Sport Is A TV Show

Parish newsletter

2011-12-10T00:54:00.003Z

Two quick bursts of info before we lose our breath and look plaintively in the direction of the subs warming up by the touchline:

The Classical is live. See my piece on the clash between José Mourinho's josemourinhoness and Real Madrid and Barcelona's realmadridandbarcelonaness, SIATVS contributor Elliott Futfanatico's article on how José Mourinho and Pep Guardiola manipulate their respective clubs in order to secure their status (his take on Guardiola is particularly perceptive), and a whole bunch of other lovely stuff we've been putting together since November.

The Supermassivoclásico is not the only big game this weekend, no sir. A bunch of gamers from Cork will be trying to set a world record by playing FIFA 12 for 2,012 minutes (that's over 33 hours, time fans). In doing so, Fi-Fa-4-Fun hope to raise €2,012 for Children in Hospital Ireland, a charity dedicated to making life easier for sick children and their parents by organising play sessions, advocating for their welfare, and doing lots of other good stuff. You'll be able to watch the lads via webcam from this morning until the conclusion tomorrow evening. If you donate, you can even play against them online. Even if notching easy wins against sleep-deprived opponents isn't your thing, do head over and consider giving to this deserving cause.

Keeping It Peel 2.2: the podcast

2011-10-27T15:04:00.002+01:00

So you've read the Keeping It Peel post, marvelled at our exquisite taste (and Peel's, of course), but thought to yourself, "Y'know, there's an awful lot there — I wish there was some kind of digest of all this: perhaps a 48-minute podcast including a track from each of the artists featured, some of which tracks were included in the post, others of which are different Peel session tracks from the artist in question. It would be nice if it included a few extras as well. Yes, that'd do juuuuuuust nicely."

Well, quite. Presenting: that thing you were wishing for:

You can download all 43.9 MB-worth of it here. The way of these things dictates that the sound quality varies between songs, and sometimes within a song, but I hope it doesn't detract from your listening pleasure. I mean, I've even made some of the songs fade in and out of one another, all posh like.

The tracklist is:

(0:00) Jimi Hendrix, Radio 1 'jingle' — 15/12/1967
(1:15) Half Man Half Biscuit, "Uffington Wassail" — 25/08/1999
(4:24) Elvis Costello & the Attractions, "Less Than Zero" — 25/07/1977
(7:48) John Cooper Clarke, "(I Married a) Monster from Outer Space" — 03/10/1978
(10:13) Datblygu, "Baban, Nerfau Mor Rhydd"
(12:20) Viv Stanshall, "In the Final Analysis" — 16/10/1975
(15:44) The Symbols, "Last Rose of Summer"
(17:47) Laura Cantrell, "Indoor Fireworks" — 08/05/2003
(22:07) Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, "Better Rooms" — ?
(24:33) McCarthy, "An MP Speaks" — 07/10/1986
(26:26) Manic Street Preachers, "Been a Son"
(28:52) The Delgados, "Accused of Stealing" — 29/03/2000
(34:43) The Fall, "Winter" — 26/08/1981
(42:47) Pulp, "I Love Life" — 12/08/2001

The dates are when each song was recorded. Those tracks without dates come from sources other than Peel sessions:

"Baban, Nerfau Mor Rhydd" comes from the Datblygu album Wyau;

"Last Rose of Summer" was covered by the Delgados at Peel's request in a 2002 session;

I thought that "Better Rooms" was from a Peel session, but after putting it on the podcast, I couldn't find any info on it. So it's most likely for another show altogether (The Evening Session, maybe?). Ah well. It's good, though!;

"Been a Son" (a cover of the Nirvana song) was recorded for Radio 1's The Evening Session (I think!).

Note: when you load this gem of a thing onto your music-spraying machine of choice, the "album cover" accompanying it will be that for the BBC 5 Live World Football Phone-in. I do not know how this happened.

Enjoy!

Keeping It Peel

2011-10-25T20:24:00.006+01:00

Welcome to the second annual Keeping It Peel, a celebration of the music brought to us by the late John Peel (although he wasn't "the late John Peel" when he doing the bringing, of course. Just in case there was any confusion, like). I and like-minded souls are commemorating the man by posting Peel session tracks and various related goodies on our internetted medium of preference (check out the Keeping It Peel site to see what others have been doing). Below is our selection, chosen at random by 's-Hertogenbosch, the SIATVS blind lots-drawing dog.

(Here's how we did it last year.)

Thanks, as so often, go to Webbie, for the whole thing is his doing; and, of course, to John Peel. He may only have been a conduit, but what a conduit.

Onward!

Elvis Costello & the Attractions — "Less Than Zero"

Deco is more associated with Charlie Gillett, who was the first DJ to play his demos. But he actually did four sessions for Peel. This version of "Less Than Zero" is taken from the first of those, in 1977. This would, I suppose, be one of the first recorded appearances from the Attractions (perhaps the first?).

Also, for no extra cost, have "Shipbuilding". It's actually from a session for Peel's Top of the Pops co-presenting bud David Jensen (see above), but it's irresistible.

Laura Cantrell — "Indoor Fireworks"

And here's a Costello song performed by Laura Cantrell. The sound quality takes a dip in the middle of this, but the performance more than compensates.

McCarthy — "An MP Speaks" — from That's All Very Well, But...: The Best of McCarthy

A rumour that McCarthy were actually from Barnsley and named themselves after Mick was started by me earlier in this sentence, and flatly denied by me in this later section of same.

The Manic Street Preachers covered a couple of McCarthy songs: "Charles Windsor" and "We Are All Bourgeois Now". Strangely, they never did a Peel session. However, in their early days, they sent Peel a letter whose revolutionary brio so impressed him that he gave them their first airplay. The band were prolific letter writers at that time, as they aimed to spread the word. My parents even got some:

"Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.": F. T. Marinetti

Dear Mr. and Mrs. O'Rrarci,

We suffer from the putrid stench strangulation of the aristocratic hegemony. Ours is a culture of underclass barricade rust death. The QEII futurepast atrocity spectacle rains down on our boredom like Chapterhouse's piss. It's time to fill the galleries with slurry. It's time to blow up the museums, rebuild them from their own rubble, then blow them up again. It's time for a new art stance. Our single New Art Riot is out next Monday on Damaged Goods.

Love,

The Manics

PS. Belated thanks for the Monopoly game you got us for Christmas. I (Nick!) like to play as the iron (natch), James likes to be the car, Richey uses a scab he picked off his arm and Sean plays as the hat, which he sometimes wears on his head!

Viv Stanshall — "In the Final Analysis"

"An Absence of Whelks" (Parts 1-4)

"English as tuppence, changing yet changeless as canal water, nestling in green nowhere, armoured and effete, bold flag-bearer, lotus-fed Miss Havishambling opsimath and eremite, feudal still, reactionary Rawlinson End..."

Leader of the Bonzo Dog Band, eccentric, and lifelong Viv Stanshall, Viv Stanshall was ... Viv Stanshall.

The Fall — "The Mixer" — from The Complete Peel Sessions 1978-2004

The Fall, The Fall, The Fall, The Fall, The Fall.

"He Pep!"

The Fall, The Fall, The Fall, The Fall, The Fall, The Fall, The Fall, The Fall.

The Fall.

John Cooper Clarke — "Readers' Wives"

I don't think Clarke sounded as good with a band behind him as he does on his own. But it's all relative, is it not?

Those of a certain tendency may listen to the following and come away singing "C-O-R-G-IIIIIIIII..."

Pulp — "I Love Life" — from The Peel Sessions

From Pulp's last Peel session proper, in 2001.

Datblygu — "Baban, Nerfau Mor Rhydd" (Baby, Nerves So Loose)

"Rhawt" (Rout)

I'm cheating a bit here. Neither of these are session tracks; I'm not that sold on most of that album, to be honest. But there's some cracking stuff on the Wyau, Pyst and Libertino albums, which are available on a 2-CD collection. The tracks above are from Wyau and Pyst respectively.

Half Man Half Biscuit — "Uffington Wassail" — from hmhb.co.uk

"A Country Practice" (live)

Yeah, yeah.

Also, some studio "cuts", as I'm totally sure Nigel Blackwell calls them:

The Delgados, "Pull the Wires from the Wall"

I've misplaced my Delgados Complete Peel Sessions, so you'll have to make-do with a YouTube upload. (Make do, says he!)

And on that note: till next year...

Up-tiddly-up-updates

2011-10-21T01:18:00.002+01:00

So, The Classical has reached its funding target. As we prepare to ~~blow the lot on fine cheeses and rare 7" singles we'll buy but never actually listen to, before working out another Kickstarter pitch~~ get the site started, we thank those who donated, spread the word, or psychically willed us to succeed.

At the moment, some fellow Classicists are over at Deadspin, discussing in the demotic American tongue the National Series: a based-ball competition of such repute that even I know of it. This year's Autumn Classical is a repeat of last year's epic struggle between the fearsome base-scoring machine of the Oklahoma Polar Bears and the fearsome base-preventing machine of the Tallahassee Wowz (formerly the Tallahassee Wowzer, formerly the Tallahassee Wowdoggzz, formerly the Kentucky Jolly Cowboys). The Polars stormed to victory in the Duke of Wellington Conference, defeating the venerable Virginia Based-Ballers in the Based Bowl by 89 bases to 2. Meanwhile, the Wowz claimed the Philadelphia Hot Jackets as their victims in the dramatic deciding rubber of the Dick's Sporting Goods Division of Glory. The aggregate score in the two-legged affair was tied at 5.2 bases each, and the extra third innings failed to separate the sides. The decision thus went to the panel of judges: fifteen-time All-Star Jimmy "Fingers" Jones, eighteen-time National Series loser Harry "Thumbs" Kopaszewski, and star of TV's Who's the Boss? Tony Danza. After their deliberations, they decreed that the Wowz's sliding had been considerably more awesome than that of the Hotsies, and awarded Tallahassee the pennant (the trophy having been stolen the previous day). The Wowz celebrated with the traditional mass brawl. Watch out in the Nationalies for Terence Lovely VI, their mighty short-step: he bowled one of the all-time great strikes against the Buffalo Assclowns in game 19 of the 2007 Snapple Division of Glory repechage round, a feat people won't shut the fuck up about to this day.

In other news...

Last year, we joined in with the Ravenscroft commemoration fest Keeping It Peel, and we're doing it again this year. It's next Tuesday, and we'll most likely be posting way too many Peel session tracks and various other stuff. If you want to take part, go here.

Webbie, the footballomusical expert behind Keeping It Peel, has made it a year-round concern with a series of Peel-related podcasts. I had the honour of selecting the choons for a Half Man Half Biscuit pod. Even better was the HMHB playlist chosen by Danny Last of European Football Weekends. And there's more where that came from. Go see!

Which leads us on to the happy news that, for the first time in the wretched history of this place, a new Half Man Half Biscuit album has been released!(!!!!!) It's called 90 Bisodol (Crimond), and don't even try guessing how good it is. God knows what the korfball enthusiasts will make of it, though. Above is the Marc Riley session version of one of its tracks, "Tommy Walsh's Eco House". Three verses, three deaths: can't say fairer than that.

Taylor Parkes, who you may know from When Saturday Comes and elsewhere, has written a great piece at The Quietus on Half Man Half Biscuit. Any article on HMHB which acknowledges that there's something more to them than slagging off Una Stubbs is already doing better than average, but Parkes nails the essence of the band better than anyone else has. Last year, also at The Quietus, he wrote a terrific piece on Mark E Smith as a narrative lyric writer. We want to write things like that when we grow up.

You'll be relieved to know (Nigel Blackwell must read the HMHB Lyrics Project) that the embarrassing error in the Riley version of "Left Lyrics in the Practice Room" by which reference is made to "Martin" Poom has been corrected on the album. Phew!

SEGUE
Speaking of which, Ireland play Estonia in next month's Euro 2012 play-offs. Hurrah for us! But our qualifying campaign has left the royal us feeling a smidge uneasy. Indulge us for a few moments as we tell you why over at The Run of Play.

I have also cleared the way for my becoming a grumpy old man by waxing nostalgic for the days of mass three o'clock kick-offs in English football over at TheScore's Footy Blog, which is now under the stewardship of old friend and, if I recall correctly, third ever SIATVS reader, Richard Whittall.

All that, plus Elliott's post hereabouts this week, is enough to be getting on with, you greedy sods.

The Manchester City Dilemma - What Happens When the Novelty of Hating the New Rich Rubs Off?

2011-10-17T20:49:00.000+01:00

Please welcome once more Elliott from Futfanatico. You only hate him because you're jealous.

Part of you has to love the verve of our billionaire plutocrat overlords. Otherwise, your actions would make very little sense according to conventional logic. Weekly, you pump gas into your fine horseless carriage and thereby donate to City's next blockbuster signing, right? Gas prices go up, but you sleep easy knowing that Sergio Agüero's paycheck won't bounce this week. Granted, these funds do eventually trickle down to important benevolent causes, like the Adebayor Charity for the Advancement of Live Music and the Roque Santa Cruz Designer Low-Cut Gray Shirt Foundation. None of this would be possible without your regular petroleum patronage. Right? RIGHT?

Well, I am not you. I detested Chelsea when Abramovich arrived with his wheelbarrow of shady roubles. However, Chelsea is more a billionaire's plaything, an overpriced toy with defective penalty-kick-taking appendages. I don't detest City, though: I hate them. I hate the nascent Sheik empire at Eastlands, but I hate them for the right reasons. You, however, hate them for the wrong reasons. And that is why my hate will burn eternal, while surrounding flames eventually extinguish.

Your basic and fleeting reasons for hating them? Jealousy. Envy. These are the most common reasons to detest City. Did you realize you were such a boring conformist? Me neither. These reasons, sadly, are also the worst. Allow me to regurgitate some oft-vomited sports writing ink. Did City just sign one of your key players? Shocker! Anger! Do you wish your team had a transfer kitty half the size of City? Envy alert! Everybody, including you, secretly (or openly) wants the new Financial Fair Play rules to put an end to "Financial Doping". I just don't want to hear any more of your middle-class moping. The plutocrat billionaires with lobbyists and CEO chums will find an end-around, so don't hold your breath. Instead, take a step back and genuflect. Look at both thyself and thy plutocrat.

Why is the Sheik pumping so much cash into City? Is it to win titles? Is it to find a high revenue & low profit venture to wash some sticky cash? These are ancillary motives. The real reason the Sheik is cashing in his chips on the Blues is you. Yes, you read that correctly. You. Your fine self. And you are playing right into his diabolical hands.

I note at this point that OPEC is so 1970s. Basically, the Russian Arctic is the new oil-rich desert. Ergo, those OPEC folks have lost their monopoly. They don't even have the clout anymore to control prices and squeeze out small-time American businesses. Pathetic. Yet, at the same time as this decrescendo, businesses from the Gulf bought a FIFA World Cup, Málaga, Manchester City, and the front of Barcelona's jersey. Coincidence? Casualidad? Nein.

In sum, the Sheik wants your love. The Gulf is diversifying and attempting some serious PR to try and steer away from an unsustainable business model. And you? You? You were probably too busy singing offensive songs about Emmanuel Adebayor to notice. Not only can you not see the woods for the trees: you see the leaf and scream to high heaven. Yet your jealous hatred sends mixed signals. Hatred demands attention. Hatred requires an emotional connection that the Sheik mistakenly interprets as love. You are gasoline to his flame. The Sheik is a screaming teenager with a new tattoo, and you salivate at the expensive butterfly tramp stamp. Disdain for the new rich is also a passing emotion. Eventually, the new rich lose the "new" tag. And then what?

My hatred burns an eternal, focused blue because I hate the Sheik for a permanent character flaw. I hate the Sheik because he seeks your love. He is needy. He is clingy. He paid a lot of money for Adebayor just because he wanted you to look at him paying a lot of money to buy Adebayor. And you looked. And you raged, your mouth agape. The more the Sheik seeks your petty eyeballs, the more I hate him. And when he doesn't unabashedly seek them, I construct a mental image of him secretly plotting his next grand "look at me right now" move. You must get over your own pettiness. Get over the transfers, the designer watches. Learn to hate in the purest form, or risk finding yourself watching City on Saturday mornings and applauding that dashing duo of Agüero and Silva. And then crying uncontrollably in a locked bathroom.

So the next time a petro-based Gulf business buys the club down the street, don't complain about new signings. Simply shake your head in disgust and mutter "Pathetic." If you do anything else, you play into their plans...

Elliott blogs about soccer at Futfanatico.com. His soccer eBook, An Illustrated Guide to Soccer & Spanish, is available for only $5.99 on the Amazon Kindle. Check out a free preview here.

!

2011-10-17T20:37:00.000+01:00

sunderrvpshoty57 by arsenalist
Via 101 Great Goals.

Every scratch, every click, every heartbeat

2011-09-30T16:26:00.000+01:00

To choose Tevez over Berbatov - to prefer the insistently effective to the evidently beautiful - is to embrace the kind of mindset that fills lakes with concrete, grinds trees into mulch, and crushes rare birds under the tracks of bulldozers. It is a prioritisation of the ends over the means, an acknowledgement that it is better to win than to smile.

Andi Thomas, gaffer at the excellent Twisted Blood, has a piece at SB Nation on the idleness of Dimitar Berbatov — the enforced idleness, that is, as Alex Ferguson prefers to pick a combination of Wayne Rooney, Javier Hernández and Danny Welbeck in his stead. Thomas' love for Berbatov is infectious, if you're not already infected; you can practically feel his beating heart refusing to be still. But I wonder about some of the terms in which he expresses this. Specifically, I question the opposition he posits between the respective styles of Berbatov and Carlos Tévez.

Of course, perhaps I'm just touchy on this matter, being one who has frequently thrilled at Tévez's play. "Thrill" and variations thereon are probably overused — they certainly are by me — but it seems perfectly apt here. Thomas is onto something when he identifies the widespread approval of Tévez (before recent antics) with the anglocentric* tendency to value activity for its own sake. It is more important to make a show of being busy than it is to actually do something; the key coaching mantra is "Look lively!" It may be that Tévez's in-the-style-of-Taz play chimes most resoundingly with this mindset, but that does not invalidate it. Tevez's play has nothing to do with looking lively: he just is lively, and this liveliness has underpinned all the success he's had.

* (I use "anglocentric" here because what goes for English football goes too for its broader sphere of influence, for good and ill.)

Or, to change the focus, he's effective. So is Berbatov: both players scored twenty league goals last year, topping the scoring chart. It's impossible to imagine that Berbatov is any less obsessed with ends than is Tévez. Like any game, football is a puzzle its participants try to solve, and in learning to do so arrive at their own idiosyncratic means of doing so. It is always shaped by the aim of the game. This isn't a mark of a brutalising calcio moderno: this is sport. It's not a corruption, recent or otherwise. Beauty and efficacy may sometimes clash, but they are far from mortal enemies. Much of the beauty of football happens by the by; some even has ineffectiveness at its core. But it is impossible to fully separate the beauty from the goal, so to speak, whether we talk about Berbatov, Tévez or anyone else. The pursuit of that goal can leave a trail of magic, and so can its fulfillment. In fact, the difficulty of the fulfillment lends it a beauty of its own. "Simple, brute efficacy"? Well, "brute" is a question of taste; "simple" is wrong.

Thomas writes:

In a world as results-obsessed as modern football, the appreciation of the beautiful is one of the few avenues left for a fan to express a simple and innocent humanity.

But there is as much humanity in the play of Carlos Tévez — in a slashing run into the box, in an unstoppable finish, even (yes) in his industry — as in any of the more subtle moves pulled by Berbatov. Tévez may appeal mostly to those possessed by the mania for running around like an eegit, but for one thing, his appeal is broader than that; and for another, he represents the obverse of that mania. It is unfair to suggest that because this mindset can have negative consequences, it can't have positive, even beautiful, ones; it is unfair to thus write off an entire swath of sincerely felt experience as a willing extension of "the usual subjugation of [the fan's self] to the grind". It's too narrow a view of beauty to be getting on with, to pit these styles as irreconcilable opposites. It goes against the experiences of many: I for one would feel impoverished were I forced to make a choice. Thankfully, I don't have to. To say otherwise is to elevate a matter of taste to a level of absolutism it can't maintain.

As I say, I wouldn't like to make a choice between Berbatov and Tévez; nor do I like having the choice taken out of my hands. Tévez's absence from the football field for the foreseeable is in large part self-inflicted, and any sadness in the face of it is thus tempered, or at least complicated. Berbatov's current absence is down to the whim of his coach, setting our desires against "the unbeatable slow machine that brings you what you'll get", and so making it all the more keenly felt. It's been fun watching Manchester United make opposing defences take on the integrity of wet kitchen towel (except for you know when), but there's something missing. Going by Thomas' piece, he (if he'll forgive the comparison) feels about Berbatov like I feel about Robin van Persie. I could watch van Persie forever, even if all he did was fail to bring the ball onto his left foot. Today's reports that Manchester City are interested in him are speculative, but even the thought of him leaving Arsenal makes the blood chill, as do the frequent injuries that beset him. Just as I hope you don't have to be a Gooner to appreciate this, I know you don't have to be a United fan like Thomas to feel the pain his Berbalove is bringing him. Berbatov reminds me of Gavin Henson, another for whom the word "languid" has been used as a backhanded compliment. Thomas again:

Johan Cruyff once pointed out that any player who was sprinting had probably set off too late.

Henson and Berbatov look lazy because they're already in the right place, and can afford to take their time over what they do. And they do it well (or in Henson's case, perhaps, he did it well). They're not lazy — they're just punctual.

On the b of hideous bitch goddess

2011-09-04T17:22:00.000+01:00

The World Athletics Championships appeared, I admit, to sidle somewhat diffidently into the view of this consumer-citizen. They were on at the wrong time of day, South Korea unaccountably having failed to subscribe to GMT. (Aren't "eurocentric" and "egocentric" awfully similar?) They were also on the wrong station, with Channel 4 acquainting itself with the sport for the first time since Geoff Capes sat in Dictionary Corner in 1986. Whatever one might say about the BBC and its coverage of sport, it still — just about — has its old-time establishment gravitas. Their competitors' tricks and flashes say, "This is entertainment! We'll be back after the break!" The BBC's very BBCness, if nothing else, says, "Dear boy, it's so much more than that..."

And of the stars of the men's 100 metres, two — Tyson Gay and Asafa Powell — were absent through injury. But there was still Usain Bolt. There would always be Usain Bolt. The man who has made the bitter and, indeed, the twisted fall to their knees in praise and gratitude had been in bad form this year. But he walked into the final in Daegu, thus reaffirming the pole-star constancy of the truly gifted in their prime. Or at least it seemed that way until he caused millions of hearts to suspend operations for a horrible moment, then to sink to the gut.

(The pole star isn't constant, either.)

