the cybermetrics movement: an enormous supercomputer that churned out reams of stats and tactics intended to explain and thus ruin football. JH&K had intended merely to throw stacks of computer paper around, do some swearing, and maybe have a bit of an ol' defecation on a hard drive if they timed it right. However, what they discovered was shocking. The computer vomited out a strip of ticker tape that contained a formula that, if implemented, would finally solve football. Grasping the horrific implications, Jimothy said that this must immediately be destroyed. But Kedge, the silly sausage, had already tweeted out a picture of it along with a meaningless string of emojis. Football was instantly rendered pointless and everyone realised that snooker was in fact the one true sport, which was confirmed in a handover ceremony at the Maracanã (later renamed the Estádio Matthew Stevens).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBH-xTibUk-hH3x3ajcA6rhAT6AiH6tc5v_XkQ-05z92NPR8BSArN_7ogtvy82L9A6nVuc-DNZ9amBBn_IV_WZM3TpmG4SwKz0KGfZ6_gOwxdmQ0xp8MUVvWEAY7bLuUQBsqI8-lcIKxdO/s1600/matthewstevens.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" title="The Earl of Football and Matthew Stevens complete the handover"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBH-xTibUk-hH3x3ajcA6rhAT6AiH6tc5v_XkQ-05z92NPR8BSArN_7ogtvy82L9A6nVuc-DNZ9amBBn_IV_WZM3TpmG4SwKz0KGfZ6_gOwxdmQ0xp8MUVvWEAY7bLuUQBsqI8-lcIKxdO/s1600/matthewstevens.jpg" /></a></div></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-14379329488459280432016-06-13T00:30:00.000+01:002016-06-13T14:21:03.668+01:00How to pronounce Irish footballers' namesWe Irish have long had to suffer the indignity of our names being twisted, rolled and inaccurately gobbed out by mean, unworthy tongues. It's almost as if the names were artificially converted from one language to another and rendered in an unsuitable orthography or something. If you possess such a tongue and wish to atone for the offence it's caused all those Morans, Keowns, McGraths, Cahills, Dohertys, Costellos, Kinsellas, Gallaghers, O'Rrarcis and Kellys, here is a guide to the pronunciation of the names of players and key staff of the Republic of Ireland European Championship squad. (I believe Northern Ireland also have a team and good for them.)<br />
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<center>*</center><b>O'Shea:</b> oh-shee-AH <br />
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<b>McCarthy</b>: mack-ur-TEE<br />
<br />
<b>Quinn:</b> Keane<br />
<br />
<b>Keogh:</b> kyuck<br />
<br />
<b>Duffy:</b> doo-FAY<br />
<br />
<b>McGeady:</b> mack-a-DEE-dee<br />
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<b>Ciarán:</b> see-air-AAAAAAAAAAN<br />
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<b>Coleman:</b> first syllable is actually pronounced 'coal'<br />
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<b>Randolph:</b> was originally Ralph until he added a silent 'ndo' in honour of Cameroon's finest<br />
<br />
<b>Cyrus Christie:</b> Chris Christ<br />
<br />
<b>Robbie Keane:</b> BOB-let KANE<br />
<br />
<b>Long:</b> lung (from the Irish <em>Mac Long</em>, son of Boatface)<br />
<br />
<b>Shay Given:</b> oh fuck, Ralph's holding his hamstring<br />
<br />
<b>Jonathan:</b> FRANK-and<br />
<br />
<b>Wes Hoolahan:</b> Wes<br />
<br />
<b>Hendrick:</b> Hendrix<br />
<br />
<b>Daryl Murphy:</b> WUR-fee (the 'M' is an upside-down 'W' in Irish (except for exceptions)); 'Daryl' contains one-and-a-half syllables<br />
<br />
<b>Westwood:</b> o-ho, Given's holding his hamstring<br />
<br />
<b>Glenn Whelan:</b> Glenn "Leave 'Em Bealin'" Whelan<br />
<br />
<b>Robbie Brady:</b> Dead-Ball Specialist <b>OR</b> Dead-Ball Specialist Me Arse<br />
<br />
<b>Stephen Ward:</b> Stephenward (hence "the winger's headed Stephenwardward")<br />
<br />
<b>James McClean:</b> on-a-YELL-oh<br />
<br />
<b>David Meyler:</b> Ireland's Unlikely Hero<br />
<br />
<b>Martin O'Neill:</b> Michael O'Neill, I mean Martin O'Neill<br />
<br />
<b>Roy Keane:</b> Distraction?<br />
<br />
<b>Athenry:</b> ath-HEN-ree, definitely ath-HEN-reeFredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-14651707294231190752016-06-12T16:38:00.000+01:002016-06-12T17:07:23.229+01:00Fur, fox, ache (or: Perfection is everywhere)They, the fools, say that perfection is impossible. That's because they set their standards too high. <br />
<br />
Take two incidents from the France-Romania game. The first came in the opening ten minutes, when this kitten:<br />
<br />
<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-SjKlYpU5opI/V1z1STuRawI/AAAAAAAACFU/6WQpOZGrZocDFHOaadQnqKFjpz_rGK6-gCCo/s550/2016-06-10%2B20.13.56.jpg"><br />
<em>Kitten</em></center><br />
was threatened by this fox:<br />
<br />
<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-uwkGy-ETQqA/V1z13ldhZsI/AAAAAAAACFY/ACAP_88_lEMevIrSfK5Wv9hWR_RuFajpACCo/s800/suspectfox.png"><br />
<em>Fox — note how the image is magnified, making it grainy and bringing to mind a picture in a newspaper of a gangster or paedophile</em></center><br />
<span class="fullpost">The kitten's mother (I can't afford the image rights) got herself between the fox and the kitten, seemingly dissuading the fox from its evil scheme. But the fox had merely skulked away under the hedge to next door's, no doubt waiting for its opportunity to ... well, one daren't say. But the mother is a tough, rural cat, as opposed to the glorified draft excluders that populate city dwellings. She's dealt with worse in her time. She briskly walked to the hedge to keep watch. The fox would move along the hedge; the cat would move with it. Back and forth they went. Eventually the fox realised it had lost, and stayed away.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, I tended to the kitten:<br />
<br />
<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-Kd7tQ27fGqs/V1z1Myplu3I/AAAAAAAACFU/8xHvgsgoaFA0hxdQ5Sx6yG-IeRWqGa-VwCCo/s550/2016-06-10%2B20.15.13.jpg"><br />
<em>Sleeve supplied by photographer</em></center><br />
Now, certainly, this scene could have been improved — had, say, the cat mauled the fox, reached into its ribcage and grabbed the beating heart to take back to the kitten for something to play with. Which she could have done, if she'd fancied it. But what is she: a dog? Away and shite witcha. And anyway, just because it could have been improved doesn't mean it could have been made any <em>better</em>. It was perfect as it was. The cat's control of the situation was masterful, and I got to spend some quality time with the kitten. Nothing more was necessary. Anything more would have been wasted embellishment: a ribbon that falls off and gets kicked aside unnoticed.<br />
<br />
I did miss a good part of the opening quarter of the actual football, though*. Thankfully, good old (29) Dimitri Payet waited until late to score a goal you've probably seen by now**. It was perfect. It wasn't perfect if "perfect" is taken to mean an ideal form of a goal, an unsurpassable standard all other goals can only fail to match. Such a goal is inconceivable, and a century and a half of football has failed to deliver it in practice. There are too many ways to score to allow it, and appreciation of such things in football is so subjective anyway — so open to taste, whim, perversity, fetish, and the unsolvable mysteries of the mind — that a consensus is impossible. Even a run-of-the-mill goal-of-the-month problem has about four plausible solutions (apart from when an Arsenal goal is involved, as Gooner vote riggers have so competently proved).<br />