Bolt ran aground on the new(ish) false start rule: an offspring of the previous rule, itself the issue of that most enlightened of creatures: the TV exec. Each athlete used to be allowed one false start. From 2003, the second false start of the race, regardless of the offender, would result in the latter's disqualification — all the better to get the bloody thing over with so we can cut to the ad for the isotonic sports drink that will make your diabetic coma last 33% longer. It's not the first time television has shaped the very rules of a sport; what's remarkable is how rarely it actually makes for a better spectacle for its viewers. Especially for the shortest sprints — the ones whose starts have the finest margins — this was a bit much. In 2009, to ward off the possibility of a runner using up the first false start or getting twitchy accidentally on purpose on subsequent starts to psyche out his adversaries, the IAAF made it a one-strike-and-you're-out deal. Several American states looked on enviously, but the governing body's apparent stance on this issue — if it ain't broke, break it, and keep breaking it — was straight out of Father Ted, and it meant that the best thing to happen to athletics in years could do nothing but beat a wall in frustration.

But there's more to it than that. For one thing, even though the rule may be savage, it is fair, in the sense that everyone knows the rule, and it's the same for everyone. Rules can be big, grey and deeply unsexy, but — let's be obvious about this — to adhere to them is a skill. It doesn't take a golfer to get that. For another thing, my opinion of the rule is just an opinion. Whatever its motivation, it is arguable. Such a severe rule even has a certain dramatic, not to say sadistic, attraction; there is some appeal to subjecting the protagonists to a bit of unreasonable difficulty. If Heracles' labours had included Cleaning the Augean Gutters and Taking the Lovely Nemean Golden Labrador for a Walk, the story would have lost something.

And there's the thing: Bolt's failure to complete the Waiting for the Gun was a great story. It wasn't a sub-9.6 run, but it was still electrifying, albeit at a lower voltage. I'll take low-voltage electrification, even when it feels more like electrocution. This is where things get messy — and by messy, I mean fun. And by fun, I mean quoting-Philip-Larkin fun. Here is a passage whose sentiment I shall proceed to stand on its head until it bursts a blood vessel:

Life is an immobile, locked,
Three-handed struggle between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings you what you'll get.

(From "The Life with a Hole in it", googlers.)

Anyone who has followed a sport (or sport generally) for an appreciable length of time develops a taste for how they would like the sport to be practised. The participants will have their own ideas, which may differ wildly from yours. And alongside how you want it to be and how they want it to be is what is: an unbeatable, slow-slow-quick, furiously productive and endlessly absurd theatre, the biggest absurdity of all being our very engagement with it. Naturally enough, we give paramountcy to the first party in this struggle, and lament when the other two fail to come up to its standards. There is always the struggle, though. It's like the harmonics of a plucked string: all three elements play off each other and combine to make the single note. The feeling of awe at Boltesque majesty is just on the other end of the wormhole from the feeling of horror at Boltesque fatal incompetence. And it all comes from that initial engagement, with allowing yourself to be at the sport's mercy. Sometimes it will make you fly; other times it will spear-tackle you straight into a mountain of shite. But the view, man, the view. I don't mean to say that I enjoyed the false start, as such. Or perhaps I do. I'm not entirely sure. I somethinged it, anyway: not somethinged as in not nothinged, but as something ineffable, something I can't quite grasp, nor am sure I want to. It comes down to this: I could have been doing anything else early last Sunday afternoon: sleeping, say, or reading one of AA Gill's delightful restaurant reviews. Instead, I watched something that I hated yet, in a way, loved at the same time. I'm glad I bore witness to the horror show, to have been pulled hither and yon by this many-tentacled monster. When I stop to think of it, I'm always glad to be.

Now, to finally watch that Man Utd-Arsenal game. No spoilers, please.

Fifty sea cadets are sailing to a place where no-one sails to

2011-08-17T09:46:00.003+01:00

So here's the thing. There's this bunch of writers who have been variously entangled with publications and websites of much esteem, busying themselves delving into sport and other aspects of culture. They want to start a new website. They want to call it The Classical. They want it to be full of smart people writing intelligent stuff on the whole wonderful, messy, insane, glorious monstrosity that likes to call itself sport, and they want it to be somewhere like-minded souls can gather. They want to have the final say as to what goes into it, and they want it to be something to cherish.

And, much like the custom whereby the Barbarians select an uncapped player in their starting XV, I'm involved.

Here's another thing. To do this properly requires money. The Google SEO bribes alone are, well, you don't want to know. So we've set up a Kickstarter project in order to fund our budget for the first year. In other words, we're looking for your help. Through Kickstarter, you can pledge an amount of money of your choice to help pay for our special satellite death ray with which we will hold the world hostage until our demands are met. Whatever we have left over, we will feed into our new operation. That is, of course, as long as we meet our target amount. A couple of days in and we've already had a gratifyingly enthusiastic response. We like to think that shows we're onto something, but we have a long way to go, and we want to make this really, really good, and we need your contribution to do so.

Here's yet another thing. No donation goes unrewarded. And we're not just talking about spiritual rewards, either — you will also get a gift or gifts as a material token of your fabulousness. Think of it as like lifting the World Cup, except better and more realistic. Whatever you give, you get stuff in return, such as a t-shirt with our logo on it (seriously, dig that logo), a commissioned essay, a FreeDarko print from said collective's resident art genius Jacob Weinstein, or even some of our treasured personal belongings. That's right: we are prepared to give you almost literal pieces of ourselves. We were going to offer corneas — our real, honest-to-God corneas — but there were some legal complications.

And as a special, unlisted, Easter egg reward, if you give $20,000, you will receive, signed by every member of the Classical crew, an advance copy of my hotly-tipped and highly-anticipated Nicklas Bendtner biography, I Just Wasn't Made For These Times!* Basically the more you donate, the more you get.

You can face our book, tw our itter, and, if you'd be so lovely, drop by our Kickstarter page and consider lobbing a few shekels our way. You'll be helping to create something cool, and ~~the others won't beat me~~ you'll get more writing from me, which I'm guessing at least several of you might consider a development of a tolerable nature. Most importantly, The Classical** will love you unconditionally. Thank you kindly, and don't make me point violently at a table.

* And this is the special, unlisted, Easter egg footnote informing you, for legal reasons, that this reward isn't real. You wish.

** Why, yes we are!

New season's resolution

2011-08-13T03:40:00.002+01:00

Be more optimistic.

"What it is, you see, you can love someone and hate them at the same time, and I felt like I was on a tightrope, kind of like a precipice...

"...though, as I say, I don't really want to go into that too much..."

― "Used To Be In Evil Gazebo", Half Man Half Biscuit

Happy new season, autumn/springites.

Rehab, Interventions, Hangovers, Pools of Vomit - Welcome to the Imminent Title-Winning Downer of a Summer at Real Madrid

2011-05-30T12:44:00.003+01:00

Please welcome Elliott de Futfanatico, who, as in a previous time of turmoil, is our guide to the wonderful and frightening world of Real Madrid.

Success? Blah. Only the successful really care about success. The rest of us get by on whip-its, whiskey, and making the front page of Marca for multi-billion dollar transfers. Sadly, I suspect my summer will be devoid of any of those things. Why? Well, we have entered the hangover stage of the Real Madrid cycle. Allow me to explain.

Everybody remembers the glorious Galacticos phase of Madrid - Zidane, Ronaldo, Raúl, Figo, Beckham, Santiago Solari, etc. Real Madrid spent millions, signed big name players, and with a wave of his wand Del Bosque coached this horribly balanced smorgasbord of egos to titles. Sadly, the early 2000s Madrid was the last of its kind - since then, a rhythm has emerged. First, we spend lots of money on players. Then, a respectable coach induces the board to purchase "value players." For example, the Capello/Schuster era saw us buy a lot of good Dutch players - Ruud was value because of the Sir Alex divorce, Sneijder had not yet ascended to his current play-maker pedestal, and Robben was a gamble given his injury history. And with these "value players", Madrid won some titles.

But there was just one problem - Booooooorrrrrring. Does a celebrity brag to E! reporters about a discounted dress she purchased at a thrift store? Nein. It's like shooting a Lady Gaga music video on a cellphone camera. Sacrilege! But oftentimes, marketing, press coverage, and good business practices diverge. Mourinho has convinced Madrid to purchase affordable Turkish-Germans. And the results are not promising. From a non-playing-football-games perspective.

Exhibit A. Despite having played for Real Madrid for an entire year, Mesut Özil has yet to release his own line of underwear. In fact, he has yet to pose semi-nude for any respectable fashion magazine. Madrid fans are pissed as hell and rightly ask: is Altintop really the answer? Or is this just another bargain bin German-Turk that keeps his boxers in his shorts, his shirt on his chest, and can't even land a half-decent Pepsi commercial?

What has tossed Real Madrid into this atrocious, never-ending cycle of fiesta-or-functionality? We all know the sinister culprit: FC Barcelona.

For decades, a simple deal endured between the Catalonians and Real: they could be the indie rocker "més que un club" and win the Copa del Rey, while European glory belonged to mega-star Madrid. Sadly, while titles have accumulated at Barça, the moral superiority complex has withered before the forces of capital and human frailty. Let me count the ways. Barcelona's current payroll exceeds Madrid's. They needed a short-term loan to make payroll last year. After the recent election, their new President threatened to file suit over hidden debts. And, of course, they sold the front of their shirt to Qatar.

Many Madrid fans delight in these pleasures. They poke fun on Twitter and in Tumblrs. But not me. When Real played Barcelona, it used to be a metaphor for us being really rich and successful and them being less rich but still pretty successful. But now we belong to the same country club. And the world is poorer for it.

Thus, unbuckle your seat belt, adjust your recliner, and get some heavy-hitting prescription NoDoz. Madrid has retained Mourinho and will spend this summer buying value players to mount a serious La Liga run. And I can't think of a poorer way to spend my summer.

Elliott blogs about soccer at Futfanatico.com

The story of the "Wenger era" at Arsenal Football Club

2011-05-18T23:57:00.005+01:00

I hope to be made to look rather foolish by this time next year for posting this.

ALSO: something new from me at t' Run of Play on old school ref bashing, in which, in truth, I do no heavy lifting, apart from lifting a bunch of quotes from a book. They're good quotes, though.

No more strawberry jam for the guild

2011-04-12T01:27:00.004+01:00

I once dreamt that I had married FreeDarko and changed my name to FredDarko. Ah well.

It seems inappropriate to talk about FD's demise: it's more like a change of state as its members disperse and do their thing elsewhere. It's the nicest band break-up imaginable. Still and all, even if it's more a symbolic end than any other kind, it's a sad moment. One line of Shoefly's from that last post more or less illustrates why FD mattered to me: "Sports should be about people, I think". More than anything, FD to me represented empathy: it was driven by a genuine desire to understand those who make it all happen. Maybe it seems simplistic, but I don't think it is. There is, necessarily, a partition in sport between us and them, the spectator and the athlete. Lord alone knows athletes often make it hard on us. But that difficulty can be cosy. Perhaps the apparent remoteness of sports stars makes the effort seem futile, but it barely seems worth following sport at all if we allow our understanding of the humanity of the damned thing to become an abstract murkiness. Alas, in sport as in much else, that's what prevails. Between the blog and the two magnificent books, FreeDarko was a beacon.

I discovered FreeDarko around the time I found The Run of Play: quite the double whammy. RoP took something I already knew well and presented it in a radically different form, like Picasso did when he put the right eyeball where the left cheek should be. FreeDarko took a sport that is far from a first language for me and simultaneously made it familiar and wondrously new. Most of all, the pair of them helped loosen my imagination when it came to sport, and they disrupted my complacency. Like all good things in life should do, they left me confused and curious.

I hope some of that spirit has found its way onto this mess of scrawlings. At the very least, SIATVS would have been a different place without my deceiving myself into thinking that it has. If, bless you, you have enjoyed anything hereabouts, you have witnessed the result of a chemical reaction in which FreeDarko was a catalyst. "Sports should be about people". Aye, that'll do. I raise a glass.

Sporting 1337

2011-04-05T01:56:00.005+01:00

The fact is hurling is elitist. There should be no shame in that. It’s an art-form, something that can only be performed by a minority because it takes years upon years of mastering. That’s why it’s such a treasure.

It’s a fanciful thought to believe every boy and girl in the country is going to puck a ball. It should be that way but hurling can’t and will never be that game simply because it’s so difficult to play. Not enough people have the patience to pass on or absorb the skills.

— John Fogarty, Irish Examiner Sports Desk Blog

There's a good point well made in Fogarty's piece: there may be only two or three favourites for the All-Ireland Championship, but it's a stretch to relate it to the undeniable precipice between the McCarthy Cup-level teams and the rest, either as cause or effect. If Offaly or Waterford, for instance, have a poor season, it'll have bugger all to do with the state of the game in Sligo. And anyway, what's fundamentally changed lately? As Fogarty puts it, "To say the hurling landscape is more unequal than ever before would be wrong. It’s just nobody has attempted to leap the bar set by Kilkenny and Tipperary combined with the pair not letting anyone get near taking that jump". But what about that precipice, the one even Clare are above? And what merit is there in the traditional argument outlined in the quote above?

Is hurling any more difficult to play than soccer? Soccer is a game whose genius is in its main constraint: the prohibition of the use of the hands and arms. For all that we may harp on about soccer's simplicity, we usually forget about how counter-intuitive this is. We are manual creatures; our natural instinct is to manipulate our environment with our hands. Civilisation was built with opposable thumbs. But by denying ourselves the chance to do this when we play soccer, we force ourselves to change the way we think about how we use our bodies and how our movements fit into our surroundings. We don't often think of it this way. It just seems normal to us (those of us who grew up with the game, that is) because it is an almost standard part of many children's development: learn to crawl, learn to stand, learn to walk, learn to kick a football. And the reason this is so is because it is embedded into the culture by the weight of generations, just like hurling is in Kilkenny, for example. There are players who can do things with their feet no human should be capable of, things that are beyond the grasp even of 99.99% of footballers. But we don't extrapolate from this that participation in football is open only to the few. Even the basic act of kicking a football properly is something of a marvel; it comes naturally to no-one. Watch someone kick a ball who is not used to it, and then watch someone who can. The difference between them is hour upon hour upon hour of practice. Yet the game's global reach is unmatched.

Or take rugby. Its defining restrictions are the offside rule — you must keep behind the ball — and a prohibition on throwing the ball forward. This makes the apparently simple aim of getting the ball down to the other end wonderfully difficult; it demands a team discipline that must be acquired by each individual player. Even Jonah Lomu had to learn it. Or take cricket. A true master of spin bowling is rare, but no-one suggests that the discipline — not just really good spin bowling, but the very discipline itself — should be the preserve of some priest caste whose gods are Warney and Murali.

Yet it persists, this notion of hurling as an art so uniquely, impossibly fine as to be beyond someone from Longford or Leitrim. Perhaps it looks this way because it is usually paired as a sport with Gaelic football (tying your shoelaces is intricate compared to Gaelic football). It's a cute idea, if you dig it. But it's way off. Hurling's elite is defined geographically. On a national level, hurling is a relatively minor pursuit. Locally, in what we might call hurling counties, it isn't. Fogarty says that "hurling is the modern equivalent of the Roman Games: adored by the masses but performed by few". But in the aforementioned Kilkenny, it has the same status as soccer does in Brazil. In Tipperary, Galway, Cork, Wexford, et al, it's a genuine grassroots activity. The reason these counties dominate is because they have a tradition of playing, coaching, watching and encouraging the game, just as is the case with any given sport in its stronghold. We might say "hurling is in the blood/water/air/soil down there", but this is a figurative way of expressing the depth of this culture, or of expressing pride in it. It is not a literal description. People in these places are not somehow gifted with the hurling gene.

The reason hurling isn't big outside the island's south-western half is because nobody really cares about it; the reason nobody really cares about it is because there is no tradition of caring about it. Cultures can change, and there is no inherent reason why the currently lopsided hurling landscape should remain locked in such a form. It's just that whatever efforts have been made to remedy the imbalance (if "remedy" is the word) have not been strong enough to make a decent difference. I only got into hurling at all because I happened to have a friend whose father happened to have played minor for Wexford back in the day. Otherwise, hurling would have been as much a blind spot to me as to most others where I come from. For most Irish people, hurling is as alien as the Irish language. More so, in fact: after all, nobody is compulsorily sent to hurling training for thirteen years. Most people at least know what the Irish for "litter" and "toilet" are, but give a hurley to someone from outside the heartland, and even if they know which end to hold, they'll probably grip it like they would a golf club; hand them a sliotar and watch them dig the tennis racket out from under the stairs.

Outside hurling country, the game serves a similar function to Irish. For some, it is a source of passion, pleasure and even pride. For most, it is an irrelevance, its absence barely felt. For others still, it is a chance to exclaim that it is ah! The greatest sport in the world!, before switching back over to see whether the safety car has pulled in at Hockenheim yet.

(For Eamon Dunphy, it's something to plunder for his list of Irish sporting bosses who are better than whoever the national soccer team manager happens to be at the time.)

It may be that everyone wants to maintain the status quo: that the current elite want to remain as much while occasionally feeling guilty that Dublin aren't doing better; that the rest of the country wants to continue being less than hurltastic. If so, fine. But let's not argue the case with such inbred thinking. Because it's a short step from this to believing that uilleann pipes are tolerable, and that's not a world I want my children to live in.

The nerds will rise again

2011-03-15T22:39:00.004Z

There's a lot of it about, you know. As you've surely noticed, the beauty and fun are being sucked out of football by the New Seriousness — no, not a Starsailor reunion, but the inappropriately close watching of games, as propagated by those who believe spodliness to be next to godliness. The official SIATVS line on this, in concert with others, is to decry it with all our not inconsiderable might, as we've made abundantly, devastatingly clear. Now, it's the turn of Fisted Away's Nick Dunmore to have his say, by way of a certain band of Mancunians. Singalonganicknmark!

The grotesque pedants stalk the land
And deep down inside you know everybody wants to like Big Paper
Hands send tweets to famous apes
Male slags, male slates, pass completion rates
Water carrier now grim thoughts
The whole country is post-Graeme
Echoes of the past

All hail the new seriousness!
Insidious maelstrom, cook one

And all hard-core fiends
Will die by me
And all decadent sins
Will reap discipline

New seriousness!

This is the grim referee
The snap at the end of the straw
With a high 6+5 quota
Your star karma, Jim

New seriousness!
New seriousness!

The conventional is now experimental
The experimental is now conventional

It's a dinosaur tackle
A pteradactyl debacle
In N1 a drunk is sick on Rob Smyth's star on York Place
Ha-ha ha-ha
Vintage strips take off in Britain's black spots
The Guardianistas run for cabs
This I have seen

New seriousness!

In Britain the scream of real-ale pumps in a gastropub
Your stomach swells up before you get drunk
The bars are full of male slags
At 10:35 they play "National Shite Day" once

Why don't you ask your local team's winger how many corners he took today?
What do you mean "What's it mean? What's it mean?"?
"What's it mean? What's it mean?"

New seriousness
New seriousness

Hail the new puritan
Out of hovel, cum-coven, cum-oven

And all hard-core fiends
Will die by me
And all decadent sins
Will reap discipline

New seriousness
New seriousness

New seriousness
New seriousness
New seriousness
New seriousness
New ser...ious...ness

New seriousness

I curse the self-copulation
Of your lousy fanzine collection
New seriousness says "Coffee table WSCs never breathe"

New seriousness
New seriousness
New seriousness
New seriousness
New seriousness says...

New seriousness
Teymourian!
New seriousness
New seriousness
New seriousness

2011-02-04T01:42:00.002Z

This Sunday is the 53rd anniversary of the Munich air crash. In this BBC Northern Ireland programme from 2008, Manchester United's then goalkeeper Harry Gregg, who saved the lives of several that day, returns to Belgrade and to the site of the crash for the first time. See also parts two, three, four, five and six.

Pro-Tottenham propganda embedded in Mainz's crest

2011-01-23T16:37:00.003Z

Makes you sick, doesn't it?

Elis & Mané

2011-01-20T22:57:00.004Z

Two great Brazilians who died young, almost exactly a year apart: Elis Regina (d. 19/1/1982):

[and because every MPB singer seemingly had to do a football number ... (this one was written by Gilberto Gil):]

*
and Garrincha (d. 20/1/1983):

After Garrincha was released from hospital once more at the start of November [1982], the football magazine Placar arranged what was to be his final encounter with Pelé. The meeting took place at the luxurious Copacabana home of Pelé's friend Alfredo Saad and brought together the two living legends of Brazilian football, one of them healthy, prosperous and glowing, the other bloated, poor and lacklustre. A whole sea had passed under the bridge since that unforgettable Brazil-USSR match in Gothenburg 24 years earlier.

The two chatted about football and had their photo taken together (Pelé playing the guitar, Garrincha pretending to play the cavaquinho), but one of the most memorable aspects of the reunion was the way in which Garrincha cheekily insisted on teasing Pelé by calling him 'King'. 'Hey, King,' he said at one point, 'don't you have a few coins to spare? You've got loads of greenbacks.' He wasn't being serious, and Pelé knew it.

To the surprise of many the two of them got along famously. Though they had never been friends off the park — they were too different — those who had thought that Garrincha might be bitter about Pelé's success were wrong. He was not, and Pelé did not attempt to patronise him, even though it would have been natural to.

When the meeting ended, they hugged affectionately and went their own ways — Pelé, off down the yellow brick road, and Garrincha straight towards the last bottle.

— from Garrincha: The Triumph and Tragedy of Brazil's Forgotten Footballing Hero (orig. Estrela solitária: Um brasileiro chamado Garrincha) by Ruy Castro; translation by Andrew Downie.

Usain Bolt: Gah hoor

2011-01-12T16:08:00.003Z

Last year, he was pretending to be a Kerryman for a day. This year, Usain Bolt is cavorting in a Tipperary jersey.

A random Corkonian last night said: "Just because we're paranoid ..."

fuckyeahheybulldogpontadelancaafricanoandprologuetohistory.tumblr.com was already taken...

2011-01-06T21:07:00.004Z

...so have some of this instead. The January Norman Einstein's is now live, and, as the king almost said in the delivery room, what a tremendous issue it is. Somehow, there's even room for a piece what I wrote — or, I should say, dictated. Using the vast, vast, vast, huge, vast contact book the SIATVS team has amassed over the years, we got a real live footballer* to tell us about the music that runs through his head when he faces the mighty Barcelona. You can even listen along as you read and...

...Why, yes, I have got Datblygu's Wyau/Pyst/Libertino collection with — with lyrics and translations — since that time I mentioned it! Well spotted! Very good it is too, I might add. There's even a song, 23, which manages to squeeze in this chorus:

"O'n i'n 23 dydd Llun
Ac rwy'n teimlo ac yn edrych fel Jock Stein"

(I was 23 on Monday
And I feel and look like Jock Stein)

But yeah, read Einstein's; it's great.

I won't even mind if you don't read my piece.*

Japanese puking kittens by Ray Larabie on Flickr.

* I might be making this up.

Appendix: Appendicitis

2011-01-01T16:09:00.002Z

An appendix to parts one and two.

"But Fredo", you splutter with a mixture of disbelief, indignation and possibly the onset of a nasty virus of some sort (you really should get that checked out), "you mention in part one the various druggy shenanigans that have been a part of Tour lore over the years, and then go on to describe in gratuitously loving detail the contest between Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck in the 2010 edition, in particular stages 14 and 17. Yet I’ve read through the whole thing (even the second part which … well, the less said and all that) and you neglect to bring up Contador’s positive dope test, which not only occurred during the Tour (though it was only made public afterwards), but occurred in between the two stages you blah on about. What gives? And where can I get a refund on my subscription?”

Hilarious, bud. But in response to your first question: doping isn’t what the post was about, but you make a good point. I wish I could say that it’s a story for another day, but it’s a story for every day, of course, and not just in cycling. My ambivalence on doping was clear enough, I hope (although “clear” is not really the apt word, is it?). I went into this ambivalence in greater detail way back in 2009; it’s there in a different form in this post written a few months later. My view on the matter has, if anything, become slightly more complicated since. By Contador’s positive, I feel let down, but not surprised; I feel disappointed, but in the full knowledge that I had full knowledge of what I was getting into. And still, after everything (it should be mentioned that the Contador case is still sub judice), my memory of the summer’s events remains a happy one. But how many more such episodes will it take to convince me (me, me) to call it quits?

Here’s something Matt Rendell wrote towards the end of his Tour history Blazing Saddles:

... much of the problem (perhaps most of it) lies with us, the sporting public. We enjoy our sport because dynamic movement induces a physiological and emotional response in us: it thrills us. If the dynamism is supercharged by effective doping products, the chemistry of emotional contagion produces even greater euphoria. The athlete is doped, we are doped at one remove — and it feels fantastic! Like any other drug-induced thrill, we don’t want to kick it — we want another fix ...

In this sense, doping is great news for the viewing public: the movement is more vigorous and dynamic, there are fewer dead moments when athletes are recovering. And what’s good for the spectacle is presumably good for viewing figures. which means sponsorship, funding and the whole sporting machine working like a dream.

Rendell concludes with something that is applicable to all sport:

The Tour may be a story that can’t be told, but it’s a great story and a deeply human one. So it will remain, as long as it exists.

Two: Two hundred and twenty-seven Lears

2010-12-31T17:31:00.008Z

Part two of two (plus appendix!). Part one here. Appendix here.

There is the tension and there is, in theory, the release. We are given to seeing the tension purely in terms of its release: a necessary prologue, a set-up for the punchline. The release is the reason we are gathered here today; you work at a mathematical problem in order to find a solution, after all. The release – or its product, at any rate – is what will live on in the Ozymandian eternity of our collective and individual memories, in the myth we feel compelled to create from what we experience.

And yet. The Tourmalet climb did indeed move the story of the maillot jaune on to a resolution: Contador achieved precisely what he needed to, thus practically securing the overall win. But from the perspective of the viewer (this viewer, at least – ymmv, dear reader), it was not from this that the full glory of the contest came. There was no great release: just a slow, slow unwinding, which amounted to a different kind of tension. It was like when we look at some great immensity – the night sky, say. We don’t just unthinkingly regard it: we undergo a shift in scale. Our own personal universes of which we are the centre usually seem so vast as to fill all available space, like expanding foam in a speed camera. But we look up, and we find that our co-ordinates are useless. And with the shift in scale comes a shift in perspective. We no longer look out from ourselves; in fact, our selves shrink in relevance. We turn our focus back on ourselves and then zoom out, and see that we are no longer the little emperors of our perception, but just things, clicks of background radiation. Like any transition between states, this has the potential to disturb. But why can’t we look away?

Watching sport is at least a little bit like this at any time; the Tourmalet was just an extreme example. It’s moments like that where the essential passivity of watching sport is most apparent. We surrender, temporarily giving ourselves over to a greater force, willingly rendering ourselves minuscule and helpless. We allow ourselves to be strapped in and transported to the crest of the track, and we experience, in the words of the poet A. E. Stallings, ”the vertigo of possibility”, as the anticipation of a lurching stomach or an involuntary freezing.

Maybe this is a somewhat melancholic thought, like the dying echo of the fat bastard singing “you fat bastard” at the professional athlete. It’s not just that we do all this: it’s that we need to. I’ve banged on at various times about the gap between the spectator and the spectacle (not in a Situationist way, unless that’s your bag, you crazy fucker), and this seems to confirm that separation. It reinforces the notion that we have no real control over something we may love with a genuine intensity. I once wrote this (aye, I’m quoting myself. Whisht, right?):

Such is the power of what we see that we unwittingly give prominence to our own perception of it; we are convinced that we watch sport simultaneously with its happening. But we are in a philosophically luxurious position: we actually experience the game on a kind of satellite delay. The game is presented to us as a fait accompli, as a set of data to be assessed years from now, next week, a second later. To us it is, in effect, inevitable — something like destiny. The spectator lives the game as a perpetual past, but the athlete lives it as a perpetual present. Our entry point is the telling of the story, which has already been written by someone else. The athlete's entry point is a vast nothing, a void where "destiny" is an advertising slogan for indulgence-pedlars and perfumers. It is they who must forge the reality we end up, however we may try not to, taking for granted. We feel engrossed, as if we are undergoing the full tumult, but we are really at one remove from the white-hot centre. That one remove makes all the difference.

But at the moment where nothing really happens, we transcend the gap. The error of parallax is eliminated as our “perpetual past” moves to align with the athlete’s “perpetual present”. Sport is a world dense with human-interest stories, ultra-confident stabs at ESP, post-hoc rationalisation presented as the wisdom of the ancients, and armchair psychology of the highest-proof bullshit. But it’s at the apsis of the rollercoaster that we gain the greatest insight into what we watch, because we temporarily inhabit something of the same outlook and share something of the same oxygen-depleted air. For the spectator, this is the difference between the event being a tableau and a living entity ...

… Okay, look: I have a confession to make. I’ve been pawing the ground in front of me for something-thousand words, swearing I was about to say it, thinking better of it, trying to avoid it. But no longer. Here goes:

I once bought a Shed Seven single.

Okay, that’s not it. (I did, though. Long story.)

Over the unmourned corpse of the World Cup final was exchanged some short-order nostalgia for the previous evening's entertainment. If I cared what you thought of me, I'd worry you'll misread what I'm about to type as hypocrisy: I enjoyed Germany-Uruguay. Yes, mere days before, I described the third-place match as "just a chummy natter between two benign ghosts — ie. the boring-as-shite kind". Which is true, in that the game takes place to one side of the stream of madness that defines the competition: it's a kickabout among semi-deflated balloon animals. This does not negate the possibility of a fine game of football, of course. Indeed, by unplugging from the mains and tapping into alternative sources of motivation, the third-place match may even be more likely to be such. I can't remember one that was devoid of interest or fun in some way, and that run continued this year, right down to Diego Forlán's last-kick free which so wrongly clattered against the crossbar. I loved it.

(That’s not it either...)

After the final, the world's mood was chilly, like outside a cinema after a disappointing sequel. I remember tweeting something to the effect that I was glad I had sat through the first ninety minutes in order to get to the last thirty. I think I was trying to chime with the prevailing sentiment — what with the climax of the tournament to which we'd devoted so much of our time and energy having turned out to be something less than heaven on earth and all — while offering some small counterweight. After all, extra time was exciting, utterly unpredictable, even — yes! — pretty at times. For example, it contained the most thrilling moment of the tournament, when Arjen Robben was put through on goal, one-on-one, delaying his move and delaying it again and again, to be denied by what can only be described as Iker Casillas. And it at last yielded a goal, scored by Andrés Iniesta: one of the least unlikeable footballers around, reprising his Stamford Bridge showstopper. (A bit of trivia for you: this is the only World Cup final goal to be scored by a Caroline Wozniacki lookalike.) Of course, if I was half in disagreement with everyone else, I was half in agreement. But not a second after I sent that tweet (it would just have to be after), I realised that I was lying to myself: at no point during the match had I been bored. The tension was too exquisite for such indulgences. I was enthralled by the whole thing.

(There we go...)

I could easily have been fed up with the relative lack of high-quality football on show. In a perfect world, especially considering the involvement of this Spain team, it could have been an asethetic apotheosis of sorts. As it was, it didn't bear the figurative stamp of Xavi so much as the literal one of van Bommel. It was far from picturesque: I would truthfully only watch it again if it was edited with de Jongian brutality. Yet it hardly mattered. I had my preferences as to what kind of World Cup final I would like to see and, even with prior experience in mind, some hope that they may be realised. But on this occasion, I was carried along by the occasion. That the match wasn't as conventionally beautiful as I may have wished wasn't irrelevant, but it certainly didn't spoil matters. Moreover, even the ugly blotches which ruined the appetites of so many became part of the game’s unconventional beauty, because they made stronger that elemental connection I would again experience four days later watching Contador and Schleck stretch the twig of sport to melting point.

Now, I'm not claiming any great wisdom here. I don’t have any special insight: I didn’t watch the match in the lotus position on a bare floor deep within the cave system constructed here at SIATVS Hectares by the world’s finest philosophical geoplasticists (it’s like the cave system at the Google campus, only without the wifi). Chance, mood, weather, blood sugar level, pollen count: any, all, none or more of these factors may have played a part in setting my mind to appreciate the game in a particular way. I'm not trying to convince you that the game was actually sporting perfection; I don't begrudge anyone their disdain for the match, nor do I believe it is necessarily mistaken. But nor do I believe I am mistaken. That feeling was there to be had, and I'm glad I had it.

But, as I say, I could just as easily have missed it. One of the snares awaiting the deeply engaged fan is the aul’ woods/trees conundrum. It can arise when our hopes for what we are about to witness harden into, if not dogma, then a kind of loose ideology. It prompts an pre-empting: in effect, an effort to control how we will feel about the event. But the essential nature of spectating is that we ultimately don't have this control. We've all experienced this nature as an immense frustration, but so have we experienced it as a profound joy — almost as a liberation as we transcend our station. Not that an immersion in the culture of a sport — our home city, to wind things back to the start — necessarily limits one's enjoyment of it. That would be absurd, really, like saying that a knowledge of musical theory and history is an automatic block on musical appreciation. Fundamentally, the pre-empting comes from love. But — speaking for myself, natch — it's notable how much easier it can be to recognise the wonder of sport when it happens in unfamiliar surroundings. Thinking back only over the history of this blog, the events that have most touched me have mainly been in sports other than football; this is out of proportion to the amount of time I spend paying attention to the non-soccer world. No doubt this is partly because, when I watch other sports, it's less likely to be the necessary preliminaries and more likely a Wimbledon final, a world 200m final or a decisive Tour stage. But it's also, I suspect, because my guard is down — the pressure is off. When your comprehension of a language is less than total, it's the sheer music of the thing that gets to you before its meaning. When it's your mother tongue, sometimes the meaning overwhelms all else, whether the meaning is real or pre-conceived by the listener.

It's that paradox again. To closely follow a World Cup takes considerable investment: not just in that condensed month, but, to really get it, in the sport as a whole, in all its quotidian madness and mundanity. Such is the expectation thus generated that it's no wonder someone might feel almost offended when it doesn't quite work out as they had hoped. Something like the World Cup gets built up so much that the only way for it to match the bombast is for it to be magnificent on an historic scale. I certainly wasn't the only one who was initially unfavourably measuring this final against past editions. But this concern with where a game fits in an eternal ranking goes against one of sport's main drives. Most art worth a damn take time to properly appreciate, and so lasts longer in the mind. But sporting drama is, by definition, ephemeral. There is no way to adequately capture the spirit of a match and carry it around with you. It feels like there should be, dammit; hence sport's constant yearning to preserve and revere itself. It leads us to wonder how many angels could dance on the head of Rafael Nadal's racquet, or to too quickly rush to the brink of smugness that we happened to be alive when something wonderful happened, or to beat ourselves up because everything wonderful that's happened did so before we were around to witness it, or to load so much significance onto a single match that, regardless of its stature, it could not possibly bear it.

In her recently published history of ballet, Jennifer Homans says (according to the review in the Sunday Times, hence no link) that dance is an art "of memory, not history". As with dance, so with sport: it's experienced in the moment, and it's in the memory that the moment is stored. A version of the moment, that is. The problem is that the memory leaks — no matter how often one tries to recall it, it will never amount to the same thing. It's nuclear fallout, a residue. It's an image of the moment, not the moment itself. Instead of letting history look after itself, we want a Polaroid, and we want it to be a perfect facsimile. We create monuments to our own perceptions.

The key is to strike a balance between enough openness to the magic to let it choose you, as it were, and not allowing sophistication to become something you merely get entangled in. Too must cynicism clogs the arteries; too much sensitivity leaves you like a peeled apple. But perhaps "strike a balance" is too optimistically active a formulation. It requires a lighter touch than that. It probably even requires cynicism as a safety valve at the very least, so that you don't end up watching the football forever. Maybe you just have to hope you don't miss too much.

One: Nothing happens

2010-12-30T22:59:00.003Z

Part one of two (plus appendix!). Part two here. Appendix here.

Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

― T. S. Eliot, 'Burnt Norton'

The long-time reader of this blog — such a creature exists, our market research department has determined — will understand how fraudulent the first word of its title is. It hints at a sporting polymathy the site fails to display — the last substantial post here addressing something other than football is well over a year old. I sometimes worry, in between the times I don't worry, whether my appreciation of sport is heading the way of my language skills: practical monolingualism, in which sparks of utterances in other languages sometimes catch fire, but which I still need basic aid to grasp, even then leaving me with the lurking notion that the true sense eludes me.

It is some way from that fate yet, for which I'm thankful. Nonetheless, I sometimes can't shake the feeling, when I visit strange parts — if I may switch metaphorical horses for a mo' — of being a tourist. (Or should that be a travellah?) I can amble through soccer's back streets, getting lost without getting lost, because it's my home city. Cycling, on the contrary, is a city I usually only visit for three weeks every July. When it comes to football, I know who Dražan Jerković was, only having to look him up to find out whether he is an "is" or a "was", and to ensure I have the correct diacritics in place in his name. (I've also discovered that no-one seems to be sure his first name wasn't actually Dražen. This interests me. Please, ladies, one at a time...) In matters cycling, I'm not completely ignorant — I know my Hinault from my EPO, my Poupou from my B-sample — but its equivalent arcana is largely foreign to me, where it is instinctive for those who live the sport. Even some of the more prominent historical points need refreshing in my mind, and this I tend to do before and during the Tour de France. But there is much else in sport I would readily give up sooner than I would the time I spend with the race.

"But" may be the wrong word, because I suspect part of its attraction lies in its unfamiliarity, or at least in the way in which that unfamiliarity highlights the familiar, the sporting universal. I'm a proponent of the idea that if you really get one sport, you at least have the key to all sports; the question is whether you want to open any doors with it, even if some of what lies behind them seems dauntingly esoteric. Sports fans are prone to framing their passion for one discipline in terms of disparagement of others, as if said passion arose by a process of elimination. It's a cousin of the more intemperate forms of nationalism: my country is the greatest because it's not yours. It's well to bear this in mind whenever someone tries to convince you how uniquely wonderful their chosen sport is. Should you notice the phrase "the beautiful game" galumphing into earshot as if set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, look very deeply into your companion's eyes before deciding whether to pursue the conversation. Should you hear the words "jogo bonito" or, Lord preserve us, "Joga Bonito", run. (I once quoted hereabouts the Half Man Half Biscuit line about the man "found guilty of wearing a Brazilian shirt with a number 10 on the back...", and I've just done so again.) But maybe I was unusual in growing up in an environment where checking rugby league scores on Ceefax wasn't a prelude to a lifetime of shame and ridicule. Or maybe I'm just rationalising my promiscuity. I come not to judge the world.

The King of the Mountains competition in the Tour de France has almost become irrelevant, as befitting something won seven times by Richard Virenque. (This is Ma Vérité — tell me yours.) But just because the Best Climber is rarely the best climber doesn't mean there isn't plenty else to pay attention to: Will this be the 150km break that actually succeeds? Just how big will Mark Cavendish's winning margin be? Just how much is Mark Cavendish like Usain Bolt? Just why the bloody hell doesn't Mark Cavendish go for some intermediate sprints? (Because it's no fun, I suspect.) Will someone fall down a ravine on a descent? Will a cyclist one day snap, get off his bike and fling it at one of those gobshites running alongside him? Who's been a naughty boy this time?

The latter question has not had to be asked much — relatively speaking — during the race itself since the 2007 brouhahas (though positive drugs tests given during Tours de France have have come to light weeks and months after the final stage). Here I make a confession: there is a small part of me — a charred, barren, quite possibly evil part of me — that misses these episodes. Ideally, it's a pure sporting contest I'm after. But my partiality to a bit of Tour scandal is not an "oh, fuck it" response to the inevitable triumph of the dastards; nor am I chasing ambulances from my sofa. It's not that I wish for these things to happen, exactly; it's just ... well, take the case of Floyd Landis in 2006. It was hilarious in its implausibility — Landis cracking in magnificent style in yellow on the final climb of stage 16, losing over eight minutes to second-placed Óscar Pereiro; recovering within a day to make up almost all of that time, before taking yellow, seemingly for keeps, in the final time trial. (Said then-WADA chief Dick Pound after Landis' testosterone-saturated dope test: "You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on his bicycle?") Or look at Michael Rasmussen a year later: the drip-drip of revelations about his, ahem, administrative carelessness in keeping the doping authorities in touch with his whereabouts in previous months; and then, on the very day Rasmussen had all but wrapped up overall victory, the bombshell of further, ahem, administrative carelessness which finally made his position untenable. Whatever else it was, it was deliciously dramatic.

"Whatever else it was" is key. Football appears to have collectively and tacitly decided that doping not only is not a problem for the sport, but cannot be a problem, at least not on the epically systematic scale on which Festina were but a plague of sores. But indulge my doubts on this consensus for a moment and imagine something similar happening in soccer. The response, among people who actually care, is unlikely to be one of shrugged shoulders, let alone smacked lips. For cycling fans, their sport's problems are a source of fundamental angst. For me, they are a site of quaint dilapidation which gives the area what the legalised hustler might call "character"; it's the scene of a violent and glamorous crime which held me spellbound thousands of miles away, whose sole purpose may as well have been to await being photographed in my gurning, thumbs-up presence. "Whatever else it was" — whatever else it is — is the detritus that remains when the likes of me pack up and return home to where nobody tells because nobody asks because nobody wants to know. The difference between the cycling fan's attitude to the Tour de France and mine lies somewhere in the distance between a life and a story, a trauma and a plot twist.

A great story can't be a great story without at least one great episode. For this dilettante, the 2010 Tour had two, both involving the competition between Andy Schleck and Alberto Contador. Schleck held yellow from Contador by 31 seconds as the race headed into the Pyrenees. By the final climb of stage 14, just before the finish at Ax-3 Domaines, the pair were part of a group containing most of the overall Tour leaders, including third-placed Samuel Sánchez and fourth-placed Denis Menchov. Schleck's approach was purely defensive: his aim was to keep Contador constantly in front of him, always in his sight. Contador's consequent reluctance to attack raised the question as to what was going to happen, for something surely had to. The answer was nothing — and did this nothing ever happen. Contador slowed down, daring Schleck to have a go. Schleck wouldn't bite. Contador slowed down some more. Schleck wouldn't bite. At times, the two riders looked like they were about to come to a halt on this category 1 climb. They played this game seemingly oblivious to the fact that the rest of the group, including Sánchez and Menchov, were now fast disappearing up the mountain. Perhaps the confidence Schleck would display in a post-stage interview about the two-man nature of the Tour was genuinely felt during the stage itself; nonetheless, this was brinkmanship on the part of himself and Contador, both in relation to Sánchez and Menchov, and to their own personal battle. Eventually, Schleck did accelerate, too late in the day for Contador to do anything but accompany him to the finish line. Sánchez and Menchov wound up taking little time from the top two, and the status quo was more or less intact for another day. Still, that moment in which time — much like Schleck's chain on stage 15 — slipped from its cog would have been worth the price of admission, had there been one.

By stage 17, Contador led by eight seconds, owing to Schleck's mishap. This was Schleck's last chance. He burned the rest of the field away with a series of attacks beginning ten kilometres from the finish — the rest of the field, that is, except Alberto Contador. For the last eight kilometres, it would be between Schleck and Contador alone, up the monstrous Col du Tourmalet. (The word "Tourmalet" always reminds me of "Torquemada".) Now it was Contador's turn to take second wheel and stalk Schleck.

What played out was, amongst other things, an example of the active role television can play in shaping our perception of sport. The Tour de France remains a extraordinarily popular spectator event, and you doubtless miss much sat in your armchair rather than stood behind a barrier. But stood behind a barrier, you miss everything else. In this case, that meant the kind of contest that usually gets called "epic" with convenient casualness, except that this time, it fitted. Schleck led Contador into the fog, the likes of which would have made watching a football game an exercise in piecing together an overall picture from distant crowd noises. But it served to perfectly capture this bike race, as if to shroud the rest of the riders and leave these two alone on a stage that moved with them. Schleck kicked as necessary — that is to say, several times, because Contador refused to be shaken off. Contador even had a go himself, as if to reproach Schleck for his insolence. Schleck stuck to Contador; they were never more than a few metres apart until the finish. Schleck took a win of which he was justifiably proud, even if it was accompanied by the extinction of his hopes of riding to Paris in yellow. (Just about: he gave Contador a fright in the first sector of the stage 19 time trial, but soon faded.)

And then there was what lay in the grikes between the facts of a bare account, in the pauses between the notes. The physical manifestation of this was in the occasional glances between Schleck and Contador; as Schleck was in front for most of the climb, they were usually instigated by him. There aren't many opportunities in sport for meaningful eye contact. In racing sports like cycling, the competitors usually face the same direction, for one thing. The haka of the All Blacks® may, in the context of international sport, verge on being a worn catchphrase — a sporting Lumberjack Song — but when the opposition responds by staring right back into it, it can power the floodlights all by itself. Ireland did it in 1989, though rather spoiled the effect by looking like kids whose giddiness was about to alert the teacher to the toothpaste on the duster; they were duly handed their customary defeat. Wales did it better in 2008, though they too lost. France in 2007, in their tricoloured garb and hard-faced impassivity and 20-18 win, did it best of all. But the haka takes place before the contest. It's a ritual; however powerful it may be, it's a formulated happening. To eyeball, or try to eyeball, an opponent in the throes of combat is different to this; different, too, to when it happens in a lull in play. On the Tourmalet, there was no real lull. Shortly after Contador's acceleration, as Schleck drew back alongside his antagonist, he took a long look at Contador. By a stroke of luck on the part of the host broadcaster, a pillion cameraman managed to get a long look at the long look. Happening when it did, the effect on the viewer watching live was akin to taking a deep breath just as a gust of wind blows down your throat. It was reminiscent of the almost invasive crosscut close-ups of Juan Román Riquelme and Jens Lehmann before the former's penalty for Villarreal against Arsenal in the 2006 Champions League semi-final, except that this time, the element of chance involved in getting the shot seemed to lend the portrayal of the moment a particular acuity. On this climb, it was clear, was sport stripped of ceremony and artifice, where the most important context was that which the battle was generating by itself. This was the rawness beneath the skin.