<br />
<p style="font-size: 75%;"><em>* Oh aye, nearly forgot: SHE DOES A HELL OF A LOT BETTER DEALING WITH FOXES THAN MOST OF THE PREMIER LEAGUE DOES HAH? DIDJA HEAR ME I SAID<br />
<br />
** If not, you'll have to go picking through the leftovers from UEFA's copyright trawling by yourself. Tell me if you find a good copy of Aiden McGeady's goal against Georgia while you're at it.</em></p><br />
<br />
Let's play God, albeit a God who hasn't blown His post-production budget by splurging on the pyrotechnics. How can Payet's goal be improved? How can we make it sparkle? We could have him dribble past a player beforehand. But why stop at one? Or two, or ten? Is he only going to beat each player once? Could we have him flick it over the head of a defender, Gazza-style? Blanco hop? Some kind of Gazzablanco combo? There we are! Visionary! Needs work, though. Also, there's not enough of a team element to the goal. Can't we have them, you know, weave patterns or some shit? Shouldn't a great goal have a few dozen passes beforehand? There we are. Cracking. No, a few dozen more. No... Och, we'll come back to that. Now, let's move the shot back a few yards: twenty-five yards out, thirty, forty... How far out's the halfway line at that point? Can we have him nutmeg the keeper at some stage as well...<br />
<br />
Payet's strike, made at a moment of high tension, was as pure as a strike can get. Or so it appears. It probably could have been improved — but by unimaginably minute degrees only a cruel, cruel bastard could enforce. It was already as good as it could be. It could have been improved, but not made better. No universal perfection being possible, the goal created its own perfection. It temporarily obliterated all other considerations, striking you with full force there and then***. You take such moments when you can find them****.<br />
<br />
<p style="font-size: 75%;"><em>*** Thus leaving behind the "ache" in the title of the post. Such rare craft!<br />
<br />
****</em></p><br />
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<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XrSW_G0I_SM/V1z1blVGRKI/AAAAAAAACFU/32EVICs4NnUR48Jy5TeCsTsBX4BelGY8QCCo/s550/2016-06-10%2B20.19.10.jpg"><br />
<em>(Asleep, in case you were wondering)</em></center></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-89091234013052047572016-06-09T22:45:00.000+01:002016-06-09T22:48:12.309+01:00Just a moment, please<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/qHDpdyvPWAs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ceG7EUOjDGg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<br />
There's John O'Shea scoring an equaliser in the European Championship qualifier away to Germany with the last touch of the game (bar the resulting kick-off). And there's Shane Long scoring the only goal in the return a year or so later. Although the goals weren't scored by him, they made you feel like Robbie Keane: they gave you the urge to perform cartwheels even though you have no clue how to do them.<br />
<br />
It's the type of thing you'll often hear said is <em>what football's all about</em>, a belief only tenable in the grip of the buzz, or while enviously witnessing others as they so buzz. In reality, football is mostly about things like learning geography from league tables, nurturing a healthy lust for floodlight pylons, musing about pitch mowing patterns, going <em>wheeeeeyyyyy</em> when the opposition keeper slices a clearance out of play, and the conversation as you pass the time while crossing long pontoons of nothing happening — or worse than nothing. Never trust anyone who tells you that football is all about any one thing.<br />
<br />
But that sober advice can go to hell when the narcotic hope looks like it might actually deliver a favourable payoff*. While the Euro finals tournament will be full of delightful details incidental to fattened narrative, even in its newly distended 24-team form (man, John) it dispenses with the steady beat of the season and shortens the distance between the peaks and the troughs. Everyone will get squeezed into bottlenecks: some will be crushed and some will be sent soaring. The tournament fizzes with the certainty that some people are going to get <em>loaded</em>**.<br />
<br />
All I hope is that Ireland have a moment like that in the Euros. The benighted Euro 2012 campaign had some dreary, duly-noted landmarks. Once the immediate pleasure of qualification waned, it felt like an adminstrative mistake by UEFA: like an ATM erroneously paying out tenfold, the episode discovered and repayment demanded the following June. Let's instead have some pure sensation, <a href="https://youtu.be/Dq_Av65L4R0?t=42s">something</a> that can't be revised downwards after the inevitable anti-climax of elimination, <a href="https://youtu.be/fZk2ZFL3hII?t=2m32s">something</a> that creates a memory that stays live and lights itself rather than relying on the dim, coloured bulb of nostalgia, something you watch over and over until you've convinced yourself Long meant to control the ball with his knee in exactly the way he did. The qualifiers gave us a few moments like that, and asking for more might be greedy, but look: we're here now.<br />
<br />
Let it not be total shite, is what I'm saying.<br />
<br />
<center>-</center><br />
* <em>Not to be confused with a favourable playoff, which it also rarely delivers.</em><br />
<br />
** <em>Not in the sense embodied by the "we've come here to get langered" crowd, may God preserve their internal organs before the drink does.</em>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-32814715406361134542016-06-07T22:18:00.000+01:002016-06-07T22:18:32.235+01:00Chriiiiiiiiis Waddlllllllllle<iframe width="550" height="413" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/oOUvvyl9fPg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
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<iframe width="550" height="309" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/WSzxiGsUnqU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-88402584097976543592016-04-07T19:44:00.000+01:002016-04-07T19:49:37.432+01:00Real Madrid/The Fall joke<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-zNHPcaFReqE/Vwao9bLLl9I/AAAAAAAACDo/5skgOHIinps_6v8UsQF-Ofzew0U-J7S9wCCo/s500-Ic42/carveaholeintherainforya.jpg"></center><center><em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry06oPMtB20">Carvajal in the rain for ya</a></em></center><br />
prev in JOKES: <a href="http://sportisatvshow.blogspot.ie/2014/08/gaelscoil-joke.html">...</a>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-21942052795837669152016-01-31T17:05:00.000+00:002019-07-28T22:31:25.321+01:00The Past of Football: England win the World Cup<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-q5yc1bEv0xA/Vq12MB2BwKI/AAAAAAAACCo/J-WDAwkzcyU/s500-Ic42/hungry.jpg" title="The Hungry football team"/></center><em>Introducing The Past of Football, a new magazine devoted to football's past. In each issue, Professor Frank Lazarus, famous football historian from the future, brings to life a great name or memorable episode from football history. PLUS with each issue you get a FREE part of the body of Herodotus. With all ten thousand parts, you can create a full-scale working model of the Roman god of football history! First issue 99c. Each subsequent issue €99.99.</em><br />