Next time: part two, duh.

Top image by Nadja Bournonville.

Status update

2010-12-26T02:28:00.003Z

In the absence of a recording of the voices inside a record company executive's head as he awaits the follow-up to Loveless, this will have to do. Happy Christmas.

Keeping it Peel

2010-10-25T20:30:00.012+01:00

So, then — #keepingitpeel. There is little I can add to what others have said today (and, indeed, for the past few decades), so here is a simple "thank you" to John Peel for the music I wouldn't have known if not for him, whether I first heard it on his show or not.

Let us delve awhile into the awesome Peel session archive. The selection process has involved weeks of tense, fraught and sometimes violent debate. Blows were exchanged outside the chamber; the upper house thrice rejected the bill; the lower house tried to pass a law forcing the upper house to accept it; the upper house responded with a resolution addressed to the lower house which included the word "poo"; one member embarked on an epic filibuster, expounding for thirty-three hours on how punk died when the Sex Pistols picked up their instruments. Eventually, I had to personally chair an emergency session which broke up not ten minutes before the publication of this very post, and ensure that a decision was arrived at. The following is the result. The members would like it to be known that they are sorry for all the acts they've left out; it's the fault of the other members.

You will notice with some surprise, perhaps, that there are no songs by either The Fall or Half Man Half Biscuit. This is because it has been decided that the prominence of said bands on this site over the last two-and-a-bit years has been excessive and, frankly, embarrassing. Sorry — or, if this is a happy development for you, you're welcome.

Let's have Peel introduce this thing himself...

Mogwai — 'Hunted by a Freak' — from Government Commissions: BBC Sessions 1996-2003

It was during a live session on either Peel's show or The Evening Session that Mogwai played so loud that the Radio 1 automatic emergency broadcast system was activated. The 'gwai's original home was Chemikal Underground, which was founded and is still run by...

The Delgados — 'Accused of Stealing' — from The Complete BBC Peel Sessions

Or The Mighty Delgados, as they're also known. To me, anyway. The Delgados may have named themselves after a cyclist, but Alun Woodward's sporting affections have their limits. "Football is pish," he claimed in between songs on Live at the Fruitmarket, "all footballers are dicks". Seconds earlier, Emma Pollock had declared her love for Queen's Park, though for all I know, that may be the Glaswegian equivalent of saying you saw the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall.

Datblygu — 'Gwlad ar Fy Nghefn' ('Land on my back') — from The Peel Sessions 1987-1993

'Gwlad ar Fy Nghefn' is a Welsh "national anthem in reverse", for which I'll have to take Ankst's word until I get my hands on the Wyau/Pyst/Libertino double CD package and check the translations out for myself. The video seems to bear the description out, and I'd wager that the title is one of those bilingual puns David R. Edwards was apparently so fond of: gwlad means land in the nounal sense.

Datblygu sang the original version of...

Super Furry Animals — 'Y Teimlad' (The feeling)

...which Super Furrys performed live on Peel's show in 1998. And here is the original — not a session track, but merely included here for the sake of comparison and awesomeness:

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Oh, Fredo, keep talking dirty about the sleevenotes to a CD reissue from a not-especially-popular Welsh-language band who split up fifteen years ago! Please?!" But onwards we must press...

XTC — 'Radios in Motion'

I include this mainly so I can link to the band's rendition of this song on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Andrei Arshavin is the Russian for Andy Partridge.

Also, does Slavoj Žižek remind anyone else of José Mourinho?

No? Oh, okay.

Blur — 'Country Sad Ballad Man'

In 1997, Peel had the idea of surprising the hell out of his neighbours by inviting Blur to play at his house. Thus was born a plan, and sessions from Peel Acres became a semi-regular feature thereafter. This, incidentally, is the only song from this session not to appear on the Bustin' + Dronin' collection.

*shrugs shoulders*

Damon Albarn pretended to like football for a spell in the '90s, and could often be found at Stamford Bridge, natch.

Elastica — 'Line Up' — from The Radio One Sessions

Ah, Damon and Justine, together again. Dab that tear.

What those who went on about how Elastica ripped off Wire and The Stranglers fail to acknowledge is that they improved on said bands, and managed to do so without going on about Trotsky as if he was good AIDS.

And no, this doesn't sound like 'I Am The Fly'.

Look, it just doesn't, okay?

I Am Kloot — 'Twist' — from BBC Radio 1 John Peel Sessions

Hi to all the Early Doors fans.

The Sultans of Ping FC — 'Give Him a Ball (and a Yard of Grass)'

A tribute to Clough. According to Wikipedia, the reformed Ping have a bass player called Ian Olney. I'm going to rashly leap to the foolish conclusion that it really is the Ian Olney.

This track, along with many other Sultans goodies, can be found at Shimmy Shammy Sultans.

The Slits — 'Difficult Fun' — from The Peel Sessions

Many people have sworn by The Slits' first two Peel sessions, including the man himself. Just don't hate me for thinking that their debut album, Cut, is better. Here's something from the third session instead. Ari Up is another gone too soon; I'm thankful for a world that had room for The Slits. I've posted the 'Typical Girls' video somewhere around her before, and sure why not again?

And that's your lot. Ta-ra.

What?

Why are you looking at me like that?

Wait a second — why are you looking past me like that?

Why are — no! Stop looking at it! Stop looking at that line! Stop looking right now! There's nothing on the other side! There isn't another side! There isn't even a line! I'm telling you — look, here, now, this really isn— I swear, if you so much as think about thinking about whatever it is you're thinking about doing which you can't actually do because there's nothing to do it to anyway, I'm going to—

*******FREDO'S PRIVATE FALL/HALF MAN HALF BISCUIT PEEL SESSION STASH*******

Oh! My secret shame! My ... not-so-secret secret sh...

Ugh, I can't keep this going. Come in, come in, make yourself at home. Cup of tea? Just mind you don't knock anything over. I learned how to make blinky text especially for this, I'll have you know.

The Fall — All tracks from The Complete Peel Sessions

'New Puritan'

'Winter'

'Garden'

'Athlete Cured'

'Blindness'

Peel. The Fall. Etc.

These session tracks are all, I believe, better than their respective LP counterparts (though in the case of 'Winter', it's a close call). Pat Nevin knows.

'Blindness' was the soundtrack to a piece of telly a few years ago that was almost as hilariously incongruous as the fact that Nicklas Bendtner is about to father royalty. It featured Robert Wotsit out of Jimmy Wotsit And The Wotsits on Later... with Jools Holland doing some handclappy thing — while standing on a carpet — followed by an almighty bastard of a bassline, during which an elderly gentleman, whoever he is, proceeded to mess with the band's equipment and burble into the mic in a manner suggesting that drink may have been taken.

Half Man Half Biscuit

'The Best Things In Life'

'Song of Encouragement for the Orme Ascent'

'4AD3DCD / Yipps (My Baby Got The)'

'Twenty-Four Hour Garage People'

'For What Is Chatteris...'

'Epiphany'

All of these songs are to be found at the excellent hmhb.co.uk. '4AD3DCD / Yipps (My Baby Got The)' isn't a session track, but is taken from the 1998 Meltdown festival, which was curated by Peel. It's included here not least because I wish there really was an album called Julio Sings Your Favourite Ultra Sur Chants. The singular 'Epiphany' is otherwise unreleased, and, along with 'Chatteris', formed part of the band's last Peel session.

And that really is your lot. I'm sure you will join me in thanking Webbie for organising the whole thing. It's been tremendous fun for me, and hopefully it's been tolerable for you. G'night.

Start communicating with the radar in your room

2010-10-21T23:11:00.006+01:00

If you know where the title of this post comes from without having to Google it, you're a very sad person. With an earworm. Especially if you know the live version that appeared on an NME CD in February 199—

Whoa! What happened there?! Ahem. Anyway, next Monday, 25 October, SIATVS will be participating in #keepingitpeel, a wee celebration of the late John Peel's contribution to music. #keepingitpeel is the initiative of Webbie from Football and Music, and the idea is that bloggers who appreciate Peel's work through the decades post a favourite track from the practically infinite archive of sessions performed on his BBC Radio 1 show. If you have a blog and would like to take part, see here.

I say a favourite track, but the next few days will be spent by the staff here at SIATVScorps whittling the provisional list down to a manageable couple of hundred. Also, you might be expecting us to foist some tenuous sporting connection onto our effort; but put it this way: among the middle names Peel and his wife gave their children are Anfield, Shankly and Dalglish. Consider that angle covered.

Here's a bit of a preview. Above is a version of Blur's 'Strange News from Another Star' performed by Damon Albarn at the BBC, dedicated to Peel. On the other side of this link is an example of how Peel helped the musicians he liked by the simple means of giving their music an airing. Several years after putting The Fall on national television for the first time, he did the same for three Welsh-language bands who, as he explains, barely got any coverage even in Wales itself. I'll forgive you for skipping over Anhrefn and Y Cyrff to approximately 4:08, where Datblygu sing (okay, mime along to) 'Casserole Efeilliaid'. According to Colin B. Morton (he tried to change the world by writing a really quite good comic strip for the NME), "it is about gay TV-presenters making a casserole, and Mr. Edwards doesn't care about their sexuality, he just wants to know what is in the casserole". My money's on Hudson & Halls.

Till Monday, pop pickers.

SIATVS world domination progress report

2010-08-19T23:56:00.003+01:00

Ha! Take that, sport is good for health!

Cad faoi i mo thír dhúchais?

Bless you. Though the fact that sport is a tv show is higher than sport is made for betting makes we wonder whether I bribed Google and it slipped my mind. It's so hard to keep track sometimes.

And how about our cousins in that big island off our coast?

Yeah, well, I didn't support England in the World Cup, either. Perhaps an alliance with sport is the opiate of the masses is in order. Or maybe I should aim for the sport is a waste of time market: for those for whom sport is not quite enough of a waste of time for them to type sport is a waste of time into Google.

A new essay-type-thingy post will appear here as soon as this incoherent pile of notes before me arranges itself into something resembling sense as I sleep. Meanwhile, do pop along to Pelé Week at Run of Play, and watch this goal by the man Pelé could have been had he been Paddy McCourt. Basically, he's like that white-suited yakuza fella from The Simpsons. The illogical shot may be even better than the run:

The new Weezer album

2010-08-16T02:03:00.004+01:00

This concept album about the life of Henry Shefflin was made to cash in on Kilkenny's possible five-in-a-row. Somewhere, Rivers Cuomo is cursing that cruciate.

Malc the Knife: The Official 2010/2011 Sport Is A TV Show Premier League Preview

2010-08-11T01:09:00.007+01:00

Review our previews from last year and the year before.

...Thank you ... thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, this next one ... this is gonna be the last song for tonight. It's a number, you may have heard of it, a tune called "Mack the Knife"...

(The audience applauds.)

You have heard of it, then?

(The audience laughs politely.)

Now, this is a version with a bit of a twist, because a good friend of mine, a lyricist by the name of Fred Rartzstein, has written some new words for it. In fact Fred's here tonight — stand up, wontcha Freddie, let the good people see you ... Fred Rartzstein, folks...

(The audience applauds lightly.)

You see, Fred here is a fan of soccer, and he told me he changed the words as a way to kinda look ahead to the new season of something called the, uh, Premeer League? Have I got that right? I don't know. Soccer ... eh, it's not really my thing...

(The audience laughs.)

...but, uh, anyway, I've got alimony to pay, so here goes...

Oh, the shark, babe
Has such teeth, dear
And it shows them...
...Well, sort of off-white
Just a nest egg for the kids, dear
And he keeps them out of sight

And when that shark bites
With his teeth, babe
His instructions start to spread
Green and gold, though, wear the fans, babe
So there's never ... well, there's sometimes a trace of red...

Now, let's change the scene...

On the greensward
Saturday evening
Lies a body
Ooooooozin' life
As the body bag is removed, dear
They all chant:
"We fucked your wife"

They've got scars on their bare foreheads
And each game is a blitzkrieg
It's still August — we've got time, babe
To repurpose them for Super League

Now, let it swing...

Tottenham Hotspur's Luka Modrić
Kinda looks like Johan Cruijff
But in FIFA 10, he is closer
To a '79 Mark E. Smyth

...You sure about that one, Freddie?!...

Right about hee-yer
There was a stanza
Oh so finely wrought, it was unreal
But just the other day, I had to junk it
Thank you very much, Martin O'Neill

Aaaawwww, Fulham-Blackburn
Blackpool-Bolton, yeah
West Brom-Wigan
All that shite
Even Cillit Bang won't buy the ad slots
So just stick 'em on on Monday night

On the table, yeah, is the letter
You've been avoiding aaaaaall day
If I were you, I wouldn't bother
It says: "Your kid has
Barça DNA"

You know it's true...

Now here come the
International friendlies
Come to decimate our stable of stars
When we need them to be fit for
Our mid-season jaunt to Qatar

Aw, now, here goes, here goes...

Never mind that he got off with
The ex-girlfriend of his ex-pal —
How would you feel to be led by
A man who screwed Alicia Douvall?

...allegedly...

'You must be delighted
To finish sixth, now?'
Well it's always been a lifelong aim
To take my place among the legends
And complain about having too many games

Have you noticed
How the key of this number
Goes up a semitone with every verse?
(Oh, yes it does)
Well, my vocal cords are already shattered
And they're about to get a little bit worse

No no no no no...

Not your failure to react to changes
Not your signing who can't shoot a lick
Not your cack-handed attempts at motivation
No, it's all because the ref gave them a goal kick

Ah, ah, ah...

Ah, the winger, yeah
Now he leans over, don't you know
And feels the hamstring that's been giving him gyp
And gets berated by some fat bastard
With gravy stains on his replica strip

In the World Cup
He was as useful
As the stinkin' corpse of good ol' Milton Berle
But today he scored two goals and made another
Ah, that's why it's
The greatest league in the world

But I deplore his obscene wages
And his astronomical transfer fee
(It really is...)
It's almost enough to make you cancel
Your subscription to Sky HD

But I like that Sunday Supplement
And I can count the hairs in Martin Samuel's nose
As I wait for Henry Winter
To tell me the answer to all our woes

Now I say, I say...

We thank you for the free publicity
Now contribute to our wealth
Or our valued data partners
Will instruct you to go fuck yourself

Welcome back Joey Barton
And Kevin Nolan
Kevin Nolan and Joey B., now, Joey B. B. B.
Kevin Nolan, Joey Barton
Joey Barton and Alan Green

Seppy Blatter, Mick Platini
And — hey, it rhymes — old Egidius Braun
Oh, the line forms on the right, babe
Now that Malckyyyyyyy's
Back in town!
Look out, ol' Malcky is back!

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here the next four nights, tell your friends, I wasn't kidding about the alimony, good night...

The Occasional Biscuit: A Song for Rafa

2010-07-23T19:39:00.005+01:00

Continuing our whenever-the-hell-we-remember-it series in which we celebrate (or fabricate) vague sporting references in Half Man Half Biscuit songs as a completely transparent way to get them onto the blog.

Of course, the smart thing would have been to post this between when Rafael Benítez was mutually sacked by Liverpool and the day he signed up to become the interista Oscar Tabárez. Still, given his inevitable fate down San Siro way, it strikes an appropriately doomy note, especially if you listen right to the end. You will return to this page in several months time and marvel at my foresight. And it comes from an album called This Leaden Pall! What more could you want? This is 'Turned Up Clocked On Laid Off'.

I tell ya, the Dutch are weeping in four languages at least

2010-07-11T23:00:00.002+01:00

YES, IT'S ANOTHER FALL REFERENCE. I know. Look, I know! I mean, what about it? What abloodybout it, hmm? Two years ago, I never got to use the headline I'd lovingly prepared for after the Euro 2008 final: "They'll be soliciting perverts in the streets of St. Pauli tonight!". So I'm having my fun this time. It's either this or "They'll be abusing animals horribly in the streets of Pamplona tonight!". Which would be insincere anyway, because I'm not that fussed about that sort of thing. If God hadn't meant for us to stick a spike through a bull, he wouldn't have made it get angry by some fella waving a cape in his face, would he?

The keen-eared Fall fan may notice that the above performance is the one that ended up on the Perverted by Language LP. There you are, now.

And to prove there's a Fall song for every occasion, here's one about England's elimination:

Kicker conspiracy

2010-07-11T16:55:00.003+01:00

Back in that innocent age we called "June", when it looked like every group in the first round of the World Cup (the first round? Remember?) might end up in one of your actual lotteries, we pondered on the last time that happened: to wit, when Ireland and Holland finished joint second in Group F of the 1990 edition. More precisely, we wondered whether we were imagining things when we thought that said lottery had been televised. We were, after all, quite young, and were probably outside playing football at the time.

But the Après Match team were way ahead of us, and they dug out the footage at the beginning of the tournament as they gathered their showbiz pals to make one last plaintive plea for Ireland's rightful place in South Africa.

Triumphant procession down the road of quease

2010-07-07T15:59:00.005+01:00

Take, if you will, Hungary's Golden Team. The story may be familiar to you: a near-perfect marriage of radical tactics with great players (Puskás, Hidegkuti, Kocsis, Bozsik, Czibor...), producing a new, adventurous style which was seemingly irresistible; an Olympic gold medal, won with five straight wins by an aggregate score of 20-2; a tying-up of the loose ends of the Dr. Gerö Cup; the Wembley 6-3, with the "people from outer space" and the "fire engine heading to the wrong fire" and the "utter helplessness"; the 7-1 return in the Népstadion; the four-year, 28-game unbeaten run (if we don't count a loss to a Moscow representative selection. And we don't, apparently) the team took into the 1954 World Cup, and not just any unbeaten run, but one in which they truly trounced opponents; the breeze through the group stage (two games, seventeen goals); the Battle of Berne; the thrilling victory over champions Uruguay in the semi-final; the final against a West Germany team they had beaten 8-3 (a real 1954 score, that) earlier in the tournament; the two early goals that would surely see them on their way to fulfilling their destiny as the greatest ever football team; Germany's quick replies to level the affair; a third German goal with five minutes to go...

...and then Puskás is put through on goal, with a chance to salvage this, the game of games. He slides the ball under the goalkeeper Turek and into the net. He gets to his feet, is embraced by his team-mates, turns around and sees that it is, in the words of Cris Freddi in his Complete Book of the World Cup:

Offside. For ever.

Johan Cruijff, one of another bunch of beautiful losers, and the only man cool enough to lead wearing fewer stripes on his sleeve than his men, once said:

There is no medal better than being acclaimed for your style.

To which one may reply: well he would, wouldn't he? (Or, this being our Hendrik: he says a lot of things, doesn't he?) Which is fair enough. But there is too a poignancy to his words. It resides not just in the (not entirely unreasonable) effort to rewrite the terms in the wake of scoring fewer goals than Holland's West German opponents did in 1974, but also in the way that, in an attempt at self-justification, he unwittingly points in the direction of what we scienticians call a Law: the World Cup is not about winning, but about losing. Or, more exactly, about losing and not losing. Which is not the same as it being about losing and winning.

Bear with me.

The World Cup, or any similar competition, whittles the participants away until one remains. It is an arrow, and without a winner, it is pointless. That one should remain matters immensely; the ones remaining become indelibly marked on the collective consciousness. After all, it's the winners of the 1970 edition who have become football's horizon. And it's the 1954 West Germany team who have had a feel-good movie made about them, whereas the development of the musical Aranycsapat! has presumably been held up as the producers try to fashion a jolly singalong ending out of the team being forced to hide out in a small regional town upon their homecoming so as to avoid the angry mob in Budapest ("It's Tata, Tata for now!"). I've not seen Das Wunder von Bern, but even watching the trailer makes me feel fidgety. Of course it should focus on Germany: it's a German film, and the story of the "Miracle" is easily compelling enough, on several levels, to warrant being reduced to cinematic treatment. But for me, to look at the match like that would be gnawingly incomplete without the gnawing incompleteness of the Hungary story.

*
203 teams entered the World Cup. Were this post instead an item on a Transworld Sport-type programme (such as, for instance, Transworld Sport) reporting from the South Pacific Games group match/Oceania World Cup qualifier between Fiji and Tuvalu in the Toleafoa JS Blatter Complex in Apia, Samoa in August 2007, this would be the point where we ponder that, no doubt, these players are dreaming of taking to the field in South Africa, and maybe — just maybe — holding aloft that gold-plated replica of a ruptured, upside-down semi-scrotum that people still sometimes call the Jules Rimet Trophy for some reason. These dreams are dreamt, naturally, but in full awareness that they are dreams. Every team may begin with the notion — however fanciful — that this may be their year, but most know the real score. At a conservative estimate, two-thirds of the teams who begin World Cup qualification do so knowing that they will not qualify; occasionally, one of this number will leak into the final thirty-two. Even then, few of the finalists will truly believe that they can win it all, let alone aim for it. Only seven countries have ever won the World Cup. More to the point, only one can win it at a time. We are led inexorably down the path towards coronation, whose climactic nature is, like any good ceremony, powerful enough to make us buy into its magical properties and essential gods-bothering purpose. As we should. But the World Cup would be unbearable if that was all there was to it.

If a football match is, in part, a metaphor for a battle, then defeat is a metaphor for dying, and victory is a metaphor for ... not dying. I trust that at some stage of your existence hitherto, you have discovered that you are one day going to join the majority. (If not, it's time to have a word with your folks as to the precise nature of this "puppy circus" they told you Snuggles had run off to join.) We are the only animal equipped with this awareness, and it bothers us. We are programmed to fight our own mortality — by, say, making babies, or taking pictures of each other. It's a form of madness: a madness that makes us human. But we cheat death in an altogether more basic way: we stay alive. The universe will kill us if we stand still. It wants us to sate its entropic appetite; it wants us to fulfill our fate and return to the chaos whence we came. We inevitably will, of course — that's what fate means. All organisms may possess a mechanism for self-preservation, but our foreknowledge gives our fear of death a unique profundity. Merely to hold our destiny off for another day, to postpone it until some indefinite point after now, is a triumph and a matter for celebration. If this appears meagre to you; if it appears doleful; defeatist, even ... well, you lead an existence either most lucky or most unlucky.

Any sporting contest, especially a competition which gradually pares down its number of participants, simulates this spirit; it ritualises it. The end of the journey is always a step away; annihilation is forever on call. To see each successive phase of a tournament as a step towards its ultimate resolution would not be to miss the point, exactly, but it would be to give it a glancing blow at best. Each stage is more than just an increment. Such is the sense of foreboding in the face of elimination, and such is the prospect of the deep joy of avoiding it, that a match becomes a universe within a universe. It takes on a meaning that, without detaching itself from the "championship" element of the tournament, is self-contained and keener than keen. Thoughts of the sweet hereafter are of limited use. There may be no future after the final whistle. For all you know, this is all you've got. A competition is a series of survivals and demises.

I say "a competition", but the World Cup embodies this most of all. A unique admixture of circumstances makes it uniquely grand, uniquely mad: its globalness; its co-option of the peculiar neurosis of the national football team; its three-year duration and quadrennial period, epic spans in sporting terms (the Henry-triggered meltdown in Ireland was ludicrous in its extent, but it can be partly explained by the fact that 2014 may as well have been 3014 at that point); and so forth. Above all, it is so through the force of an extraordinary consensus; it is so because we (or as great a "we" as can be reasonably imagined) have willed it to be so. The desperate, magnificent vitality intrinsic to sport is lit up by this extrinsic investment. It is heightened beyond a point where it is simply "sport, only more so"; it is alchemically converted into something other.

The ennui that prevailed in the first week of this World Cup was understandable. It was hardly the most exciting of beginnings, even when only compared to its 2006 counterpart. When we watch games ... well, we want them to be good, and the cumulative effect of so many not-so-good matches in a three-a-day schedule can be wearing. What were less understandable, however, were the glum pronouncements on the quality of the tournament — indeed, on the state of football itself — based simply on the evidence of these matches. The unearned definitiveness of this mopetastic palaver was puzzling, for one assumes that at least some of those so quick to judge had at least some previous World Cup-watching experience. Feverish anticipation can be the enemy of patience, but this was silly. A World Cup is never defined by its first week. This is in part because of a kind of recency illusion: the last few games are more memorable because they happened last. Moreover, it is because the full Worldcupness of the World Cup exists only as potential in the opening batch of games. It begins to coalesce only in the second round of group games, when those teams who started badly are starkly confronted with the consequences. It becomes more real with the final group games: dead rubbers aside, these are decisive (although some teams go into them with a head start). It becomes urgent and inescapable from the first knockout round.

And it is in the light of the very Worldcupness of the thing that it must be seen. Of the five World Cups I have seen prior to this one, none has approached the 2000 or 2008 European Championships for concentrated excellence. (It may be that it's not even possible with a 24- or 32-team competition; in which case, savour Euro 2012 before the mediocrities are granted squatters' rights for France '16.) Yet for all that (and it's a pretty substantial "all that" to be getting on with), neither of those tournaments approached any of those World Cups for depth of meaning and feeling, because the European Championships lack the particular insanity of the World Cup. This insanity is the riptide that sweeps everything and everyone along with it. The meaning of a moment in football cannot be fully discerned by pickling it and examining it later; it always depends on context. In a World Cup, you can't move for context. Every act is performed from Dionysius' chair. This is why the third-place playoff is reduced to being a thank-you gig for the home fans, or a present to the mid-level team for not getting too far above their station. No matter how good a game it may be, it's still just a chummy natter between two benign ghosts — ie. the boring-as-shite kind. It could be the greatest aesthetic feast, but it would still be pallid next to the dourest last-sixteen encounter.

Paraguay-Japan wasn't quite that, but it was almost indigestible for the neutral. Nevertheless, the Worldcupness was still there, still very much there, in a place inaccessible to the dubious feed-me squeaks of a billion hungry chicks. It took Eamonn Dunphy, of all people, to draw the attention of viewers in one country to the parallels between the match and a certain Monday afternoon in Genoa twenty years ago, which happened to be the greatest day in that country's soccer history and, in its way, one of the greatest days in the modern history of the country itself.

It was also a prime example of the capricious nature, as we might see it, of the World Cup. That Nike ad (I can't believe it is Focus!) rang hollow not just because of its FIFA intro-movie stylings and its apparent belief that Homer is still funny (it pains me to say it, but can't someone slip him a Dignitas email address?). It falls flat in its inference that the future would necessarily be written by those players under contractual obligation to them, or at least by those of a similar, if (grumble grumble) non-swoosherrific, stature. If everything is magnified by the World Cup, it is this that gets magnified the most. In our minds, our hopes and forecasts are a kind of Platonic form. The World Cup reveals them to be subjective wishfulness. No, worse than that: it reveals them to be bunkum. This is not "Nike curse"-induced, 20-20 hindsight. This is reality, as borne out time and again. The failure of Hungary in 1954 is the perfect World Cup story. The result was "wrong", though it was so close to being "right" — to elevating the Golden Team to a state of perfection. It was so close to being "right" that the juxtaposition between the ideal (something seemingly tangible, yet still hypothetical) and the actuality (where the current has dragged us to this point and no further) was demonstrated in the starkest manner. It brought up the tyranny of the irreversible moment like a new scar: time's arrow and what have you. The story attained a perfection in its exquisite imperfection. It was the very essence of the drama that is the life force of the World Cup, the very essence of the Worldcupness that informs every knockout game. Perhaps this was the Platonic form of the World Cup, after all.

Not to belittle West Germany's, or anyone else's, success by focusing on failure. If defeat is a metaphor for death, then a championship is a metaphor for immortality. A metaphor, mind: no matter how many times the word gets repeated, it doesn't make it literal. Neither do I think we mean it in the sense of belonging as firmly in the psyches of those future generations, as they tend to their wounds after the sandbag riot, as it does in ours. Are we quite sure that they will buy into the magic of the thing as much as we do, that it will matter more to them than, say, the standing high jump at the 1906 intercalated Olympic Games does? (Ray Ewry ftw, btw.) It's immortality on a scale we can comprehend: immortality that's artificially induced, that refers to the history we have chosen to buy into, that will be immortal for as long as we (as individuals) are. It more than suffices.

But even then, there are limits to this immortality, if that's not too paradoxical. A portion of it is reserved as a tithe to the continuation of this rite. Because it will begin again, and the glory will become a burden, an anxiety. It will become something to be defended — something, maybe, to be lost. Sunrise, sunset. Cat's in the cradle and the silver spoon. Yes, we have no bananas. And so forth. Forever.

Victims of educated aimlessness: the beauty of France

2010-06-12T03:36:00.005+01:00

Firstly: WORLD CUP! Get, mar a deir na Sasanaigh, in!

I can't deny a hint of sadness, though. I may have basically gotten over certain events (y'know, like a grown-up), but even though Ireland never quite managed to get a lead in that tie, it was close — not last-minute-equaliser-by-Macedonia close, but easily close enough to prompt reveries quickly rendered insolent by reality. Watching your national team walk out for their opening game in a World Cup is one of the most special feelings a sports fan can have: a unique mixture of joy, pride, trepidation, pessimism, optimism, giddiness. To see South Africa and Mexico line up before their game was to experience this by proxy, diluted. I figured that by the time the anthems before France-Uruguay had been sung, I'd be wrapped up in a duvet penning self-pitying blank verse in red ink.

But, in truth, once the actual football began, the weirdness sidled off to make way for the WORLD CUP! This shouldn't have been surprising: it's not like we're short on practise when it comes to watching a major tournament without Ireland's participation. But more than that — and I don't know if this is universal — though Ireland's World Cup successes remain so vivid and, dare I say, important to me, I have always been able to perceive a tournament as a whole separately from the vagaries of my team's performance. My love of the game partly arose out of Ireland's qualification tournament for Italia '90 and the subsequent good times, but also out of moments such as my first finals game (an upset, a brutal and hilarious red card, and the San Siro — what's not to love?).

I suppose what I'm trying to say is — WORLD CUP!

And it's the very Worldcupness of it all coupled with my immense maturity, my oh-so-mature maturity, that allows me to see the France team as they really are. I don't wish to make sweeping judgements based on one day's play, but France are quite possibly the most interesting team in the tournament. They drip with interesting. They are the very concept of interesting in human form.

You will be told that the game was dull, turgid, abject, nothing to text home about. You will be told wrongly. This may not be a team that "practically have the best players in the world at every position", as Patrice Evra claimed (listen here, Podge, no-one plays the Bendtner Role like Bendtner), but they do possess the ability that ought to make them one of the favourites. That such talent flounders so is grim and thrilling. One's inner aesthete may be pining for some good play, but this is almost as beguiling. One doesn't connect with it partially, but not strictly impartially either: it's the fascination of a natural phenomenon. The pleasure one takes from this is not schadenfreude: it's the beauty of decay. It's like witnessing a fruit rotting in time-lapse. Any guilt one may feel about it is soothed by remembering that France's woes, such as they are, are self-inflicted. If they can't pull together, if they can't rein in their madness so that it at least becomes good madness, then they become a specimen in a cage, a group of Big Brother contestants.

However, this would be hollow if it weren't for the suspicion that change is forever lurking. The talent is still there, and against Uruguay there were glimpses of the good it could be used for. Many's the team whose qualification was squeaky or whose finals began dodgily yet who reached the heights of there or thereabouts (eg. France, 2006). Were things to fall right, or were, Raymond, the constellations to blah blah blah, received wisdom could, shock horror, be turned upside-down. A long stay in South Africa would be tremendous fun: for the quality of football that would probably ensue; for the continuation of the unhingedness; for the possibility that the big fuck-up will merely have been postponed, not cancelled.

For that possibility is always there. And its effect is enhanced by the peeks at greatness that France reflexly grant us. Really, it's as conceivable that they could match World Champions 1998 France as it is that could match goalless 2002 France. Either way, this is spectacular.

The second-last word goes to Rafael Honigstein:

it takes an absolute genius to make so many talented players play this badly together

The last word goes to me. At a team meeting on Thursday, Florent Malouda and Raymond Domenech, shall we say, vigorously disagreed with one another on some matter. Who was the player who had to restrain Malouda?

William Gallas. Enough said, I trust.

...and that's how I choose to remember it: A World Cup preview / case study

2010-06-11T00:55:00.007+01:00

Out of Their Hands
― Title of RTE television's review of Ireland's World Cup qualifying tournament

A thing happened in Paris last November. It upset Irish people. You may remember.

There had been national splutterfests before. When it was suggested that Michelle Smith may not have stumbled upon her remarkable pre-Atlanta Olympics improvement simply by means of the coaching skills of her coincidentally banned-from-discus-throwing-for-taking-drugsdrugsdrugs husband, we formed a four-million-strong human shield to protect our innocent golden girl and her four medals from the jealous rantings of jealous loser jealous weepy jealous American jealous swimmers. (Two years and one whiskey-and-androstenedione test sample which shockingly contained traces of urine later, we said "Michelle who? Oh, you mean Michelle de Bruin".) Other times, the anger has been directed inwards: brother against brother, friend against friend, random drunken stranger against random drunken stranger. The Keane/McCarthy showdown in 2002 made similar civil wars — such as the Civil War — seem like little more than brutal conflicts whose effects on the very fabric of society could still be felt decades later. (See also: abortion, divorce, the EU, that kind of crap.)

This, however, was dynamically different. This time, we were indisputably in the right. This time, we weren't tearing each other apart or fighting from the back foot. We were on the attack. We had God on our side. This rage was a Rubicon moment for Ireland. No previous tournament elimination for the national team had provoked such a response. Your correspondent's stance on the import of this phenomenon to our land of rampant tea addiction and basically underwhelming weather patterns was ambivalent. One the one hand, it seemed a shame for us to surrender our exceptionalism on this matter: this type of thing happened in other countries. It happened in Spain in 2002; it happened in Italy in 2002, and they made up for their continuing absence from the Eurovision Song Contest by calling Scandoconspiracy in 2004 (that Giovanni Trapattoni was Italy's manager in both competitions is coincidental, though since Paris he has, more than once, invoked the name of a certain Sr. Moreno); the end of every tournament for England prompts an intoxicating mixture of neurotic introspection as people try to figure out why the fact that the game was invented there does not translate into trophies a century and a half later, and the identification of an enemy from without or within, an effigy of whom will be chucked on the giant bonfire on Guy Fawkes' Night in that nutcase village. When we get knocked out, it's a cause to head to the Phoenix Park and watch Duffer sheepishly try to address the cheery throng. Of course, it's silly to believe that we should be immune to these forces, but then everyone likes to think their pile of dirt is in some way special (let me tell you, you won't find a better hare duodenum and mango curd tartlet anywhere) and it's somewhat sad to see our no-claims bonus disappear.

On the other hand, here was a chance to experience this wonder in its raw, bloody state. I'd never driven into a tornado before.

Your wind joke here.

The immediate aftermath — the howling, the keening, the Facebook petitions, the march on the French embassy (there was a march on the French embassy!), the editorial promising revenge in the forthcoming France-Ireland Six Nations match (ie. a game in a different sport involving an entirely different set of players), the Minister for Justice of an actual nation state blathering on about injustice in a football match (maybe he thinks the Hand of God is blasphemous), the FAI's absurd quest for a replay or for a place as the 33rd team at the World Cup or for some other sacrificial offering (which wasn't even quixotic because Quixote believed in what he was doing and wasn't just a béal bocht chancer who got lost on his way to the county hall) — has been well documented. The really fabulous part of all this is how rapidly the episode has become fastened within the mythology of Irish football. And not just of Irish football either, but of the society as a whole, which is a testament to the rapid transformation of the national team from peripheral Ban-suppressed concern to (at least when success is a real prospect) key component of our self-identity, just like in those exotic lands of skilfulness and cups we'd seen on the telly. The intensity of feeling has, naturally, diminished since the heady initial rush, but the substance of the feeling has not. Our suffering and righteousness has solidified into scripture with nary a trace of wastage. The still image from that behind-the-goal-line TV camera of the diabolic moment has been reprinted so frequently, it's in danger of becoming our Zapruder film.

(If you're planning on having a drink for every superfluous mention of Thierry Henry during the World Cup, can I borrow a tenner?)

Even when the flame burns at this lower level, it requires a fierce amount of energy to maintain. Only so much of this energy can be supplied from within when it concerns such a small country as our own. Some countries are big enough and loud enough to sustain themselves with ire, but we needed outside validation. This wasn't hard to come by given the stature of the team's opponents and the offender in question; rarely is anything involving Ireland afforded so much international coverage. Luckily, if that's the word, Irish football is a satellite of English football, and English football's primary chroniclers are the artists formerly known as Fleet Street and their broadcast pals, who tackled the incident with customary brio. And why wouldn't they? It involved so many elements of their staple diet: Thierry Henry, one of Britain's foremost car salesmen of the last decade; a conspiracy theory; a Scandinavian ref (an exciting recent development in English football theatre); The French; Sepp Blatter (even though it didn't really involve Blatter at all); Michel Platini (who is triply evil: French, allied to Blatter, and the man English sportswriters warn their kids will snatch them away if they don't eat their dinner); heresy against the god Technology; the chance to remind us that they are the guardians of our moral purity; the chance to side with plucky underdogs Eire (sic); the chance to break out the Eau de Humanity reserved for the most special of occasions.

The handball, the referee's call and the subsequent (correct) refusal of FIFA to alter the result became co-opted into the peculiar strain of Eurosceptic paranoia that still exists in England, as surely in the sports pages as elsewhere. This paranoia is shared only residually here, but that was none of our concern: we were right, and we had the second opinion to confirm it.

The will needed to keep this death cult going is impressive. It entails a substantial feat of selective memory to turn justifiable grievance into an anger fetish. It entails characterising an entire tie — an entire tournament — by its most memorable moment, when it's really an accumulation of details. It entails a cardinal's belief in his own purity. It entails marching under the flag of eternal justice and forgetting the misdemeanours on one's own side (Shay Given's uncalled foul on Nicolas Anelka was far sneakier than Henry's handball — after all, who's ever talked about it?). It entails a sudden belief that we existed in a prelapsarian paradise until the sin was committed. Approached like this, the anger becomes detached from the event that caused it; it exists for its own sake, for the sheer thrill of frivolous martyrdom and for the sake of the void that its removal would leave. One can never know for certain, but all evidence points towards an absence of retrospective embarrassment in the future. This isn't something that can be relinquished just like that. It's the difference (with all due apologies to Eavan Boland) between history and the past. It's history that we crave more instinctively.

Sport is a passionate pursuit, and passion is immoderate. The World Cup wouldn't be the World Cup if this weren't so. From the very start, its greatness has come from the fact that it really matters, or that is at least always has the potential to matter. Victory isn't mere victory: it's triumph, it's glory. Just as success is taken to heart, so is failure; and if failure can be seen to have a face, all the better to make sense of it (never mind how sensible that sense is). It's said that deep down, the real reason people watch motor racing is because they want to see a crash. Half the fun of watching a World Cup match comes from the knowledge that it carries in it the germ for this sort of thing. It's the wondering whose spirits will be uplifted and whose lacerated that makes it exciting.

Of course, creepiness is a form of excitement, and this vexation can be deeply, fantastically creepy. Observing it is like being in a horror movie where the entire population bar you has undergone a mass personality shift at precisely the same moment. It's not so much the first flush of insanity that was so weird: it's the way that unreason has become calcified, the way the words HENRY and BASTARD now run through our core like we were seaside rock. It's the outrage unsweetened by even a hint of irony or self-awareness; it's the suspicion that people really, really believe what they say about it. It's disquieting to see your people wish they had a giant wicker man handy.

I don't speak here from the moral high ground. I am far from immune. For instance, there is barely a team in the English league against whom I don't bear a grudge for some real or perceived slight against Arsenal. One day, I will have my revenge on QPR for that 1990 FA Cup fourth round replay defeat. My Twitter feed is a welt on the face of the internet when the Arse are playing, a frightful cauldron full of bile and irrational hatred. I pretty much cursed Hull fans for having the temerity to turn up and breathe the same air as Nicklas Bendtner. I have a stable of high horses at my disposal. No: my outsiderdom on The Handball doubtless arose, in part, from a synaptic malfunction at the moment of the fateful meeting of hand and football. The seed just so happened to not take root. This is my fate. I must traverse the fields and the glens, the bogs and the islands, the semi-pedestrianised main streets and the mile-long tailbacks caused by the banjaxed toll gate, tending to the unburied dead while shivering and muttering George Pringle lyrics to myself, and waiting for my compatriots to descend the staircase too early next Christmas morn and find out who really leaves the presents under the tree.

That said, it's funny when it happens to other people. So enjoy the World Cup, folks! I certainly will! I've been the uncreated conscience of my race! You've been wonderful! G'night!

Dublin-Paris-Peckham,
2008-2010.

POLL: Who will win the World Cup?

2010-06-07T22:30:00.001+01:00

Oh, don't be daft.

Nick Lowe previews the World Cup for those who failed to qualify

2010-06-05T16:26:00.002+01:00

Let's set fire to tears

2010-06-02T20:19:00.003+01:00

It's a new month, so here's a new Norman Einstein's, now in its second glorious year. As befitting this, the most June 2010 of all months, one of your favourite members of the O'Rrarci family has elected to share with you the innermost mysteries of the penalty shootout. You will learn about the essential nature of the penalty, how qualifying for the World Cup is like joining a gym, how defensive football is like a backside (not necessarily in a bad way), why the shootout will save your soul, and much else besides.

There is, of course, plenty of other terrificness in the issue, footballistic and otherwise, so do have a look, and subscribe if you haven't done already. You know I'm right.

And now, because you're lovely, and because I unwittingly mangled one of his images in my aforelinked piece (a prize of indeterminate and, most likely, imaginary nature to the first person who can guess correctly!), here is Stephen Fry reading the Shipping Forecast:

My entire future depends upon the whims and foibles of eleven pairs of dirty great boots from Gateshead

2010-05-29T18:43:00.005+01:00

Prompted by a tweet by @darcysarto, I've been watching episodes of Hancock's Half Hour lately. This one, from 1959, I'd never seen before. It's got everything: gambling, history, big shorts, muddy pitches, the existential angst of the turnstile operator, conflicting styles of fandom, terrace violence, match fixing, sports science, the birth of Total Football, and Sid James' cackle. Part one is above; parts two and three are after the jump.

John Motson and Clive Tyldesley preview the World Cup

2010-05-19T18:48:00.002+01:00

Bullets have eyes

2010-05-14T14:31:00.008+01:00

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain
― Sylvia Plath, 'Black Rook in Rainy Weather'

It's the force of habit:
If it moves, then you fuck it
If it doesn't move, you stab it
― Elvis Costello, 'Suit of Lights'

On the surface, the praise for Lionel Messi during his current extraordinary run has been pure. Astonishing — astonished — praise has followed his every deed. Not for a generation has there been such a rush to consider someone alongside the pantheon of great players past; to name a planet after him; to dress him in armour, plonk him on a horse, dip him in bronze and place him halfway between La Masia and Camp Nou, beside a stall selling miniature bronze-coloured plastic replica hims. Scienticians are rushing to prove by July that he is, in fact, a physical constant.

But as with the man who swears he was beamed up onto an alien craft and shown The Secret yet can't quite remember what it is, there's an anxiety behind some of this. Messi's progress has not been charted merely in reference to the heavens, but also to the mortals beneath — and one walking potential Brylcreem fire in particular. The joy deriving from Messi has certainly been genuine, but it has been infected by the seemingly irresistible temptation to use him as an implement with which to bring Cristiano Ronaldo to heel. There is a sense of relief at the emerging consensus which renders consideration irrelevant and which pushes aside the dread thought of Ronaldo being acknowledged as primus inter pares. Ronaldo's flaws show up nicely under Messi's divine light, and in turn make the light appear to shine more brightly. Messi is great, in part, because he is not Ronaldo.

A similar sentiment was apparent, if more implicitly, in the recent crowning of Wayne Rooney as King of the Empire. Again, the acclaim for Rooney was sincere but overreaching. Here was a player who was not only great, but also the right sort. There was a time when Ronaldo was held to be the gleaming, violent, snorting avatar of the Futurist vision of football brought to you by Barclays ("A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath" — Henry Winter). "He can head the ball," they squealed. "He's the complete footballer!" The reaction to Ronaldo's departure from Manchester United was instructive. It was an elastic snap back to the comfortable worship of the right sort. When Rooney was deemed to be beyond question "streets ahead" of any other player (Thommo's words — the Rooney-is-better-than-Messi part, at least — were merely a caricature of a briefly common belief), it was also a rejection of Ronaldo: see, United didn't need him after all. (United's decline this season is no coincidence.) Here in the Premier League — not in Spain, not in Madrid — here in God's own cartel was the world's greatest player. "He can head the ball and he can track back," they squawked. "He's the complete footballer!" The argument about which is the bestest league in the universe evereverever (which is bereft of the awareness that a football match takes place between two teams, not leagues) quickly finds its level at dick-swinging quasi-nationalism.

True, Messi's rise to the top of the pile — let us pause here and reflect on the transience of this position and the part amnesia can play in its bestowal — must by definition be measured against the status of the pretenders. But with Ronaldo, there are other things at play. He reveals a veritable fault zone.

The flounce of the footballer thwarted by the incompetence of referees and the inconsiderateness of colleagues is part of football's entertainment (whether one thinks of it that way or not). The comedy of such moments comes from the distance between the player's estimation of his own importance and our awareness of his true worth; it's classic material. Flounciness is a signature Ronaldo move, of course, and he would seem to be a prime candidate for risibility. Consider, for instance, perhaps the defining image of Real Madrid's season (barring any strangeness this weekend), in the dregs of the tie against Lyon in the Champions League: Ronaldo on his knees, his face a picture of sincere incredulity at Gonzalo Higuaín's decision not to pass His Crissiness the ball. This was a joy to the neutral. And I mean neutral — not an anti-madridista revelling in the abrupt cancellation of Pérez's triumphal parade in May, but one simply savouring one of a season's many resolutions being represented so vividly, so ludicrously. It's opera for people who don't get opera (like me and our Jamie). Again, whether one thinks of him this way or not, it's the ever-present possibility of this type of thing which makes Ronaldo so engaging.