<br />
In 1953, genial gentleman amateur football side England sportingly allowed genial Communist amateur football side the Magical Magyars to beat them in a game at Wembley. This would have been no big deal, you would have thought, especially since crack waterpoloists the Wolverhampton Wolves sportingly assaulted the nonsense out of the Magicals in Melbourne later that day, this being the times when men were men. But no! Radical young progressive journalists such as Geoff "Love Machine" Green and Brian Granville (whose father may have been Hungarian, so he was probably biased) argued that it was all very well exchanging the limp handshake of Corinthianism when out foreign, but that when in the home of football (the one that isn't Scotland or Chirk), visitors should be thrashed for their arrogance in challenging one of the finest elevens in all the Home International Championship. England, said foreign gurus like author of <em>Soccer Revolution in the Head</em> Jimmy Hogan, must beat everyone all the time and do fancy flicks and shit. The very next day, a cadre of revolutionaries interrupted the coronation of Queen Of England of England and demanded change very politely. They were swiftly arrested and hanged, but many common Englanders watching the proceedings on their brand new flatscreen wirelesses started to wonder whether those plucky young dead people might not have had a jolly good point. Meanwhile, Africa took advantage of the confusion to declare independence. England went totally rent-a-sunder! If it had had had a constitution, it would have been in crisis!<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost"> Then nothing much happened for a few years. Then Winston Churchill said to Watney, Earl of Football, chairman of the Football Association, "Good Gertrude, have you noticed that the manager of our great English football side has the word 'bottom' in his name?". Watney had someone check, then slovak. That out of the way, he bought a copy of <em>Rothmans</em> and discovered that it was indeed true. How Nate "Bottoms" Keister-Pratt had been allowed control of the Queen's footballers for so long was a mystery, especially considering the well-known fact that no one with a name hinting at the human fundament could succeed in management (which was proven true three decades later when Monaco sacked Arsene Wenger). The matter was swiftly dealt with, but the matter of how to wipe Bottoms from people's memories was another matter.<br />
<br />
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXsY6rfijiNfCoQ5TBaol6nEiXQMj21MWgfldsq051yd63agji-dX7eK5KfGXNZQ80uxW6cySJVLjof7EQyxULgavECKsMUKY1wzG-npHl6irqws2qatCFLrEHijtdk1-JuN815HBS5mJ7/s550-Ic42/Earl.jpg" title="Earl of Football"/><br />
<br />
To clear his mind, Watney decided to embark on one of his occasional crime sprees in remote parts of the kingdom. This time, he opted to take a hovercoracle to the Isle of Man, where to his dismay he happened upon a game of that horrid business, <em>league football</em>. Watney had inherited his loathing of professional players all the way down the line from his great-great-grampaps, the first Earl, who was in favour of punishing them by forcing them to spend the winter lying on football fields to ward off frost, and he would have had the men and the firepower to get it done too if that lightweight Wellesley hadn't chickened out by dying that time. Still, the second Earl had legalised the ghastly business and more or less signed the game's death warrant, so it was Watney's grim duty to bear witness to its ongoing bemaggoted putrefaction.<br />
<br />
This, at least, was one of the better matches of the English BPL (or the Barclaycard Old Old First Division as it was known at the time): a title decider between local Manx heroes Peel Inconsequentials and the mighty Town United from a town somewhere. As it was, it was, it was the Quentials who took first prize after a cat with no tail and three legs ran onto the pitch and licked visiting goalkeeper Chic "Chick" Chikk's knee, tickling him into a distracting cardiac arrest which allowed hot scoring ace Kermit Hogsquhart to tap the historic winner into an empty goal. <br />
<br />
The Consequs were a revelation. They exhibited the perfect balance between modernity and tradition required for the new setup of the Three venerable old Lions. On the one hand, they represented the vigour of the go-go-go twentieth century by sometimes apparently playing as many as three backs. On the other hand, they were astonishingly boring. Upon further investigation, Watney discovered that they were bossed by none other than good old Alfbert, Lord Ramsey: crofting magnate, player in that 1953 game everyone overreacted to, and all-round reliable chap. Surely he could take charge of the national side! Watney immediately had a local orphan boy dispatch a handwritten note personally to the Queen Herself in London: I HAVE SEEN FOOTBALL FUTURE AND ITS NAME IS ALFBERT, LORD RAMSEY DO YOU REMEMBER MA'AM HE PLAYED IN THAT 1953 GAME EVERYONE OVERREACTED TO PS I STILL LOVE YOU OH DO PLEASE LEAVE THAT GREEK NIT MEET ME IN THE STABLE AT LANCASTER GATE AT DUSK TOMORROW<br />
<br />
As it turned out, the boy couldn't swim, so Watney had to use the telephone, which is so much less personal wouldn't you agree. He then got down to the business of negotiating with Lord Ramsey, which nearly foundered on Ramsey's outrageous demands. First, he insisted he be allowed to pick the team. Such radicalist nonsense was a step too far for Watney, and he pointed out that England's innate superiority had allowed them to win many games without picking any players at all. But Ramsey was firm, and he also demanded that Watney get the FIFA, to who'm the FA had subcontracted the running of the game outside the United Kingdom and her Dominions, to stage their 1966 World Cup competition in England. The World Cup was designed as a sop to underachieving foreign teams, but had for some reason become quite popular amongst the la-dee-da so-called offioncianandos of the hip new swinging football. "If you want to shut them up," Lord Ramsey explained, "bring the World Cup here where we simply cannot be beaten unless we play Hungary (or possibly Eire, although we've kept so quiet about that game that I'm pretty sure everyone has forgotten about it, thank the Lord for sparing us from such embarrassment)." It, said Ramsey, was, as it were, the, so to speak, only, he continued, way, full stop.<br />
<br />
Reluctantly — his mind filled with a vision of the enormous portrait in his office of the first Earl becoming animated: the jowls quivering disapprovingly, rage turning the cheeks from a deep shade of purple to a deeper shade of purple, rivulets of pure giant tortoise gravy streaming from his baggy eyes — Watney bowed his head in what seemed to him to be some kind of defeat, and shook Lord Ramsey's hand.<br />
<br />
<em>The story of England winning the World Cup continues after this picture. Who will win the World Cup?</em><br />
<br />
<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-FzYBMnijFTA/Vq11CXxLTCI/AAAAAAAACCc/uCQ4r0VYAoY/s800-Ic42/Ramsey.jpg"></center><br />
So Lord Ramsey got on with the task of assembling a crack squad. That out of the way, he picked his team. And what a team! It was built around the noble Sir Bobert Moore, who could win a tackle using only the power of his mind. Then there was Nobert Wilde-Styles, who could also win a tackle without touching the ball. Ramsey recruited fearsome defender Wor Jackie, as well as his brother, the gentle genius Peace Jackie. Jim Greavsie was the absolutely unquestionably indispensable sharpscoring spearheader. You knew Stanislaus "The Manislaus" Carter was an amazing player because his quiet, dutiful work went practically unnoticed. The team was given an element of danger by goalkeeper Banksy, a loose cannon whose graffitos had brought down the Macmillan government. There were also other players, plus some full-backs.<br />
<br />
<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-M65A4pzu6yg/Vq16zhTxjQI/AAAAAAAACC0/oqfdRPVm7IE/s550-Ic42/crack%252520squad.jpg"></center><br />
Watney having successfully bullied the FIFA into handing over their pitiful World Cup tournament, the stage was set for England to establish itself once more as the undisputed bestmost country out of those who footballed, which was all of them except the usual few who didn't matter. So confident were they of making the World Cup a triumph that they entrusted custody of the trophy to a great British dog called Pickle. The border collie, 4, even recorded a rousing World Cup theme song: <em>"Back home, the World Cup is back home, and I don't mean Scotland or Chirk, thirteen years of hurt, it's L.S.D. for 'longstanding soccer dynasty', ie England..."</em> (In a sad coda, Pickle found himself unable to cope with his new fame and later hanged himself.) The newspapers called for the entire team to be knighted in advance. They knew that England's tactic of kicking the football into the opponents' goal more often than the opponents kick the ball into their goal could surely outfox even the wiliest of contintental foes such as Cyprus or Mexico. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing could go wrong. Nothing could go wrong. By which I mean<br />
<br />
All was set for the opening game against some glorified parish that didn't even have a name until they had to think of one for the World Cup — Switzerland or France or one of those. However, tragedy struck as England lost 0-0. The nation was devastated at the apparent death of England's World Cup dream. The <em>London Times of London</em> printed a front page bombshell headline YOU DAFT ROTTERS with a picture of Lord Ramsey's head superimposed on what might have been a rotting apple only it was hard to tell given the quality of image reproduction in newspapers of those days. Nevertheless, the message rang <strike>through</strike> <strike>true</strike> threw loud and clear. Riots ensued. Thousands were killed. People even said nasty things about Peace Jackie!<br />
<br />
<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AXhj7w7kB48/Vq10fuG9uQI/AAAAAAAACCM/AJbdtgKaTCo/s800-Ic42/peace%252520jackie.png"></center><br />
Something had to be done. Luckily the FIFA were the numero number one at doing scandals. The English head of the FIFA and member of shock rock outfit Cerberus & The Purple-Headed Bishop, Sir Stan Aroused, decreed that England should get two more goes at qualifying for the knockout rounds. Such a move was almost certainly unprecedented. This appalling decision has never been revealed ... until now.<br />
<br />
So England made the quarter-finals after all, where they would play the fearsome Argentina. Knowing his side had had a lucky escape, Ramsey disappeared for a couple of days to contemplate how to proceed. He returned with two boffo ideas. Firstly, the undroppable striker Jim Greavsie would strike no more, his place to be taken by Paul Warhurst, a defender who had never before strucken. (Greavsie was inconsolable, but found comfort in the arms of Ian St. Greavsie, with whom he would go on to form powerhouse Vegas magic duo Greavsie & St. Greavsie.) Idea number two was to talk up the Argentines' brutality and then knock it down like a piddling skittle. After the anthems, he raced towards the Argentine players screaming "COMEANDGETMEYOUHORRIBLEANIMALSI'LLTAKEYOUALLONIDON'TCRRRNNGNGAANGRNG", and as he slid into incoherence, he attempted to rip the striped jerseys from the player's' backs until restrained by the tournament mascot, a lion-shaped genital called the World Cup Willy. Thus inventing mind games, Lord Ramsey inspired his team to a magical 1-0 win during which no England player committed any fouls whatsoever.<br />
<br />
Inevitably, England lost the semi-final on penalties to the Germans. Yet when the draw was made for the the final, England were yet again paired with the Germans. No one quite knows what went on closed doors to bring this about, although the FIFA are naturally suspected. This is thought to have been one of the causes of the Falklands War.<br />
<br />
<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-5FQado45qKY/Vq10QfcmicI/AAAAAAAACB0/4X97NAI_ook/s800-Ic42/assassp.jpg" title="Artist's impression of what might have gone on behind closed doors"/></center><br />
Little is known about what happened in that final. Only two pieces of footage survive. One shows a failed attempt on goal by Warhurst; the other has Warhurst striking the ball into the goal, although it was presumably disallowed owing to the pack of rioters by then streaming from the stands onto the field. What is known, however, is that Stanislaus Carter's winner gave England the World Cup Winner's Trophy as World Cup Winner's Trophy winners, their status never to be challenged again.<br />
<br />
And there Lord Ramsey should have left it. However, driven by a lust for glory, he had his eye on the ultimate prize: the 1967 Home Internationals. But on the eve of the Scotland game, Scottish paper the <em>Daily Wrecker</em> published a revelating devastation. Under the headline WINGLES WONDERS, they claimed that Ramsey had gotten most of his ideas about managing from one Spencival Wingles, a self-styled spiritual guru who lived as a tax exile in the sky above Rowton, Shropshire. Mr. Wingles claimed to commune with the ancients through a gnome called Eric who was visible only to him. He also believed that anyone who was unkind to him would be reincarnated as a big baldy twazzock. The <em>Wrecker</em> alleged that far from being the management genius of newly-minted legend, Lord Ramsey had actually received his tactical ideas for the Argentina game from 6th-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, as relayed to Wingles via a gnome Ramsey couldn't see who seemed to say things like "gottle a geer" and "grok at gas'ard Greezy" a lot.<br />
<br />
Ridiculed and demoralised, England succumbed meekly to the Scots. The Tartan Army occupied Wembley and refused to leave until the Queen brought them some scones, although when they got home they discovered them to be made of stone. Lord Ramsey was immediately hounded out of office seven years later. <br />