Sort of. The problem with such a reading of Ronaldo is that it depends on a faulty and wishful assumption. This is not someone with ideas above his station being sharply reminded that he's not all that. Thing is, Ronaldo pretty much is all that. What makes watching Ronaldo so thrilling is that one moment he'll be standing hands-on-hips in a how-dare-you-ignore-my-presence sort of way, and the next he'll fashion a fully-operational lunar rocket from twine, bog roll tubes and glitter glue, after which he'll be forced to choke back tears provoked by an offside call. He is frequently laughable, but, in honesty, it's nervous laughter, or laughter over-compensating for its nervousness by being a tad too loud. It's laughter fronting for the knowledge that he will almost certainly fuck you up in a bit.

But then, Ronaldo failed to fuck Lyon up. We are invited to juxtapose with this failure his supposed immodesty and lack of humility, and then laugh ourselves silly, or at least cluck admonishingly, at how he and and his team got dashed against the rocks. This may have some validity on the level of the club and its democratically unelected leader; this team has been constructed with a superpower's sense of manifest destiny. Ronaldo himself seems to possess enough of the stuff to wipe out entire aboriginal tribes just by running his hand through his hair. It's not just that he believes in his own greatness — it's that he wants us to know he believes in it.

It's just not cricket. Ostentatious confidence seems to disrupt, not to say subvert, the natural order of sport. The dynamic, surely, is for the athlete to submit themselves for examination and dutifully await the results. A belief that you esteem yourself― actually, scratch that. To display a belief that you esteem yourself is to pre-empt the process, to blow a raspberry in its face, to invite retribution. It is to insult the examiners: the result and the spectator. Isn't it?

We suffer from an error in perspective. Such is the power of what we see that we unwittingly give prominence to our own perception of it; we are convinced that we watch sport simultaneously with its happening. But we are in a philosophically luxurious position: we actually experience the game on a kind of satellite delay. The game is presented to us as a fait accompli, as a set of data to be assessed years from now, next week, a second later. To us it is, in effect, inevitable — something like destiny. The spectator lives the game as a perpetual past, but the athlete lives it as a perpetual present. Our entry point is the telling of the story, which has already been written by someone else. The athlete's entry point is a vast nothing, a void where "destiny" is an advertising slogan for indulgence-pedlars and perfumers. It is they who must forge the reality we end up, however we may try not to, taking for granted. We feel engrossed, as if we are undergoing the full tumult, but we are really at one remove from the white-hot centre. That one remove makes all the difference.

The weigh-in for the first Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight — well, technically the only Clay-Liston fight, pre-name-change — reads like a great piece of theatre. (One assumes that the edit job on this piece of film is deficient, because it fails to live up to the retelling; that, or the retelling has been embroidered.) Staged on the morning of the fight, it became the occasion for an extraordinary display of seeming manic insanity from Clay. From David Remnick's King of the World:

Clay lunged at Liston. Bundini grabbed the belt of his robe and Faversham, Robinson and Dundee held him back. Robinson tried to shove Clay against a wall, and Clay shoved back, shouting, "I am a great performer! I am a great performer!" [...]

"Hey, sucker!" Clay yelled up at him [Liston]. "You're a chump! You been tricked, chump!"

Liston looked down at Clay with a slight, fatherly smile.

"Don't let anybody know," he said. "Don't tell the world."

"You're too ugly!" Clay shouted. "You are a bear! I'm going to whup you so baaad. You're a chump, a chump, a chump..." Clay's voice was shrill, his eyes were bugging out, and he was lunging around like a mental patient.

That morning has gone down in Ali lore as an example of his unique genius, a masterfully controlled assault in the mental battle with the fearsome Liston:

"Ali whispered in my ear, 'Hold me back,' and then he winked at me," Mort Shamnick, the Sports Illustrated writer, said. "Ali had the capacity of self-hypnosis or self-induced hysteria and he'd work himself up to this crazy pitch."

But what if this isn't the full truth? What if this was genuine fear, at least partially? Not to say that it was not also a calculated effort to screw with Liston's head, but might it not have also been born of the dawning reality of this momentous day? Might he not have been stricken with terror, yet blessed with the wit to turn this to his benefit, and in doing so deflect any potential attention away from his nerves? His pulse was running at more than twice its normal rate, and his blood pressure was almost off the chart. Then again, perhaps I'm reading too much into it — these symptoms returned to normal barely an hour later. We do know, though, that Ali felt the significance of the fight that day: that for all the declarations of his greatness that were so irksome to so many at the time, he was starkly aware of the fact that all that really mattered were Liston and the fight — the fight. Said his doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, "He was very nervous, you could see it. [...] He was just a kid, and that night he had no idea if he could really do what he had been saying he could do all along". He faced the void.

The seductive notion is to infer from braggadocio a lack of humility, and from subsequent defeat the appearance of that Grabowskian supersub Nemesis. Such an idea would be to overlook the fact that no sportsperson achieves anything meaningful without a fundamental humility. It's the humility to recognise that you start each match along with everyone else at zero, that you always have to prove yourself all over again, that flights of angels will sing thee nowhere. Ali said he was the greatest, but he knew he had to show it. His boasts are now utterly comfortable because they happened an age ago; they are part of an oft-told story where we all know who the good guy is. When it happens here and now, as with Ronaldo, it's more disquieting. (There was plenty of disquiet over Ali too, and it was far, far more profound, of course.)

What's odd about the questioning of Ronaldo's humility is that he really ought not to be so readily accused. Focus on his diva-like qualities and you miss his diligence. He's a self-improver who practically invented his own method of free-taking. His play is not that of someone who thinks he's owed anything for being him. In fact, an over-eagerness to succeed is becoming a trademark: see last year's Champions League final or, more especially, the recent game against Barcelona. It's a tendency which could make his team soar or lead it down dead ends. Or to put his more profitable excursions in moral terms, one may draw an analogy with Kobe Bryant's 81-point game against the Toronto Raptors in 2006 and the contrasting responses to it, as related in Free Darko's Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: it was either a "virtuosic display of skill" or it revealed Bryant to be a "statistical glutton". One could elect to see it with a sympathy in no measure soft-headed, and ponder on the wending and inefficient transition between talent and application, and on the volatility of insecurity. It's easier to gerrymander a character, to compartmentalise and be done with it. Ronaldo's pouting, his comportment, his bouts of selfishness, a propensity for falling over which is almost Rooneyesque, the fact that him screwing Serena van der Woodson would seem completely plausible (that clip will never stop being funny), his stepovers (did not the Devil himself tempt Our Lord in the desert with some continental cleverness?), his hair, his clothes, the sports car from whose remains he stepped unblemished: these are, or may be perceived to be, affronts to modesty, not to humility. Modesty is a matter of taste, not cosmic comeuppance. A lack of modesty may, unchecked, curdle into complacency. It may equally be the germ of healthy confidence. But modesty and humility are fundamentally different. To believe otherwise is to engage in a narrative fallacy. It is to resort to a dilute new-agey karma: a godless curse, an impotent revenge fantasy.

(Modesty can be more ostentatious than immodesty, by the way.)

Greatness is a rare thing. Sometimes it doesn't seem that way; at any given time, there is a smattering of the stuff somewhere, so we can get a constant supply if we pick carefully. In its apparent abundance, it can be easy to overlook; in fact, it's curious how strong the impulse to actively do so can be. Innocuous flamboyance still has the power to perturb in football, to incite a defence of a cover version of wholesomeness. The surest, maybe even purest, connection we have with the players is through their deeds on the field. It's through where their actions fit on the scale from failure to success. Goals and stats and pots and pans are not exactly mathematics (and Ronaldo is no sporting equivalent to Andrew Wiles, it must be said), but they are the nearest things we have to an objective assessment. There is a certain truth and beauty to them and to the manner at which they are arrived, and attempts to sidestep them — likening Ronaldo to a Playstation footballer, calling his Brazilian namesake the "real Ronaldo" — can come off as somewhat desperate. (Besides, watching the Brazilian Ronaldo at his peak was really like watching someone play FIFA at beginner's difficulty level.) Ronaldo is in a position to stand by this truth and dismiss us all at our one remove as nothing more than auld biddys gossiping in the post office queue.

And yet. Let's go back to Lionel Messi. Messi is the new, improved model of The World's Little Brother — Lester to Michael Owen's Bart. He is clean and germ-free; to borrow Richard Whittall's description, "he leaves no lingering aura". There is nothing remotely unsettling about him. So he retains a kind of purity. He reflects what we want football to be, and when we flatter Messi for his angelic play, we are also flattering ourselves for having the good taste to flatter him.

Ronaldo plays big. With everything he does on the ball and everything he does off it, with every move and every gesture and every faux-weary shake of the head, he projects ever outwards. He plays to row Z; he fills the lens; he tries to communicate directly to the International Space Station without all that radio wave bother. More than almost any player, he commands our attention — whatever kind of attention that may be. He's trying to connect with us, or at least with something beyond the field of play. He kind of wants us to like him. But something gets garbled in transmission. While there has never been a crisis of confidence in our relationship with Messi, our relationship with Ronaldo has been in nothing but a state of crisis. This isn't a simple case of misunderstood genius. It's as if the part of him that wishes to win our favour operates in some kind of autistic state. Or to put it another way, it's as if he's trying to chat up a girl that he really fancies by telling her that that spot on her nose makes her look like a clown, hah hah hah!, before pressing it whilst making honking noises and not getting why he's just had his face slapped.

It's a funny thing, all this. The realm of the player is inherently separate from that of the spectator. We experience sport in a necessarily mediated way. This is obvious when we're watching it on television, say, but it is equally true when we're watching it in the flesh. The mediation is in the distance between us and the spectacle — the physical distance, but more especially the philosophical distance, that satellite delay. Ours is a realm of fuzziness, subjectivity and interpretation, and we reach inwards towards the field of play to draw from it what we will. Of course we do — our very status as spectators is wholly contingent on the existence of the game; the game is the centre of our particular solar system. And the existence of the game is wholly contingent on the players. Players are sport's one indispensable group. They create everything the rest of us feed off; without them, there is no "rest of us". So central are they, so strong are the forces of opposition and chance they spend their working lives trying to overcome, that one would imagine them to be consumed by it, to be wrapped up tightly enough in the stark certainty they generate at the hub of the universe that they would derive all the validation they needed from it.

What is fascinating about Ronaldo is not that he so patently does not conform to this — it's that he's merely an outsized, malformed version of the norm. All but a negligible number of players in any sport that garners any attention reach to some degree outwards; they look beyond the field to us for some kind of additional validation. It needn't be a full on man-of-the-people shtick, or a rolling declaration of tribal loyalty (how unconvincing Steven Gerrard is in that role); and its articulation can sometimes be pale and platitudinous. But how often does a player score a goal and content himself with a shared celebration with his colleagues? And how often does a goal celebration involve some form of ackowledgement of the cheering, peripheral thousands? So obvious is this reaching out that when a player seems to be shut off from observing eyes and totally immersed in the game — think Pete Sampras or Tim Duncan — it is shocking. Our interpretation of the game is so dependent on players revealing something of their inner selves to us in the course of their play that when no such revelation is forthcoming, it leaves us bereft; we compensate by projecting images of clockwork regularity onto them because that is all we see of them, not because that is all they are.

One wonders whether this looking outwards is a distraction, an adulteration of the purity of the sporting pursuit brought about by the very presence of outside attention. Do, say, the world's greatest orienteerers crave affirmation from complete strangers? But maybe they just don't realise they do; maybe it's a latent craving that would only be awoken once Sky or ESPN started promoting the sport properly, dammit. It's more likely that this desire points to bigger, stranger things than sport only being winning and losing, ritualised conflict with no hope of a peace treaty. That the players feel a pull from our realm of fuzziness, subjectivity and interpretation suggests that there really is something to it. Sport is a medium for self-expression, individual and collective, witting and unwitting. Sometimes the only thing a player's play is expressing is "yes, boss", but that's still something. When that expression is witnessed by non-participants, sport becomes theatre — a living, breathing, open-ended production. And taken all in all, sport is a society, with its own mores, morality, codes of behaviour written and unwritten, tastes, trends, fears and dreams; and the society has sub-societies and sub-sub-societies, and varying and conflicting ideas as to what the society is and what it should be; and so its characteristics mutate and shift, if often tectonically. Yet the constant in all this, the star that gives it light and life and dominates its sky, is the scoreboard. All of our aspirations for sport we wish — we need — to see reflected in it. But the scoreboard has no conscience. When we think about sport, we are, most often, trying to reconcile ourselves to this law.

The ghost of Jean Baudrillard previews the World Cup

2010-05-02T02:28:00.004+01:00

The Henry handball? It did not take place. Bof.

There are two kinds of people in the world:

2010-04-28T22:13:00.000+01:00

Those who actually look at the foul and those who reckon the lad went down very theatrically there, John.

JOIN US

2010-04-19T16:45:00.003+01:00

So Sport Is A TV Show has been nominated for an EPL Talk award, which is very nice and all that.

Voting is open to you, you beautiful chunk of reader you. With that in mind, I urge you to head over there and not vote for us. Yes, not vote for us. To be honest, if you were all to vote for us, the landslide victory would be, well, embarrassing. Plus we might get full of ourselves like the British Labour party after the 1997 election. I've already been scouting for locations to build a giant tent commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the day Arsenal clinched the 1991 championship. Do you want that on your conscience? DO YOU?

So pick one of the other blogs and vote for them: if not out of respect for our sense of modesty, then at least out of pure pity for the proprietors of those other sites, some of whom, I'm told, are not entirely repellent. Then we can watch the results roll in, clock our meagre haul and bask in the moral victory. Which is what sport is about, isn't it?

sigh

2010-04-08T00:35:00.002+01:00

Here's a goal you may have seen once or twice before. The second replay here is my favourite way to watch it, because you get to properly see the two best parts. First: the way that, after Messi beats the first set of challenges and sprints into the space behind, the defenders converge on where they wish he was, a panicked swarm which contrasts with the second, better, delight: once Messi is through on the keeper, he not only slows down but seems to switch into another mode altogether. He's just legged it for fifty yards, dodged two lunging tackles and is about to face the ultimate moment of this already extraordinary passage, and he looks — just for a second or two — as if he's all alone, nowheres in particular, doing nothing special. A football game is a swirling sequence of pockets of space expanding and contracting; the energy spent in trying to shut these spaces down makes their serial exploitation a pressing concern, a ferociously difficult task. And the penalty area is, of course, the most fiercely defended patch on the field. The not-incorrect but humdrum explanation for this moment (hah! humdrum!) might be that he was facilitating his next move — fucking with the keeper's head, essentially. And I'm sure that there is some stuff about how elite athletes experience time differently to merely excellent ones that would fit just nicely here. But when I recall this goal, this is the moment I think of: when Messi created a bubble apart from what surrounded him before returning to our world.

Arselona (II): Gravity

2010-04-06T21:53:00.003+01:00

Arselona (I): If I never saw the sunshine

2010-04-06T21:45:00.004+01:00

8-1. 8-bloody-1

2010-04-02T15:26:00.005+01:00

On the occasion of us finding this wonderful 2000 Michael Palin interview at the When Saturday Comes website, here again is the "Golden Gordon" episode of his Ripping Yarns series. I say "again" because, as a few of you may remember, it was posted here some time ago; however, the uploader has since been taken away to be re-educated, and his/her videos have disappeared. Luckily, someone else has submitted it, and in view of the fact that the SIATVS header is culled from said episode (an idea we nicked off these chaps), it would be wrong not to have it available here. Part one is above; subsequent parts are after the jump.

(By the way: does anyone know which teams are featured in the footage at the beginning of the episode? And what grounds the games are being played in? I would guess that the team in the white-sleeved shirts might be Arsenal, and the aerial shot at the end of the montage is obviously Wembley.)

The Drogheda/Turkey connection in full (that is to say, empty)

2010-03-25T22:51:00.002Z

President Mary McAleese has been on an official visit to Turkey this week, where she affirmed Ireland's support for Turkey's accession to the European Union, and honoured the Irish soldiers who died at Gallipoli in World War I.

More important, however, was the address she gave at a dinner at the Presidential Palace in Ankara on Tuesday:

Contacts between Ireland and Turkey are not simply a recent tourist phenomenon however. In the mid nineteenth century a million of Ireland's citizens died of starvation. During that Famine, Turkey's then leader Sultan Abdul Majid sent three ships loaded with food to Ireland. In your state archives, there is a letter of profound thanks for that generosity, signed by a large number of Ireland's public figures and clergy. The cargo was unloaded in a port called Drogheda and since then at the insistence of the people, the star and crescent of your country forms part of the town's coat of arms. Those symbols of Turkish kindness are to be found today on the crest of Drogheda's football team - a fitting contemporary link given that football is as much a national passion in Turkey as it is in Ireland.

Oh. Oh dear.

The story about how the star and crescent were added to Drogheda's coat of arms as a gesture of gratitude to the Ottoman Empire is a tenacious myth. In fact, according to Liam Reilly of the Old Drogheda Society, "There are no records with the Drogheda Port Authority of this [the landing of an aid consignment at Drogheda] ever happening". A spokesperson for the President has admitted the error.

When did the town adopt the star and crescent, exactly? In my cursory web-based rooting around in search of the answer (get thee to a library, Fred), I've found more than one. Reilly says it goes back to the granting of Drogheda's first town charter in 1210, during the reign of King John, whose symbol the star and crescent apparently was. The town's official tourism website concurs. Other sources, such as the Drogheda Rotary Club site, date the emblem to a charter presented to the town by Richard I (who also had the star and crescent as a personal symbol) in 1194. (The town did hold 800th anniversary celebrations in 1994.)

Either way, its provenance is royal, it predates the Famine by centuries, and it was later chosen by Drogheda United to adorn their crest. Another club with the star and crescent on their badge is Portsmouth. Like Drogheda, they took it from their town's emblem. Portsmouth was (according to the city council) granted its first town charter by Richard I in 1194. A correspondent to the Guardian's Knowledge feature last year seemed to imply that United had nicked the motif from Portsmouth. This is not so. Irish football may look towards England, but there are limits, good God.

Fans of Drogheda United and Trabzonspor have struck up a friendship in recent years, based on their mutual claretandblueness and, um, the Ottoman story. Hmmm. Also, the Wikipedia entry for the town of Drogheda has seen in recent months a determined effort to establish the tale as the Wikitruth. One edit included the somewhat bizarre line "Due to this the Irish people, especially those in Drogheda, are friendly to the Turks".

Glossing over the fact that Drogheda's coat of arms also has three lions on it, I draw your attention to another part of the Prez's musings. "[F]ootball is as much a national passion in Turkey as it is in Ireland"? More than a tad impudent — football (assuming we're talking only of soccer here) is a national passion in Ireland when it suits us. The vaguely hooliesque behaviour of a few skangery knobweasels who attach themselves to some clubs here hardly counts.

Here's a genuine connection between the Irish and the, um, Turkans:

Don't listen to us – listen to Kerins

2010-03-25T21:55:00.004Z

Being (it says here) one of the five best sports blogs in the country isn't all practising our poses and deciding on an outfit for the swimwear section, you know. It's really about giving. In that light, the people behind the Vodafone Ireland World of Difference competition have asked us to spread the word. It's a competition which offers its four winners the chance to work for a charity of their choice for a year. Above is a video from the launch do, featuring Alan Kerins who, along with Alan Brogan, is an ambassador for the initiative. If you're interested, pop along to the website or the Facebook page.

And if you're wondering whether I have anything to do with Vodafone: nope.

Football in a paragraph

2010-03-25T00:57:00.003Z

Football used to be an easy game. The big lads played at centre-half and centre-forward, the hard lads played at full-back, the bright lads played at inside forward, the hard lads who were a bit bright and the bright lads who were a bit hard played at wing-half, and the little, quick lads played on the wing. Left-footers played on the left and right-footers played on the right. And the one with no mates went in goal.

"Used to be"? Isn't 99% of football still like this? (Give or take some positional mutation, of course.) Nevertheless, this is another example of Jonathan Wilson being quite good.

We're all the same. We're all twats

2010-03-21T19:59:00.002Z

Despite/because of the fact that he doesn't like football, Armando Iannucci has mined it for some great comedy in his time.

No, Father, you can't have an award

2010-03-21T19:40:00.002Z

Exciting news in the world of me-being-fabulous: Sport Is A TV Show has been nominated for an Irish Blog Award. Specifically, we are a finalist in the Boards.ie-sponsored Best Sport and Recreation Blog category, where we will be being uncomfortably polite to Back Page Football, Arseblog, Green and Red, and Irish Peloton.

Cheers to the folks behind the awards for seeing fit to include SIATVS amongst this fine group. Enjoy the shindig if you're attending. I'm unlikely to be able to myself, but if I win, perhaps we could have one of those pre-recorded videos of me being presented the award by ... I dunno, that Gilson one, or someone who used to be in Six or something.

I'd just like to say, from the bottom of my heart, a big, big "thank you" to SIATVS's wonderful guest contributors, my mam and dad, my agent, my pet marmoset, all that crap. Without you, blah blah. All sycophantic praise may be left with my valet, who will inform me of such at my majestic convenience.

An maidin i ndiaidh

2010-03-18T01:18:00.002Z

Yep, we're so mavericky here at SIATVS that we celebrate the feast day of a Welshman incorrectly given credit for the absence of an entire species from our gentle isle on the 18th of March. So pray, swill the vomit from your teeth, hush the lies about how much you won on Cheltenham and discard the KISS ME, I'M AN INSUFFERABLE PRICK t-shirt as you bask in the achievements of the only NBA player ever to hail from our fair land, and lose yourself to the sweet melodies of one of our renowned bands of merry minstrels.

And so it goes and so it goes and so it goes and so it goes

2010-03-11T13:31:00.008Z

I thought everyone would have established bases on Mars and things by about 1985. I had books and things and a telescope, but it was cheap so when you looked at the moon, you couldn't see any detail, it just made it a bit bigger.

―Jarvis Cocker

The experiment with bye-line officials in the Europa League jars somewhat. Not that it's a bad idea per se — having someone in a position to spot offences in the maelstrom of the penalty area, which are often on the referee's blind side, could be a good idea. You wouldn't know that from the number of people poised to pounce on it like spoilt indoor cats who don't realise what a proper scrap is. But then, it was endorsed by Michel Platini, so, of course, it must be hare-brained/part of a nefarious scheme to erode Britain's sovereignty and introduce a federal Europe by the back door. When the wrong Fulham player was identified as the due recipient of a red card against Roma in October, it was seen by some as proof of ineradicable weakness, rather than one of those things that could be minimised given a chance. So count me amongst that small, bedraggled, stone-pelted crew happy to see that the IFAB last weekend sanctioned a possible continuation of the scheme.

The problem is less in the idea itself than in some of the other reasons given for its implementation. One was that it might make for a better-officiated game while sticking to the belief prevalent in Fifania that football should, as far as possible, remain the same from the World Cup final to the wheezy, hungover park match. But it's hard enough for many amateur leagues to send one ref to each game, let alone three. How they are to expand their officials pools by 67% when the numbers are actually in decline in many places is one for Derry City's board to figure out, perhaps. Maybe FIFA's one-size-Fitz-Hall vision is flawed, or is offered to us as an appeal to credulity.

The other fault is that Platini has presented it as, effectively, one option in an either/or. The notion that it could be complemented by additional technological means has been dismissed. Stark confirmation of this attitude came at the weekend with the IFAB's vote, by the power vested in it by the status quo, which ruled out any future employment of that demon Technology. Such was the wilful definitiveness of this decision, you could have stuck Ratzer's sig on it and called it bull.

Sorry, a bull. A bull.

The IFAB may have some hidden motive for their continued intransigence. (Did the Welsh and Northern Irish FAs side with FIFA to help maintain their independence as footballing nations, not to mention their disproportionately powerful positions in football geopolitics?) But it suffices for now to examine how they have sold this to us down here at the foot of the Mount. It's all about "football's human side", according to your caring, sharing FIFA PR department. "We were all agreed that technology shouldn’t enter football because we want football to remain human, which is what makes it great," said Patrick Nelson, the IFA's representative on the IFAB. His Welsh counterpart, Jonathan Ford, said: "The big moments in this sport — whatever they are — get supporters talking and go down in history. That’s what makes this sport so vibrant".

Where to begin? What lies beneath the whole issue was articulated by radio's own Ken Early when he said (forgive the lack a direct quote) that arguments about refereeing decisions are, in fact, the most boring in football. I don't totally subscribe to this, but it's not far from the truth. That the "what would the plebs have to talk about in their public drinking establishments?" line has been put forward apparently in deadly earnest is, thus, an insult. It reduces the game to a intermittent series of controversies rather than a varishaded system. It reduces the fan to being incapable of appreciating that complexity, to being someone only excited if provoked by a good old you-sez-I-sez about something mundane before settling it in the car park.

The IFAB's Luddite diktat encompasses a rejection of any kind of system — Hawk-Eye, say, or a chip inside the football — which might determine whether the ball has crossed the goal-line. Such mechanisms were "put on ice" when last considered two years ago; they have now been kiboshed forever, apparently. True, many calls a ref must make are based on interpretations of the rules (though many of these are themselves officially prescribed). But here is one type of decision which is — which ought to be — simple, beyond dispute: a binary decision, goal or no goal. If the technology does not yet exist to determine this (and how would we know without it being given as thorough a trial as the bye-line officials have been?), it may soon. The IFAB rejected the microchip on the grounds that it provided a mere 95% accuracy. Do they believe — even when such incidents usually happen incredibly quickly, often when the ball has thwacked off the underside off the crossbar — that the human eye, even three pairs of them, can do better?

Who knows? Anything is possible where FIFA are involved. If the aim is to provide moments that "get supporters talking and go down in history" whilst retaining the "human aspect of football", why not, for instance, get a blind child to draw lots to see which team will get a random twenty-point deduction? Why not spin the referee around every ten minutes? Why not allow each team to sneak a sniper into the stadium to have a maximum of one shot per game at a target of his or her choosing? Human, controversial, pub-chat fodder, who's a good likkul football fan, then? Eh? Eh? You are, aren't you? Yes you are! Yes you are!

The "human aspect" should not always be paramount, at least not when it is a euphemism for the actions of the see-no-evil monkey. But anyway, in ruling all video evidence undesirable, the IFAB have misrepresented it. Whether a ball crosses a line is a matter of physical fact; many other decisions are more complicated. We are still far from a time when the adidas autoref® can scan video of a contentious piece of play and return a call with greater than 95% accuracy. Human intercession is still necessary.

Which leads one to sympathise with the IFAB's cause, to a point. They are but one element in all this, one extreme. The other pole is exemplified by a television advert for the "Irish" edition of a certain Murdoch daily tabloid, featuring some of your favourite heavyweight ex-footballing gobshites (Cascarino! O'Leary! Ian Wrightwrightwright!) possibly reading copy written in the nocturnal emission of a News International exec about how video evidence just has to be brought in and it would solve everything and everything, so it would.

It wouldn't. It can't. Much is made of technology's power, of how a TMO could sort out a tricky diving incident and solve the Falklands issue to boot quicker than you could say "Havelange". This belief in the benevolent omnipotence of science and the inevitability of progress is somehow touching. It's retro-futurism as lifestyle choice, football-style. It's fanciful, though. When Sepp Blatter, following that 2008 IFAB meeting, talked about "really complicated goal-line technology such as ... the famous Hawk-Eye which is appropriate for tennis as the players can stop the game to challenge the decision", he was, no doubt, indulging in his shtick, ie. treating the listener like a simpleton. But accompanying the falsehood was a truth. The technological imperative is constrained by the desire to maintain the game's tried and trusted shape and integrity. The flow of a football game, its dearth of interruptions, is a precious quality not to be messed with. Whatever way technology might be used must adapt to fit football, not vice versa; it cannot simply barge in and make itself at home. The more enthusiastic proponents of that god Technology fail to comprehend that there would, by definition, be limits to its use: if every little thing were to be referred to the stands, a game would be of test-match length. Besides, many's the incident that fails to yield an immediate, incontrovertible solution, even on close, super slo-mo inspection. This is something so obvious to anyone who has watched any amount of football on the telly that it shouldn't need stating, but there you go.

So it is understandable why the IFAB would be hesitant with these things, why they delayed a decision on Hawk-Eye and the ball chip two years ago and the icing-sugar proposal last year, though it neither explains nor excuses the finality of this year's pronouncement. (Had they been in charge of football's rules in Victorian times, would they have outlawed the pea-whistle?) Wherever the limit of technology's dominion is set will be unsatisfactory to some. Were some (perceived) significant injustice to fall outside this remit, the howls to shift that limit further outwards would follow, themselves followed by the counterwails. The fundamentalists dominate the discussion, even though the best way forwards probably lies somewhere in the moderate, fuzzy expanse in between. Maybe the IFAB are right, after all: isn't this the very epitome of something we will "keep talking about ... again and again"? And again and again and again and again and again and...

Joël Bats, chanteur

2010-03-05T16:11:00.005Z

While searching for a photo to go with the previous post, I learned of the existence of this: Joël Bats, French national team goalkeeper in the 1980s, singing a song called "L'escargot". Nope, me neither.

The Occasional Biscuit: See the keepers

2010-03-05T15:25:00.004Z

Let's dust off our inadvertently neglected Occasional Biscuit feature (explanation here for thems that need it) for this track from the album Trouble Over Bridgwater. A couple of football references here, amongst other delights: a would-be pitch invader and a passage which suggests that, as hmhb.co.uk put it, "Nigel's been reading his World Cup encyclopaedia again".

After the jump, I give you "Emerging From Gorse" ... plus a bonus.

Sing/talk along!

Here's the bonus: "Running Order Squabble Fest" from This Leaden Pall. There is a very tenuous football link here (clue) in what might be my favourite HMHB line (though ask me tomorrow and...)

Mark E. Smith on Ramsey and Shawcross: Gymwork cops stalking the streets-uh

2010-03-05T00:43:00.009Z

I've been tempted to write something about the Aaron Ramsey/Ryan Shawcross "coming together". Alas, every time I try to publish my thoughts on it, an error message flashes up: PERMISSION DENIED: YOU KNOW IT'S GOING TO END IN TEARS, FREDORRARCI. Which is fair enough.

I can, though, pass on the opinions of others. I was delighted last night to receive a voicemail message from my old whist pal Mark E. Smith From Out Of The Fall, which I relay to you here:

Uh ... thing fucking work— Ah, yaright, Fred, 's me, Mark Smith. Ah, just calling about that, uh, dog of yours ... and, uh, 'cos I've written a song about that thing with Shawcross and the Welsh lad and, uh, just thought you might like to hear it, you being a fucking Gooner and 'at, youknowworramean. 's not finished or owt, but (inaudible) dead good, I reckon. I'll sing it for you now, haven't got the band with me, like, but I'll just sing it. My singing's getting really (inaudible) (laughter) (cough).

This is a warning from—

—Fuck, forgot, 's called "Playground Letraset Forgiveness Compact", right...

This is a warning from the Potteries!
Beware the gymwork cops stalking the streets-uh
Boer War scar tissue and Charles M., Charles H. induction-uh, certificate-uh
Remember: when your skull gets smashed with truncheons of propriety:
You are to blame-uh!
In the Big Sam disciple courtroom showroom abattoir
The man with the prawn cocktail Molotov breath says:
You are to blame! You are to blame-uh!
You asked for it, sunshine-uh!
Don't come running to me with your broken-uh
LEG-uh!

...duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh, nuh-nuh, nuh...

HARK AT THEE! HARK AT THEE!
Alimentary rumble of brain shrapnel halfwits
Cling to the scalpel like doctor evil Übermensch rotating the rack-uh
Rotating-uh
The RACK-uh!
He's a good lad, though
His tears fill the reservoirs all across the land
And keep the water bills down-uh
Britannia, prison yard, crap, hobnail, press conference
Hiroo Onoda emerges from the jungle and says:
That's how it's always been-nuh!

...then there's, like, a kind of guitar bit after that, right, and then it's...

Cast signed in playground Letraset forgiveness compact-uh
Cast signed in playground Letraset forgiveness compact-uh
Cast signed-uh, in playground-uh, Letraset-uh, forGIVEness compact!
You are to blame! You are to blame-uh!
Cast signed-uh, in playground Letraset forgiveness compact-uh
Know your place, son, know your place!
You are to blame! It's your fault! You are to blame!
Cast signed in playground-uh
LetrasetforgivenesscomPACT-uh!
That's how it's always been-uh!
Cast signed in playground Letraset forgiveness compact-uh...

...and that's all I've got so far, so, uh, anyway, hope you're keeping well, and, uh, the dog ... sorry about that, hope he's, you know, alive an 'at, so yeah, I'll (inaudible) ... ta-ra...

In an interstellar burst

2010-03-02T11:39:00.003Z

The March issue of Norman Einstein's is available now in all good inboxes (and here), and your favourite blogger whose pseudonym ends in "-edorrarci" but is not "Bedorrarci" has an article in't. It's all about Arsenal, Manchester United, fans, symbols, laundry, sleeves, history, greedy billionaires, VERY NICE OLIGARCHS and more besides. I quote Trigger from Only Fools and Horses. It is — pardon my French — quite long, so bring a packed lunch.

David O'Doherty, "Me & Tiger"

2010-03-01T22:59:00.003Z

Via Adrian Russell.

And another one for the hell of it:

The Premier League All-Star Game — as it happened!

2010-02-28T13:43:00.008Z

When the Premier League decided to import the concept of an All-Star game from the United States of North America, well, who'd have thought it would turn out like that, huh? For those who missed it, Chicago's very own Ted Harwood — editor of Running Downhill and contributor to Arsenal Station — has kindly given SIATVS permission to reprint his liveblog of proceedings...

Good evening from Wembley Stadium, site of the inaugural English Premier League All-Star Match. A wise man once said that “We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,” and he was something of an expert on gutters. For those of you thinking that is a quotation from the late Oscar Wilde, it could come as a bit of a surprise that those words were first spoken by Mr. Jack Greaves, who worked on the grounds of Oscar Wilde’s block of flats in London. No, it’s true. For those of you then thinking what the hell does that have to do with football, it should come as no surprise at all that it has nothing at all to do with it, so let’s move on, then, shall we?

This match will feature two squads, one from the EPL teams in the North, and one from the EPL teams in the South. The rules for the match state that each team must include at least one player from each EPL club. Substitutes are unlimited. The North will wear white shirts with a giant rose on them, and the South will wear navy kits with a large white lion. No word about the red shirts with St. George killing a dragon drawn on the rear of the shorts, as far as we know. Maybe next year.

Teams:

North: Reina, G. Johnson, R. Ferdinand, G. Cahill, Evra, Nani, Gerrard (c), Barry, Giggs, Torres, Rooney. Subs: Jensen, Richards, Samba, Scharner, Baines, Kuyt, Fellaini, Cana, Hunt, Rodallega, Tevez. Manager: Sralex.

South: Čech, Sagna, Terry, Vermaelen, Cole, Lennon, Fàbregas, Lampard (c), Arshavin, Drogba, Agbonlahor. Subs: Hart, L. Young, Dunne, Shawcross, Konchesky, A. Young, Milner, Milijas, Belhadj, Defoe, Diamante. Manager: ‘Arry.

Referee: Steve Bennett.

6:35pm: I have already received several texts asking about the squads for this evening. Some of you appear to be puzzled about the selections. Hey, I didn’t make the rules, man, I just work here.

6:37pm: Apparently Prince Harry is in attendance this evening. No word about which side he’s supporting, but my money’s on England.

6:39pm: Giggs, Tevez, and Defoe have gathered in the center circle for a pre-game warmup chat. Smiles all around.

6:40pm: Re: 6:39: “If you put the three of them together, would they reach Peter Crouch’s shoulder?” wonders Billy from Cheltenham. Surely that depends on whether they are all standing atop each other in the same trench coat?

6:52pm: Sorry, just popped off to the cafeteria for a cuppa there. What’d I miss? My mate from a rival paper reckons that the acrobats and lion-tamers were good. He said the 16-foot animatronic Queen Elizabeth with the flares in each hand was a bit odd.

6:56pm: We’re a few minutes away from kickoff, and a bemused 85,000 or so EPL fans have just been asked to stand and sing “God Save the Queen.” Immediately thereafter, a squadron of RAF fighter jets flew underneath—I’m not joking, underneath—the Wembley arch, and a pair o’ paratroopers landed on the field, one to each penalty spot. As far as American imports go, so far, I’d put this match somewhere between the Ford Festiva and Budweiser.

7:00pm: Mr. Bennett fumbles for his whistle, and…

0 mins: …we’ve achieved liftoff. Drogba passes back to Lampard, who immediately ignores Fàbregas and passes back to Terry, who, after having a look up the pitch, passes back to Čech. It’s all a bit partisan at the start. Čech, thankfully, doesn’t slide it out to Ashley Cole. And you were all worried that the Blues would be snubbed.

1 min: Gerrard wins a free-kick about 25 yards out on the right after a lovely exchange between the Liverpool captain and Ryan Giggs. Giggs curls an effort toward the top corner, but it misses the target and hits an unsuspecting fan in the pie. I’m not making that up; someone’s pie has felt the full impact of a Ryan Giggs freekick. Disgraceful.

4 mins: Not much on here at the start. There’s not been a high workrate, but neither has there been tremendous urgency in the attack.

5 mins: Fàbregas springs Aaron Lennon up the right, the Spurs man flinging in a wild and woolly cross that Drogba just barely misses with his outstretched foot. The ball rolls harmlessly out of play for a goal kick. “Will there be a half-time show?” wonders Ken in Norfolk. Well, Ken, in fact, there will not be. We’re not totally Yankerised here today.

GOAL! North 1 – 0 South (Rooney 6’) Well, that, it has to be said, is just poor defending. After Steven Gerrard collects the ball at the halfway line, he spots Rooney running towards the South penalty area. He lofts a long ball over the top, Terry’s effort in the chase was uncharacteristically tame, and Rooney collects the pass and rifles a laser over the shoulder of Petr Čech. Thomas Vermaelen looks at John Terry with the blank expression of a teacher whose star pupil has just completely ballsed up a maths problem.

8 mins: Oooo, nearly! Fàbregas slides a lovely ball through into the path of Gabriel Agbonlahor, after some great work from Sagna on the right took Patrice Evra out of the play entirely. Sadly, the Villa man scuffed his shot and Reina saves with no problem. Reina shouts something in Spanish towards the Arsenal captain with a smile on his face, and Fàbregas can only laugh. Good-natured fun; that’s the EPL All-Stars’ motto.

9 mins: The crowd have slowly begun getting into the geographical spirit of things: a contingent of supporters in one corner of the ground have begun rocking back and forth while singing “Hit the North”. Mark E. Smith nowhere to be seen, though. As I type that, Rooney goes down in a heap after being shouldered, hard, by Lampard. Wazza not best pleased.

12 mins: Despite the lax defending and workrate, it’s all gone a bit quiet.

GOAL! North 2 – 0 South (Barry 13’) And as soon as I type that, the Northerners start to string together roughly 234 passes, the last 159 of which are inside the area, before Gareth Barry chips the ball over Čech’s head from five yards out. Bewildering stuff from all parties. These all-star games are really something, I’ll tell you what.

14 mins: A triangle of Fàbregas, Arshavin, and Lampard slowly make their way up the field with a series of five-yard passes before the Chelsea man attempts a 20-yard blast. Reina watches it balloon over the crossbar.

GOAL! North 2 – 1 South (Fàbregas 16’) Nothing wrong with the defending there, but Reina would’ve needed something ethereal to stop that one. Ferdinand’s attempted clearance of a Sagna cross finds its way to Fàbregas’s foot, and from the corner of the area, he unleashes an outside-of-the-foot smash that curves to the right on its way to the opposite top corner. The Arsenal man runs the entire length of the pitch in celebration. Dynamite. Reina shouts something in Spanish again; no smiles this time.

17 mins: After that, someone in the crowd has started a group of Arsenal fans singing “London Calling.” I don’t know what to say.

19 mins: Giggs just misses another free kick, this time from farther out, but a wonderful effort. No pies harmed this time around, and grateful we all are for that.

21 mins: “What do you reckon the odds are that a fan wouldn’t be watching the flight of the ball? Who are these people?” chirps in Tom from Croydon. Well, Tom, as Otis Redding once sang, you don’t miss your fiver ‘til a free kick hits your pie.

22 mins: Gary Cahill heads just over from a North corner. Unlucky for the Bolton man.

23 mins: Gary Cahill, again, heads just over, this time from a free kick. Unlucky, again, for the Bolton man.

25 mins: Impossible. From a North corner, Cahill heads just wide. Somebody please mark him, if only because this is starting to look a bit like an anti-Bolton conspiracy.

27 mins: The North win(s?) another corner. Giggs steps up, lashes it across, and it bounces around before being blasted just over the bar from nine yards out. By…Nani. Gary Cahill was nowhere near it this time, if you can believe it. The South under real pressure for the last seven or eight minutes.

THRIKER! GOAL! North 2 – 2 South (Agbonlahor 30’) That is better from the South, just slightly. Gabriel Agbonlahor receives a ball from Drogba and lashes one past Reina after taking two touches around Gary Cahill. I don’t think we’re going to see much tackling from here forwards. Not that we’ve seen much so far.

33 mins: Someone on the North has just attempted six consecutive stepovers. No, it wasn’t Nani. It was that man Gary Cahill, who had stormed up from the back. He can’t stop laughing as he trots back to his position after Fàbregas nicked the ball off him post-stepover #6. Cahill’s not the only one laughing; Torres is doubled over with spasms, and even the normally fierce competitor Rooney has lost control of himself. He’s still running around, but he is more or less useless with laughter at the moment.

35 mins: I’ve received a text message from Barry Glendenning, and all it says is “cahill lmao”. Good to see that we’re all getting into the spirit of this all-star thing.

38 mins: In a riposte to Cahill, Thomas Vermaelen does an Ajax-fueled Cruijff turn around Gareth Barry. Vermaelen doesn’t smile, though. He just glares at the ref who books him for holding off Evra illegally. Icy.

42 mins: Reina pulls off a great double save from a South corner, first from a John Terry header and then from the follow-up shot from Drogba. Great stuff from the Liverpool guardian. “If Gary Cahill were ice cream, what flavor would he be?” muses Rick via email. It’s hard to say. Maybe Ben & Jerry’s half-baked, by the way things are going today for him. Maybe that’s too harsh.

45 mins: Cesc Fàbregas drags a shot just wide after some good work by Lampard opened up the Northern bulwark.

Halftime: Peep! Peep! Steve Bennett brings the first half to a close. A loose first half with a number of good chances, goals, and hilarious Gary Cahill moments. Everyone looks pretty pleased to be out there, the players shaking hands and having a laugh. Reina and Fàbregas appear to be debating something on their way off the pitch—maybe Goya? At any rate, we will have a fresh 22 players for the second half, although hopefully Gary Cahill gets to stick around.

“This has been very entertaining so far. Gary Cahill for England striker? He must be better than Emile Heskey,” posts in Carrie from Hounslow. And he could probably keep a couple of German defenders busy laughing, too.

So let’s quickly recap the first half: paratroopers, crowd chants courtesy of The Fall and The Clash, Gary Cahill singlehandedly setting back the course of Western Civilization by three minutes, four goals, two of serious quality. Depending on one’s feelings about sport, maybe the Americans have been on to something all these years.

45 mins: Time to begin again. As I mentioned, both teams have sent out a new XI. More subs are possible, depending on how things go. Harry Redknapp gives some last minute advice to Jermain Defoe, and we’re off.

GOAL! North 2 – 3 South (Konchesky 46’) That did not take long at all. Konchesky makes a sterling run inside of Nadir Belhadj, rather than overlapping, and the Pompey man slides a soft and fluffy ball through to the left-back, who smashes an effort into the roof of the net past Jensen. Not a good game in which to be a keeper, I guess.

48 mins: The North are responding well to the goal, applying all kinds of pressure. They force two good saves from Joe Hart, who catches both easily.

49 mins: The North win a free kick…

50 mins: Joe Hart makes a ludicrous save. Improbable save. Tevez curls a rifle shot towards the top corner, and just when you thought there was no chance for the Birmingham keeper, his hand comes flying into the picture and tips the ball off the crossbar, straight down in front of his prone body, and Richard Dunne clears to safety. Great great great stuff.

54 mins: Dirk Kuyt is absolutely hilariously scary. Aside from vaguely reminding me of his countryman Rutger Hauer from Blade Runner, he always sort of sneaks up out of the shadows, as he did just now, to head just wide from a Milijas cross. How soon until he breaks Harrison Ford’s fingers?

GOAL! GOLGOLGOLGOLGOLGOLGOLGOL North 3 – 3 South (Tevez 57’) Kuyt skips through the South defense and squares it to Tevez, who chips it over the frantic Joe Hart. I wouldn’t say it was a great goal, but now that I only see Roy Batty out there, everything seems somehow both epic and elegiac at the same time. Somebody find my Vangelis records, please. No, seriously, that was a good goal, and Tevez skips away with glee.

58 mins: No good chants for a few minutes, now. Nobody really seems to know what to do. Email in your suggestions, and maybe I’ll shout them towards Wembley.

GOAL! North 3 – 4 South (Rodallega og 62’) Unfortunate for the Wigan forward. From a South corner, Jensen punches weakly, and Belhadj’s cross back into the box skips off the turf, off of Hugo Rodellega’s boot, and into the net. He looks around for a moment before he realizes what has happened.