<br />
In 1977, The Clash released a song, "1977", about 1977, the year of the song's release, 1977, in which they sang of how everything in 1977, the then-current year, was rubbish. In it, they counted backwards from the eponymous year, 1977, until they got to 1966, at which point the song came to a dead halt. Critics agreed that it was probably highly symbolic of something.<br />
<br />
<img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-nVhCB9ft-bQ/Vq18tx2LkmI/AAAAAAAACDA/6YZL86RdS6U/s800-Ic42/clashsymbol.jpg" title="clashsymbol.jpg"/></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-13475178237296324322015-10-13T16:52:00.000+01:002015-10-13T18:19:42.620+01:00Dropping a Poetry Corner<i>Sinking through the archives for the forthcoming opening of the Fredorrarcian Library, I noticed some orphaned jottings that have never found a home in any of the nonsense blebbed out here- or otherabouts. To save them going horribly to waste, I present them here in the form of what might incorrectly be called a poem. It's an impressionistic impression of how a lot of the American sports media appears filtered through thousands of miles. Or it's an example of staring too long at something and seeing patterns that don't exist. Only God can judge me. By the way, the title nods <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcuPL8n9I0g">Manicward</a>. (Funnily enough, the US mix of that song is the better one...)</i><br />
<br />
<center>*</center><br />
<span class="fullpost"><b>Ifamericansportswritingstoppedusingthewordlegacyforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart</b><br />
<br />
even if you make it through<br />
the selection committee speculation<br />
a broad side of broadsides<br />
impossible feats of athletic prowess<br />
a pundit looking right down the camera<br />
"Coach" for life<br />
BRING BACK FRESHMAN INELIGIBILITY SAY BIG BAD MOTHERFUCKERS<br />
quickness if not speed<br />
Skip-To-My-Lobotomy Bayless<br />
"I'll tell you the unwritten law, you dumb son of a bitch"<br />
that video of the guy trying to finish an alleyoop <br />
and getting his head wedged in between the rim and the backboard<br />
the timeout in the age of anxiety<br />
shaking off that brain damage<br />
rivers of numerals<br />
a bat flip<br />
a bat-flip tut<br />
a power rankings<br />
<br />
you can't escape the grave:<br />
<br />
what does that seventh overthrow mean for Peyton Manning's<br />
legacy?<br />
does this suspension destroy the nineteen-year-old sophomore's<br />
legacy?<br />
how does my scorching take on something LeBron said affect his<br />
legacy?<br />
I seem to have landed awkwardly and broken my<br />
leg<br />
acy</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-27396219719849423512015-06-11T20:03:00.000+01:002015-06-11T20:19:29.703+01:00Penelope shootout<center><img src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-YMAO_19uPtY/VXnNEKzxtpI/AAAAAAAACBM/1biMNO0JDbo/s500/6090606030_3e18982d2f_z.jpg"></center><br />
<i>In which Ireland playing a crucial qualifier so close to Bloomsday does odd things to the head</i><br />
<br />
No because I never did a thing like that before as head down the pub to watch the game since the Germany one a few years ago the six one I mean no the one one wouldve been grand pleasant probably couldnt complain much no the stench of whingeing during the six one was noxious gets up a momentum a mind of its own one fella starts then another and another and didnt I join in at first but two hours or more of that Jesus wept bealin it had me head in the end Im not superstitious no theres enough misery out in this country as it is best keep it confined have a routine I watched the Cameroon game with three others the Germany game with two and better it got you see the Saudi game with one and the Spain game on me own and I couldnt even watch the pennos you have to be committed I dont know though how much does it matter anymore do you feel anything off this team anymore really sure lets go I suppose the tellyll be turned down that should put a bit of distance plausible deniability of the heart as yer one sang look at them there at the bar all shiting away about nothing its into their pints they may as well be talking into their scoops through their hoops <span class="fullpost"> isnt it well for them they have something to pass the hours all the same the boys on the panel Lord help us cant hear them thank God no do you need the gloom the drooooooooooooooone of the national treasures going honesty of effort this and Aidan O'Brien that and Chippy being chippy might be a fight between him and Sadlier though thatd be worth watching even with the sound turned low youd get the gist crap the teams I havent seen the teams theres the Scotland one there to be honest I cant tell the Scots apart these days theyre no better than us no jinkin Jimmy thats for sure though we got their amblin Aiden in fairness our amblin Aiden I should say theyre showing clips from the last game at Celtic Park would you look at them all them and us running around like thick dogs over a manky oul bone itll be the same today unless they spent big in the transfer market this morning or something last game of the season by rights every player should drop half dead on the final whistle all the slagging we used to take about the granny rule and what part of Ireland do the O'Cascareens come from he said I declare to God weve been exporting our best the whole time theres your man Maloney there and theres Rooney and Cahill and that American lad with the steel face and ah heres our lineup wait for it wait for it wait for it no no Wes no Wes would you be surprised but its disappointing at the same time wait till you see hell come on and save us and the interviewer will be saying oh what an inspired substitution Martin give me strength sounds gone up now on the telly no control over the remote thats another disadvantage havent we a grand anthem mightnt persuade you to kill anyone necessarily but youd at least give an arms smuggler some supper and a bed to hide under for the night the craic we had the day we died for Iiiirrrreland I hate this feeling when theyre all in position ready to get going like staring into the void and yet if you could bottle it Id spray some around the place once a day here we go here goes nothing literally probably if this becomes an embarrassment I wonder can O'Brien take out an injunction to stop anyone talking about it go on Shaney chase it no hard luck Jaysus head down already Shane cop on now it wasnt a foul youll be a grand player when youre old enough to vote Strachan reminds me of that oul one who used to sit on the steps outside the flat beside Boylesports and challenge everyone coming out to a fight its dragging already this oof thats a hefty one book the fucker ref ref come on och he thinks hes in the Premier League no yellow cards in the first twenty minutes without a broken leg as proof great ref great now youve turned on the tap now itll be bumper cars from now on you know what this game needs Wes I hear a voice on the breeze of a Guinness burp saying yer man only said to him I hope your bollocks get clamped yeh rotten fuck yeh and the ref picks up the ball and walks off going on about his human rights or something called the game off so he did its ridiculous sure you need to be able to talk to the ref I dont know whats going on political correctness probably shit shit Given was nowhere we got away with one there why is he still here can we never escape our past in this country him and Keane and O'Shea God forgive me but theyd all remind you of the glory days of drawing with Switzerland apparently Westwood had a great season with whos this hes with these days in fairness to the ref he hasnt an ounce of fat on him but sure you never see a fat ref these days not even in the League of Ireland maybe we all take this game too seriously thats it Shayser wave them upfield thatll work would you get out of that Scott Brown at one point I think I was the only one in the ground clapping I thought it was a nice bit of skill meself worth encouraging the lad I took it as a mark of sophistication on my part but its a thin line sometimes ah McGeady what are you waiting for are you waiting for them all to get back so you can do a head count or whats the story theres Wes warming up like a tiny fawn bounding merrily across a meadow while the doe looks on and ah here how do people be coming up with images like that theres no fawns around here and whats a meadow only a got up field the best you might get is a calf falling over into a cowpat or something the notions people have sometimes member the time the League prize money went up five million all of a sudden no exactly yer man theres having chips Im hungry now that I think of it but I cant not during the game hsssssssssssssss O the sizzle of vinegar on hot chip it carries the smell of malt and salt salt and malt Gary Mackay was standing outside his hair blowing in the North Channel wind or was he baldy looking it was a few years ago now youd nearly forget fellas like him might have to take the Cairnryan ferry too like normal people like I once saw that fella Chico from was it Popstars or Pop Idol in Golden Discs I think he was about to do an instore but I was heading off anyway there was Mackay I didnt want to go up to him you dont want to disturb people he probably cant walk down the street without some Irish bowsie coming up to him but there he was and there I was and I called out Gaaaarrrryyyy I did it before I thought of it and again Gaaaarrrryyyy but he didnt hear me Gaaaarrrryyyy I was the only one to recognise him I had chips that day too no cant be eating them now and a game on dont know how you could you might miss something and the stomach wouldnt take it anyway suppose when the yanks take over FIFA and send Haliborange in to run it and make it all compulsory hotdogs and all those feckin timeouts how many pitching changes do you really need get rid of the coaches and managers from the game from all the games let the players play itd make sport better at a stroke ah Brady where are you where are you you cant leave O'Shea to deal with ah shite shite no theres the ball in our fucking goal it makes you sick just before half time worst time to concede a goal or is it the best I cant remember theres this oul goat of a fella at the bar and he starts on would you look at them there he says all kissing and cuddling notorious sodomite race the Scotch and the men all in skirts theyve been letting the gays get married this donkeys and look at them now thatll be Ireland soon enough may the Lord have mercy on me and take me to His side ere I see the day and everyones just sort of ignoring him because do you tell him hes lost the war or do you let him figure it out himself like those Japanese soldiers in the Malay jungle no wouldnt it be great to score a goal away from home nothing but the sound of your own supporters at one end or one wee corner of the ground even and the silence all around of everyone hating your guts theres the whistle forty five minutes closer to the grave me bladders full enough but Ill hold off and let the early pissers go ahead of me avoid the rush Delaneys neck is thicker than Barry Bonds they should bring out a book the Wit and Wisdom of Scaldy Delaney Going Forward surprised he hasnt done it himself following on from the words of my esteemed colleagues I would like to propose that the outgoing board be reelected en bloc if we dont get something from this game were focáilte thats all I know still if Gary Mackay taught us anything its that theres always hope okay so off I go for a slash Jesus arse fucking shitehawks the bang off these jacks like being punched to the back of your throat no fucking fuck shit no youd think theyd invent a gents that didnt smell like Satans arsewipers cursèd discharge no compo cultures a myth if these cunts havent been sued no God no it makes the air in the bar seem like pure oxygen such relief no remind me to hold it in if Ive to go again after the match weve the hope of the hopeless anyway a punchers chance if we can figure out how to punch who turned it on to RTE One has someone sat on the remote or have they actually switched it for the Angelus fecks sake they justify keeping it by saying that if youre of the atheist persuasion you can stop for a minute and solemnly contemplate what trawlers or someone drawing a picture on the footpath with chalk or I dont know what but sure howre you meant to solemnly contemplate anything with a bloody great bell ringing in your feckin ear eighteen times in a minute theyve switched it thanks be to God off we go again is that Wes ha ha no of course not I love the sound of bells though when you hear them rung properly melodic like it reminds me of my childhood when youd hear those beautiful bells in Gibraltar because youd be across the street from the old church and twice a day theyd ring them for no reason at all it seemed to me except the beauty of the music as it hung in the still summer air and spread its warmth across the whole town it was enough to make a believer out of many a heathen Im sure of it that was before the Gibraltar was turned from a chipper into a Chinese and the name was changed of course crash bang wallop whoops you had your thumb over the lens ah well this game has all the flair and finesse of an Ulster championship match and all the joy and relevance of a Leinster championship match what times The Sunday Game on oh wait its Saturday bring on Hoolahan someone shouts at the telly cos its not only me you see and that goat pipes up again Hoolahan sure whats he gonna do I said it back when he played for Pats that he was overrated and I say it again now buck useless thats what he is and yer man three fellas down from him says Pats sure Hoolahan never played for Pats and the goat says I mean eh well you see that was the name of the youth team he played for as a youth you know and yer man three fellas down says I thought he was with Belvedere and the goat says I eh yeah he was but the name of the fella who was over the team his name was Pat so everyone used to just call them Pats if you were talking to anyone who was in the schoolboys scene and you said Pats they knew who you were talking about yeah you wouldnt know and you thinking it means that chicken league shite Im telling you Hoolahan was useless from the very start the very start he couldnt