GOAL! North 3 – 5 South (Diamante 63’) Goodness me, stop it. Straight from the kick off, Diamante nips through, positively steals the ball from Stephen Hunt, takes a touch, lays it off for a sprinting James Milner, who plays a return pass back to the Hammer, who plasters it past Jensen. Again, no tackling going on except for by the forwards today; it’s becoming a joke. The crowd is cheering both wildly and sarcastically. It’s a bit of a testimonial match out there, really. Brian Jensen is absolutely angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. He’s a very nice man when pensive, though.

66 mins: Milijas and Fellaini trade 35-yard efforts at either end, both of which are approximately ten parsecs off target.

71 mins: Not much on lately, until now. Ladies and Gentlemen, there is a great, massive dog on the pitch. It’s bigger than Stephen Hunt. I’m not kidding. It’s doing a great job of evading capture; Steve Bennett himself chased it for a minute. Most of the players on the pitch got a right laugh from that one, I’ll tell you what.

74 mins: That dog has finally been nabbed. By Sir Alex Ferguson. With his coat. Extraordinary performance from the Scot. Whatta guy. Play resumes.

77 mins: Marouane Fellaini displays a good deal of skill in getting past James Milner and lashing a shot just wide of the post. Joe Hart looks around at his defense like a disappointed father. Sorry, Joe, but that’s the way it’s going to go for you in this one. “Most North American all-star games end with preposterous scores due to lack of defense,” I’m told by a woman named Christine emailing in from Boston. Well, glad to carry on the tradition, then.

GOAL! CONTROVERSY! UPROAR! DISCONTENT! North 4 – 5 South (Cana 81’) Lorik Cana has scored, but only after he basically threw Ryan Shawcross onto the turf. As Tevez played a pass back to the Albanian, he seemed to wrap his arm around the Stoke defender and toss him to the ground, but Steve Bennett waved play on and Cana exchanged one more pass with Tevez before slotting home the return from ten yards. Shawcross, in fact, is still sitting on the ground. He’s saying something to Steve Bennett, who is sort of bemused and apologetic at the same time. Something like “It’s the all-star game, Ryan” has come out of his mouth.

85 mins: It’s gone a bit stale again. Where’s Gary Cahill.

88 mins: Jermain Defoe, who has done next to nothing tonight, finally gets through on goal, and zigs when he should zag, and before he knows it, the gigantic Brian Jensen has slid in and taken the ball. Looked a bit like a jaguar stealing a canned ham from a kitten.

89 mins: There will be 5 minutes of added time. Not many injuries, mind you, just a dog…

90 mins: …and now a fan. Goodness me, what a shambles. He’s running away from all the stewards. Disgrace. The fan, not the stewards. Well, I mean, he shouldn’t have gotten past them in the first place, but now that he’s out there…oh sod it. No more press for him.

PEEP! PEEP! PEEEEP! Steve Bennett has probably sensibly blown his whistle for full-time after the fan’s capture. No sense in having this friendly get any more out of hand.

Well, that’s the all-star experience in the EPL, then. Nine goals of varying quality and “lolz” as the kids like to say. “I’ve been less entertained by the EPL before”, chirps in Chris from Doncaster. That’s a good shout.

That’s it for me. We’ll be back next May…my favorite part was either the dog or the RAF…no, it was certainly Man of the Match Gary Cahill, for making Harry Redknapp and Sralex laugh at the same time. That’s worth more than any goal.

The obligatory Tiger Woods post

2010-02-23T17:03:00.003Z

("Obligatory" in its more common sense, that is, meaning "not at all obligatory, but if I use the word, I can subtly, wearily, comment on the omnipresence of the Woods story while not letting it deflect me from adding to it".)

No doubt there are thousands of examples of dissonance between perceptions of Woods before and after his ahem. This is one I stumbled upon today. It's from a 2007 radio essay by Clive James on how black public figures are often burdened with the undue responsibility of being representatives for an entire people (though it seems to me that Woods has come to be perceived less so as the years have passed, but hey):

Arthur Ashe has gone now but Tiger Woods, in another sport, has risen in his place to adopts the duties of the black champion who wins everything but is also the perfect gentleman at all times. Just occasionally he allows himself to bounce a misbehaving putter off the green but if he even once called it a dirty name he knows what would happen next. He'd better not be caught eating even one extra hamburger. There are white American golfers who can barely fit into the bunker along with the ball, but Tiger has an obligation to go on looking gorgeous, and, above all, behaving like a saint.

I'm fairly sure he has called his putter dirty names, and been criticised for it. Of course, he wasn't behaving like a saint, either...

(Here I point out that this is the last time I'll ever mention Tiger Woods on this blog, making it seem as if I have made a great sacrifice by condescending to raise the issue, and reassuring the reader that I am better than the nasty rabble, really I am.)

A song for Craig Bellamy

2010-02-19T14:07:00.001Z

News keepie-uppie, a snorting priapic bull and the voice of like, reason?

2010-02-18T16:43:00.003Z

Tip of the hat to Sport without Spin for this from the latest edition of BBC Four's excellent Newswipe with Charlie Brooker on the coverage of that John Terry thing. If they scrapped news bulletins and replaced them with just Barry Shitpeas talking about stuff, would we notice the difference?

Ingerletc. redux

2010-02-18T01:09:00.004Z

Consider this the guilty response to the previous post. It is rough and vague ("it seems ... it appears ... one gets the sense ...") and utterly inadequate for the subject at hand, one on which volumes have been written. But I couldn't let go without acknowledging the greater issue, even if cursorily. It is, in effect, a first draft for a post – or book – I may or may not get around to writing.

Frankly, I find things like the clip here risible. But then, it's not aimed at me. Who am I to pass such a judgement, based as it is on a personal disquiet of such naked jingoism and, no doubt, a residual disquiet of such naked English jingoism? (Not that I am anti-English – indeed, I am, largely, quite the Anglophile, or at least have too great an awareness of the complexities of that nation to have anything but a suitably nuanced idea of it. That residual disquiet comes from the weight of that bastard history, of which there is far too great an accumulation hereabouts for one to be totally immune to it even if, like me, one is disdainful of its more poisonous effects.)

No, this is bigger than one smartarse foreigner's pointing and laughing. I wonder how England fans react to this kind of John Bull stuff. Or perhaps I wonder how much the John Bull stuff is a reaction to England fans. The relationship between the English and Englishness seems to be far more complicated than this film allows for.* The kind of unabashed patriotism – or even quiet pride – characteristic of so many countries seems embarrassing to many English people. Whereas the national saint's days of the other UK nations is cause for celebration (or a day off, anyway), St. George's Day is the occasion for a debate on the meaning of St. George's Day, which has thus far yielded no consensus. While the shunning of the Union flag by England football fans in favour of the George's cross in recent years appears to itself have caused some small shift in general national self-image, one gets the sense that there is a certain strain of mainly right-leaning souls who believe they are England. What's more, they can do so because they are largely unchallenged; an association with one's nation and with its symbolism is gauche and undesirable. (How healthy all this is I really don't know.)

(Compare this with Ireland, whose citizens are Irish and not afraid of being so or letting everyone know about it: even when the Troubles were at their height and a large degree of sympathy with Northern nationalism existed, the presence of militant republicans in the Dáil only ever hobbled between non-existent and negligible. This was despite the way in which they attempted to co-opt the symbols of Ireland and Irishness – something in which, in fairness, they succeeded to a certain extent; the large number of tricolours flown around the country during the 2002 World Cup was seen by some an an instinctive act of reclamation.)

So if there is this ambiguity, how is it that the conditions exist that this film can be a plausible way to introduce a football match? How has this sort of thing not been laughed out of town? Maybe everyone is too nervous or chatty or pissed before a game to pay any attention. And maybe I'm reading too much into it – though, as I say, I'm not interested in it as a deterministic thing as much as I am in it as a reflection. If it is a reflection, that is. Which it mightn't be. In which case, I apologise for wasting your time. I suppose what I am ultimately trying to get across is how utterly fascinating that tangled web is, both in general terms and in how it manifests itself through football, especially in an even-numbered year. England will be an armchair sociopsychoanthropoetcetcetcologist's plaything this summer, as ever.

* Though I guess that a title sequence showing CCTV footage of people moaning about the drizzle and discussing the merits of a stag weekend in Bratislava would be, if more truthful, not quite fit for purpose.

Ingerletc.

2010-02-17T23:14:00.002Z

In the last post, I gave a prediction as to how the BBC might choose to promote their World Cup coverage this year:

I'm looking into the future ... I see ... George's crosses ... lots of George's crosses ... three lions ... a red jersey ... a close-up of Ashley Cole's face ...

Well, as Nick pointed out in a comment on said post, Setanta were way ahead of me:

Ahem. I am suitably embarrassed by my inability to conjure up the white cliffs of Dover, plus three galloping lions reflected in Fabio Capello's glasses.

Was there not something even more egregious, though, before Setanta's first England game (I believe it was the 4-1 win in Croatia)? Involving poetry or something? I have been unable to locate it. Do my work for me and let me know that I wasn't dreaming it, dear readers, won't you?

Advertising sport as a TV show

2010-02-13T02:46:00.004Z

The British TV licence fee money is, all told, put to fine use, if the UKers amongst you don't mind me saying so. Take the BBC's promo film for their Winter Olympic coverage, rightly praised by Joy in Mudville:

Good and all as it is, it still doesn't match its counterpart for the 2008 Summer games, made by Jamie Hewlett and Damon Albarn from Gorillaz:

I've just watched that for the first time in a year and a half, and it's once again put a smile on my face. What's more, all this gives me hope that Auntie Beeb might come up with something stunning to promote the World Cup. I'm looking into the future ... I see ... George's crosses ... lots of George's crosses ... three lions ... a red jersey ... a close-up of Ashley Cole's face ...

Oh.

"Take a shufti. Don't come back."

2010-02-11T20:27:00.002Z

Jonathan Wilson on guardian.co.uk:

The idea that it that may be harder to play against 10 men than 11 has been a cliché so long that there's even a Beyond the Fringe sketch about it.

Indeed there is:

Down to the hollow, and there we will wallow

2010-02-05T23:39:00.004Z

So Giants Stadium is no more. Jason Clinkscales got onto the field after the Giants' last game there in December, filming it for posterity. Meanwhile, Adrian Russell has bid farewell to the ground by reminding those of you who need reminding of its greatest moment (not that we're biased or anything):

In respectful disagreement with the mystics

2010-01-28T22:07:00.008Z

Rooney is the difference between knowing you are a big club, and aspiring to be one. He is the world-class player who United own — and, however many millions they throw at Kaká or Fernando Torres or any of the rest of that small world-class elite, City can only covet.

―Matt Dickinson, The Times

I don't know whether it's possible to be patronising towards a football club that could buy and sell all our asses put together and platinum-plated, but this must surely come close. To this extent, Dickinson takes a line common to a lot of discussion on Manchester City since they became the eighth emirate (yeah, I had to look that up). Moreover, it borders on the mystical, putting faith in bigclubness: the mystical property that makes great teams great. Those without this are, by definition, fit only to be patted on the head and told not to bother their silly ikkul noses with idea that they can reach the stars. Go out to the yard and play catch with your imaginary friend, whydontcha.

No. The cult of Wayne Rooney is one I can get behind, but it shouldn't blind us. Dickinson also singles out the experience of Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes for particular praise. But Alex Ferguson did not form Rooney out of clay and breathe bigclubness into him — United paid an eight-figure sum for the right to pay Rooney a seven-figure salary — and United's success has not been driven solely by their now senior players, no matter how fine their contributions have been, and sometimes still are. What United's extraordinary success and City's ambition have in common is that they are facilitated by money, and cannot be otherwise. Ferguson's genius is beyond dispute, but it's with the vast financial backing his genius has received that it has attained such comprehensive fulfillment. Money allows a team not only to buy greatness, but also the room to make big mistakes. For every Rooney, there's been a Verón; for every Keane, a Kléberson; for every Schmeichel, half a dozen Taibis.

Later, Dickinson says:

All the sheikh’s money has bought City some fine players but this was a reminder that they are only a few steps into the long journey.

There is a difference between the two clubs' means of attaining their respective stashes: United by a symbiosis of on-field triumph and a frighteningly effective commercial operation, achieved over time; City by sheikh ex machina. But the result is — City hope — the same. A more apt comparison is between City and Chelsea. Fingers were wagged when Roman Abramovich bought the latter with the aim of turning them into the best team in the world; we were told that it takes more than a book full of blank cheques to make champs. In the six full seasons since, Chelsea have won more than in ninety-eight previous years of history.

Dickinson seems to think that there exists an alchemical formula to success, known only to a chosen few, but he exaggerates. For instance, when we think of City's failed bid for Kaká, we think of Garry Cook's hilarious turn as a big-shot boor ("If you want my personal opinion they bottled it"). We forget that City were not exactly laughed out of town by Milan or Kaká. It was a closer-run thing than all that; Kaká's Evita impression would hardly have been deemed necessary otherwise. But for some reason, City "throw" money around, whereas United and Chelsea and the rest of the establishment, presumably, invest with utmost prudence. Hmmm.

The only way City could match the risible bombast of Cook's periodic boasts would be to develop nuclear capabilities. But Cook is comic relief, a footballbiz incarnation of Neil Kinnock's notorious election rally performance; his manifest earnestness means he is hardly to be taken earnestly. This isn't the real standard against which City are to be measured. They just have to put together a football team competitive with the elite. That just is enormous, of course. It ain't what you got, it's what you do with it, and what City do with it remains to be seen, though they've started well enough.

Immortality is a swindle. There was a time when City fans could, and did, mock United for last having won the league in 1967 (the days when smallpox-ridden infant chimney sweeps were sent abroad to defend sugar plantations for King and Empire) while City's last title had come in 1968 (the year the world went from black-and-white to colour and sex was invented (yeah, you heard, Larkin)). And how long ago that seems. "Money doesn't necessarily buy success" is a true statement. "Money doesn't buy success" is superstition.

SIATVS EXCLUSIVE! Live Lively Soccernomics Liveblog Liveblog — Live!

2010-01-23T18:23:00.044Z

Welcome to the first ever Sport Is A TV Show liveblog! Of course, we won't be doing anything so square as liveblogging an actual sporting event. The very idea of such a crass ploy makes us want to delete this post out of self-spite merely for thinking it. No, we have, after a period of intense negotiation as a result of which few were even hospitalised, managed to secure the exclusive rights to liveblog Elliott Futfanatico's exciting livetweeting of his reading of the final chapters of the book Soccernomics: Why England Lose, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey and Even India are Destined to Become the New Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski!

If you made it through that last sentence: welcome.

So, yeah, basically. We have not had the pleasure or otherwise of reading — as it is less snappily yet somehow more snappily titled over here — Why England Lose and Other Curious Phenomena Explained. We have read Kuper's previous work, the seminal Football Against the Enemy and the less-seminal-but-still-very-good Ajax, The Dutch, The War, but we're in the dark as to his and Mr. Szymanski's latest. Perhaps you're in the same boat. What better way to experience it than through a text commentary on someone else's text commentary on reading a portion of the book? Yeah, that shut you up.

So many unanswered questions! Will it be any good? Will I remember to type Elliott's name with the requisite number of ls and ts? Will we manage to keep using the editorial first person plural? (No.) Will we be interrupted inconveniently at some point during proceedings? (Almost certainly.) Will our chances of accidentally deleting this entire website increase each time we update the page? Just how many typos and spelling errors can one person make?

Join us, refreshing the page periodically. Get in touch in comments, via the email address on the right-hand side of the page or via Twitter. Your chances of being mentioned and thus becoming the envy of yourself are far, far greater than you think.

1829 GMT: Already some subtle Eurobashing and use of the word "lies" from our americano friend. Dear me.

1832: Yep, GMT. None of your deviant Texan time here.

1833: If this was the BBC, I'd be calling you all "mate", being all common and giving you "Fredo's Predos". This is not the BBC.

1834: Elliott (two ls, two ts) narrows it down to wanton Anglo-Saxonism.

1837: My my, it's a fiery start to this encounter! "'"Fans behave more like consumers than addicts.' Umm, I beg to disagree. You need to meet more interesting fans Mr. Kuper", types Elliott.

1838: Have to say, as someone who usually writes at a strict twenty-WPD pace, this is very disconcerting. I think I've got vertigo or something.

1840: See how quickly I can turn the subject round to me? I should be in Hollywood.

1842: I can see this ending in broken bones and scratched corneas: "Whoa, the Scots are more enthusiastic watches of soccer than English? I hope Mr. Kuper has a secluded home on a Patagonian estate". If I'd ever stolen an office plant and it was sitting on my desk, it would have withered slightly at this point.

1844: True story: I scratched someone's cornea when I was a kid. Accidentally, like, but I feel it scarred my psyche forever.

1845: I mean, look at me! Not only do I have a sports blog, I've liveblogging a livetweet of someone reading something! You wouldn't understand. You weren't there, man.

1847: Meanwhile, Elliott counters some criticism of Iceland. Right on. I've been in love with Iceland ever since Jeremy Clarkson drove a buggy over its mountains sometime in the '90s.

1848: First Fall reference of the evening:

1851: Elliott in comments says: "Fredo - this is an unmitigated disaster of Shaniah Twain proportions. I shall march on, but understand if you jump ship." I don't get it. Was the Shaniah Twain some kind of ship or something?

1855: I don't think "Jeremy Clarkson driving a buggy over Iceland's mountains" is a euphemism, but always consult your euphemologist first.

1900: Elliott: "Whoa, Kuper just said "the successful Germans" and the "not so successful English." This Yank just steps on toes like a footlose outcast" Which reminds us, of course, of last week's QI, where the guests simply couldn't believe that German football fans don't care about England very much, no doubt due in part to the fact that they have won lots of stuff since 1966, whereas England have been to a couple of semi-finals.

1901: And Ireland have...

1902: ...not lost to England since 1984.

1903: Of course, Ireland haven't actually played England in a game that last the full ninety since 1991....

1905: "Simple prose for highschool drop outs" -- Kuper's previous form counting for little, and such footballing terminology.

1906: Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Elliott starts to praise the third-place playoff. That could be the turning point of this one, you feel, John.

1908: Elliott responds to his faux pas with a spirited attack on Kuper: "I suppose if Patrick Vieira's form can fade so poorly in 10 years, then a writer's can as well?" Hopefully it'll help in settle and get back into this game.

1911: By drawing attention to the fact that I am aware of my misspellings and typos, I aim to demonstrate my unwillingness to be considered lacking in intelligence.

1913: "Brazil is everybody's 'second team'", says Kuper. Ugh.

1915: Right then. Leeds get their reward for an enterprising display but Spurs probably should have made the game safe before the late penalty drama. I'm not sure either side really wanted a replay either, but I doubt Leeds will be complaining too much.

1916: Damn. What happened there?

1918: Wait, you don't stop in the middle of the game to hug your opponent and tell them how great they are. "The stats on "Public Viewing" in Germany are ridiculously awesome, hats off to Kuper." What is that?

1920: Billy from Prestatyn, Wales emails: "Is it just me or is it really cute how these Americans get so worked up over 'sawker'?" Yes it is, Billy. Yes it is.

1925: Elliott: "langlauf ... I am too afraid to google that word. So let's just all let our imaginations run wild" Let's not...

1927: Which is quite perverted, when you think of it.

1928: Dinner time. Back soon!

1949: "Hurry back!" emails Roger in Melbourne, Australia. Aw.

1950: Did you know there was a liverayhudson Twitter page?

1951: Oh yeah, the liveblog.

1952: Whoops -- hi, Terry. Missed you there.

1953: Good grief -- this livetweet liveblog has been livetumbl'd. I think I going insane.

1954: Wait for it...

1955: ...wait for it...

1956: ...wait for it...

1957: ...there it is. I've flipped.

2000: Hi! Welcome to Sport Is A TV Show, as I, Fredorrarci embark on an exclusive liveblogging of my reading Anna Karenina! Don't worry, I won't be blogging the whole thing; I've already read the first fifty pages. That leaves a mere eight hundred to report on, which is really nothing, when you set it against the entire body of literature produced by mankind.

2006: As it stands, Levin is about to spend the evening at the Scherbatskys', where he may or may not propose to Kitty. (Stiva has warned him to wait until the morning.) The Princess, Kitty's mother, has grave misgivings about her daughter marrying Levin; she would rather she got hitched to Vronsky, who seems like your stereotypical eligible bachelor sort at the moment, though who knows what...

2007: Hello? Hello?

FIN

Battery in your leg

2010-01-22T23:57:00.006Z

Perhaps there has been a bit too much "things have been a bit quiet around here lately" around here lately, but an operation of this kind of intellectual gravity requires periodic seasons of fallowness to allow the soils of knowledge to bloom with the flowers of genius, and so forth. Things will pick up when they pick up, and you'll be damned grateful for it too, I'll warrant.

The picking-up will, hopefully, commence this weekend, as we plan to engage in a multi-platform, hyper-dimensional, meta-meta experiment, conditional on schedule synchronicity, an uncharacteristic absence of time-zone mix-ups and Aunt Agatha not making any unexpected visits. Details to come, if it happens; otherwise, your computer will self-destruct ... when you least expect it.

In other news, hasn't this transfer window been the most blissful time of your life? How quiet! How serene! How divine! Although my sources tell me that Finn Harps have tabled a loan bid for Ruud van Nistelrooy, so one to watch out for there.

There Are No Fours have posted some great stuff in response to Arenas/Crittenton gun/fingergun episode. Here is the latest, opening out onto the general issue of sport and morality. Also related to sport and morality, except this time on the field of play, is this by Ted Harwood at Running Downhill from a while back, which if I didn't already link to here or on Twitter, I'm doing now. Léigí!

Ted has also passed along this. To re-iterate a point I made on Twitter: people say you can either love or hate Robbie Savage; I say you can do both.

It's nearly Winter Olympics time! Spencer Hall samples the glory of curling first hand (link via Plasma Pool). Zach Dundas makes the case against the case against the Winter games.

If you haven't seen what's brewing at The Run of Play, brace yourself.

What does Cormac McCarthy think of that thing with the handball and the tears and that? Adrian Russell knows.

Dirty Tackle has moved to Yahoo. See Brooks Peck's face!

Left Back in the Changing Room has posted a Roberto Baggio compilation video. Altogether now: swoon.

Video has surfaced of that Usain Bolt/Kerry football meeting, reported on here last week. Aye, but sure what'd he be like in an O'Byrne Cup match on a filthy Sunday in January, hah? Hah?!

Bill McLaren passed away this week. Here, via the Guardian, is himself commentating on Paul Thorburn's extraordinary 70-yard penalty back in "the day". Dollink, either you got it or you don't got it, and both Thorburn and McLaren gotted it. Listen for McLaren's immediate reaction to the kick.

Finally, just because it was in the Related Videos on the Thorburn/McLaren page, that Gavin Henson kick. Here's selfishly hoping his loss of motivation is temporary and that he can get back to doing stuff like this.

It's true what they say...

2010-01-12T20:19:00.003Z

...God is a Kerryman. Here endeth the debate, disconcertingly.

"How good is that?!"

2010-01-10T15:57:00.002Z

A delightful interview with Jens Voigt, via the Twitter feed of the equally delightful There Are No Fours.