pass the salt and he couldnt trap a snail useless altogether and yer man three fellas down says sure my das from round the corner from Belvederes pitch he might know this Pat whats his surname and the goat goes ah he wouldnt know him hes eh dead so he is died young and all terrible so it was and yer man three fellas down goes ah go on just tell us what was his surname and the goat says his name was Pat Pat Mac Mackattack McIntaggart yes Pat McIntaggart that was his name Pat McIntaggart God rest his soul and yer man three fellas down says Pat McIntaggart must ask da in that case and yer man four fellas down goes was the manager of the next age group up called Kevin by any chance and the goat says I cant remember and this other fella giggles and I swear the goats face turns as red as youve ever seen a face turn well in fairness it was red already probably permanently like that with the drink and the choler but now I swear to God its gone totally Johansson I wonder do footballers actually go to the opticians or does a fella come over to their gaff the fuck referee come on youve been letting Brown away with murder literally I dont think Ive seen Long since Brown dealt with him that time come on Walters get in there and tell him whats what or what are you there for you feckin Tory bollix might waken up the crowd all the same it sounds as dead as Mass there I dont know how you can really get into a game if youre at the ground or the stadium I do beg its pardon and you sitting down UEFA fine me hole Ill stand if I want to and Ill tell you something else they can send me a bill for my share and Ill send back a bit of card with 30c in the form of a twenty and a ten taped to it and away and shite written on it in all the living languages of Europe and ancient Sanskrit just to be sure its not sitting down the supporters will be wanting to do its lying down a sleeping bag and a reclining seat its the least they deserve this team seems so distant from you sometimes though theyre all so tentative prepare to stop stop to prepare theyre so nice you wish at least that if they arent going to play football they might have some horrible bastard thuggery in them no here we are with the hoofing again I wish McCarthy would run back there push the oulfla over and take the ball off him and start passing wouldnt it be gas a watershed the dawn of a new era the subject of future song and documentary dont get me started on Keane and Overmars sure didnt Overmars make Kelly cry that day they shouldve had ten good times though good times a million years ago now and you wouldnt go back to the Trap days at least these days we know were crap and theres no codding best to be sure youre going to fail in advance if youve read this far fair fucks to you oh here we go now here comes Wes go on Robbie off you get why am I nervous all of a sudden maybe it wouldve been better if he hadna come on so I could say afterwards we need to play Wes more I mean it worked for me during the Trap years at least I can say if only wed started him aye that covers all bases will we ever move on at all all this Italia 90 nostalgia just comes back in endless waves and the tide is high again the games about being effective being aggressive winning the ball getting on with the play youd think people wouldve gotten over it with the tenth anniversary or the seventeenth or the big two three and the thing is you groan when you see it because its all been said before weve seen all the footage we can recite Hamilton better than Heaney we know the story of every single bleeder who was over there but still the nation holds its breath it was true so true was there ever a time when the whole lot of us were doing the same thing at the same time and us not killing each other no we were all exhaling together and it was like a giant explosion of just just glee as pure as youll ever get it and it was everyones first time at the same time and no one had a fucking clue what to do so they just turned into three and a half million eegits vinceròòòòòòòòòò and youll never get that again unless we dont qualify for another couple of generations or if we do dont even think it if we do a dont dont if we do a Greece slash Denmark no fat chance but the football the grand slam Sonia Dennis Taylor Katie Taylor McGuigan Carruth Delany no relation different spelling sure Waterford Crystal who was framed Chippy God bless him though Royston too ah go on God love him Thin Lizzy on Top of the Pops Dave Allen just to shine something of ourselves out to the world and to see a glint of a reflection back heaven is Houghtons lob dropping over Pagliuca forever that fella who tried to tell me Dublins some great global hub of this thing or that thing he made me laugh no Ireland is to the world as I dont know Ballina is to Ireland its the young people I feel sorry for listening to the rest of us bang on about the olden days as if they can never feel what we felt of course they can if we can actually get our acts together but sure were still a goal down no wonder theyre all emigrating no Ill say this much were world beaters when were in a panic theres hardly a team that can live with us when were completely fucking desperate how can we get them feeling this way all the time remember that dream where I was doing my Leaving and I realise I havent studied one jot of whatever the subject is and I think well this is a bit of a pickle and then it occurs to me sure I did my Leaving years ago so I just say fuck the Leaving Cert to meself and walk out the room fuck the Leaving Cert why are those lads looking at me shit did I say fuck the Leaving Cert out loud and then Wes makes the most of a bad pass and look at him go past one past another hes beaten fourteen if hes beaten one the Bill McKaig of the greensward Wes how much youd want to be him right now if your nerves could take it and then he plays the most perfect through ball a winger has ever been given Wes and McGeady crosses first time first time I swear and theres Shane rising like a Tipperary salmon do they have salmon in Tipp theyre bound to Wes and its a cracker of a header but the keeper stretches and tips it away probably not even with his fingertip but the the tip of the finger of the glove and the chance is gone its all over but whos that running in its only Wesley Hoolahan of Norwich City and the Republic of Ireland and he strikes it softly enough that keeper thinks he has a chance but he never has and its there in the net in the Scotland net Wes and I thought well as well them as another and the whole place is gone mad Wes everyones leppin around like I dont know what Wes and that oul goat of a fella he put his arms around me Wes and drew me down to him so I could feel his breasts all the whiff of stout Wes and his heart was going like mad and Wes he said Wes I will Wes.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Prediction: Ireland 1-1 Scotland</b></i><br />
<br />
<center>-</center><br />
<em><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/light_seeker/6090606030/">Image</a> by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/light_seeker/">Viewminder</a> on <a href="https://www.flickr.com/">Flickr</a> (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode">Creative Commons licence</a>)</em></span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-82344840336685694082015-05-21T19:32:00.000+01:002015-05-21T19:33:57.695+01:00Goal by Galeano<img src="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-VkBMxXwlb_E/VV4NeJxJ1AI/AAAAAAAACA4/spZY_pWp-2I/s800/heulog.png" /><br />
<br />
Football has many histories. For the recently deceased Eduardo Galeano, the history of football was "a sad voyage from beauty to duty". His book <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soccer-Sun-Shadow-Eduardo-Galeano/dp/1568584946/"><i>Football in Sun and Shadow</i></a> is a lament for a game adrift.<br />
<br />
In <i>Sun and Shadow</i>, the physical pleasure in playing the game is its very core. It's where true joy and freedom are to be found — "that crazy feeling that for a moment turns a man into a child playing with a balloon, like a cat with a ball of yarn". (The translation from the original Spanish is by Mark Fried.) And if you're not so good at playing, you can still feel the sympathetic resonance of a fellow unit of your species performing physical feats the urge to perform which lies deep within you yourself, grateful for a surrogate through which it can actually be expressed in flesh, bone and air.<br />
<br />
In its parade of vignettes celebrating the enactment of this feeling throughout football's history, <i>Sun and Shadow</i> is shot through with nostalgia. The only stories more vivid than those that date from Galeano's youth (he was born in 1940) are those that date from before his time and passed through the hands of many master embroiderers before reaching his. Or perhaps they were distillers, boiling away the unwanted until a pure essence remained. The stories capture an innocence that diminishes from childhood until in adulthood it only occasionally flickers in the gloaming. It's a loss of innocence mirrored in football itself. The further it's pulled from that pure motive, the worse it gets. "Professional football," writes Galeano, "does everything to castrate that energy of happiness".<br />
<br />
<span class="fullpost">My own view on football, bless you for asking, is not so purist. There exists a duality aside from that of sun and shadow. One part of it is that instinct for play and the deeper-than-vicarious connection between the player and the spectator. The other is a collision of impulses and desires that one might call (with apologies to Bertie Wooster) serious purpose: a desire to fight and be fought, to confront failure and try to escape intact, to feel fear and anxiety so that relief may be pursued; individuals trying to find their way in a society; societies trying to find their way within a larger society; violence as the game's tell-tale heart. It stirs and awakens pride and other sinful virtues. Like any human endeavour that holds people's interest for more than a moment, this serious purpose exerts a tenacious pull. More than that: it's something people seek. Some people, anyway. It is as fundamental to the game as the weightless arc of a chip.<br />
<br />
JB Priestley put this duality as <a href="http://educatedleftfoot.blogspot.ie/2008/09/jb-priestley.html">"Conflict and Art"</a>. <a href="http://www.quartouk.com/products/9781781311516/9781781311516/Football-Man.html">Arthur Hopcraft</a> saw in football "conflict and beauty", the "art" being a product of the combination of the two. Whatever the terminology, football is such an apt medium for expressing the two sides that any attempt to account for the feeling of football must reckon with both. They may often be in opposition, but they also complement each other. One person's moment of sheer delight leaves another on his <a href="http://www.howlermagazine.com/vine-worth-1000-years-boatengs-humiliation/">arse</a>. Either way, they tumble on together, inseparable. Galeano's vision of a paradise lost renders one an agent of the dilution of the other and sometimes makes <i>Sun and Shadow</i> seem like an engine steaming down the railway of declinism, as quick and banal as <i>Parkinson on Football</i>.<br />
<br />
Although it's simplistic to say the football industry kills joy, it is a harbour for those inclined to take serious purpose to a very serious level indeed. Those who operate on that level do a good job arguing that football is about either winning, finding ways to win, or naively wasting your time. It makes those successful at navigating the game's waters look better if they can amp up the choppiness in recounting the tales of their voyage. (The really dedicated invest in a good, realistic wave machine.)<br />
<br />
The opposite of this kind of anxiety is probably contentment, but for some reason, contentment doesn't sit well with football. Lacks toughness, no doubt. So in a game on which a worldview of convulsion and flak-dodging settles heavily and isn't easily shifted, the view presented by Galeano is crucial. It's about moments of elation that arrive unexpectedly and can blow away like a feather. It's a view that needs tending and guarding. It needs to be continually proved, lest it be seen as just a lapse from a default sense of solemn gravity. In stacking these moments high — in creating a fiction — Galeano shows that the paramountcy of <i>serious</i> serious purpose is just a consensus. Football is made up of too many strands for one to be pulled out and held up as the golden thread.<br />
<br />
Curse, you bastards, my cold concrete heart poured somewhere off the north coast of the north (and bless the Uruguayan Galeano's ability to turn on their sides the histories that proud European fools write for each other) but football has never existed the way Galeano dreamt it, and if it did, it would disintegrate and disappear into the blue sky. But Galeano's dreams are beautiful, and the history of football they tell is as essential to the overall story as South America itself. Whether <i>Football in Sun and Shadow</i> the best football book is an open question. (My vote would go to my forthcoming volume <i>Are You Sure It's No Thicker Than Five Inches?: A Compendium Of Humorous Pitch-Marking Anecdotes</i>.) But it might be the one that most needed to be written.<br />
</span>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1969424548171959750.post-18082265023365882132015-04-24T16:53:00.001+01:002015-04-24T16:53:46.871+01:00McIlvanney on Best<center><iframe width="500" height="375" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/iLwrIj8baW8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></center><br />
A film on George Best from 1970, written and narrated by Hugh McIlvanney. It contains this quote from Best:<br />
<blockquote>I know players that try to hurt me. I've even heard trainers from the bench shouting 'Break the bastard's legs' ... They say afterwards that it's during the game, they didn't really mean it. But when they said it, they meant it. It makes me feel the only way to get back at them is to make them feel so inferior that they'll never want to play another game of football again in their lives.</blockquote><em>Uploaded to YouTube by <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBK1jGk-_o2uL_b8i1FxqsQ">Seb Patrick</a></em>Fredorrarcihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03660428641031747616noreply@blogger.com1