Sports and culture writing from overenthusiastic man-child Nicol Hay.
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The most important thing for any football team to have – a thing even more useful than a good eyebrow stylist or a Groupon for Nando’s – is a clear identity. A mature level of self-awareness will help any side facing adversity to take a step back, concentrate on doing the things that know they can do, and calmly move towards their common goal. Long-held identities also help link a club to its history and constituency, which is why Liverpool have been so committed to celebrating the famous Scouse wit by becoming a flailing ensemble of hilarity.
Changing your identity can bring varied results. Arsenal shifted themselves from successful arch-pragmatists to (financially) successful arch-aesthetes, though their greatest teams were the ones that combined the two personalities with a schizophrenic fault-line…
You can read this article in full at The Football Ramble, an excellent website for an even excellenter podcast.
If teen-orientated TV drama has taught us anything – and let’s not try to pretend that it hasn’t taught us everything – it’s that in every high school basement there lurks an ancient, temperamental boiler tended by a wizened, undemonstrative janitor. That boiler is a terror, screeching and threatening to shudder itself to exploding pieces at any moment – taking the hot water supply and half the geography department with it. But whenever the violent gurgling gets too much, that wizened janitor tilts his head, smiles faintly, and twists a strategic bolt or two, bringing the entire calamity calmly back under control. There is no problem that boiler can throw up that he hasn’t seen and fixed a thousand times already. That faint smile is the expression of a man who knows that he will never be surprised again. It’s the same look that crosses Tim Duncan’s face every time he steps on a basketball court.
As the teams were announced at Hampden Park on Saturday afternoon, an image of each man named flashed up on screen – a simple portrait of every participant, posed in that uneasy footballer mug-shot so familiar to the Panini generation. Well, nearly every participant – Hibs midfielder Lewis Stevenson must have slept in on photo day, as he was represented by a featureless pale grey shadow instead. Unfortunately for the Leith faithful, pale grey shadows would turn out to be filling every green shirt on the pitch that afternoon.
Rudi Skácel is a goal machine. He has played three seasons at Heart of Midlothian, and been the joint or outright top-scorer in each one. He has personally provided over a quarter of the total goals scored by Heart of Midlothian during his time on the club’s books. He has all the hallmarks of talented penalty-box poacher, except he’s actually a midfielder. He is the very image of the luxury player, except that his team would be in far worse sporting position without his goals at vital moments in the biggest games.
Rudi Skácel is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in goals.
Unless, like me, you spend your life with an RSS feed from a dozen comics websites constantly ticker-taping across your fading, anxious vision – you may not know that a few years ago Warner Bros had Joss Whedon signed under contract to write and direct a movie adaptation of Wonder Woman. Whedon had turned in several drafts of the script, and was keen to head into preproduction when WB decided instead, no, they’d rather not have that. I can only imagine the meeting where the decision to drop the project was made went something like:
“Lemme look at that. Wonder what?!? We can’t make a movie called Wonder Woman – audiences don’t like women! We can’t even abbreviate it – if we call it WW, people will think it’s about the internet, and audiences don’t like the internet. I’ll tell you what audiences do want: they want to see Van Wilder wrap himself in seaweed and hang out with Foghorn Leghorn! If we throw enough money at that flick, you will see some box-office fireworks baby! Oh dear, I seem to have run out of cocaine.”
After Wonder Woman got canned, Joss Whedon went on to make The Avengers, and audiences across the globe put hundreds of millions of dollars into Marvel’s caped pockets because they thought the movie was the bee’s knees, and Warner Bros cried and cried and cried.
But I digress.
Football does funny things to you. It contains a regularity – of fixtures, of annual competitions, of uniform Laws that apply identically across a wealth of nations, cultures and ideas of acceptable haircuts – that forces you into spotting patterns and making predictions. Romance also has a funny effect on a body, as the continued success of Kate Hudson will attest. Romance builds hope, and the more you hope, the more you see the possibility – no, the cosmic certainty – that this time the story is going to have the happiest ending. If you indulge in football and romance simultaneously, the resulting shift in your perception moves from funny to downright, painfully hilarious.
That useful striker who scores reasonably often becomes an irrepressible goal-fabrication plant. That scampering winger becomes such a paragon of speed and delivery that Hermes himself wonders who the real diety around here is. Although you know that the ball is round, your inner fan starts to mutter things about scripts being written for them, that this is their year, that names are on cups.
And then Athletic Club lose the Europa League Final to Atlético Madrid.
We all have sports that we love, the ones where we’re keenly aware of the slightest tactical nuance, the obscurest of seldom-invoked rules, the crummiest of bench-warming cult heroes. These sports reward our obsession, revealing new depths and quirks to those dedicated to watching all available contests at all available levels because we are so deeply invested in the way a particular ball flies through the air when it is touched to a particular set of standards. Some of us are even moved to write about these sports, to share our thoughts and feelings on the intricacies and passions of these games in order to inform and connect with others who share our fascinations. We are completely engaged, emotionally and intellectually. It is love, pure love.
In the last few days, we have witnessed a banner weekend for sports that I like.
The apex of men’s tennis exists in an odd vortex of inverse-strength and cognitive dissonance. We all know that Roger Federer is the best player the game has ever seen – we simply have to count his titles and coo lovingly over his backhand service return – and yet he consistently loses to Rafael Nadal. We all know that Rafael Nadal possesses the unprecedented physical gifts of a tennis phenomenon – and yet he consistently loses to Novak Djokovic.
So why don’t any of us know that Djokovic is the greatest of our time?
If the NBA’s marketing team wanted to craft an honest and effective promotional campaign for this season (leaving aside the unlikelihood of an outbreak of honesty ever afflicting a marketer), they’d run something like this: A title card tells us that it’s November 23rd 2011, and we see besuited players and owners as they glare at each other silently across a grey conference table; journalists yawn in hotel corridors, listlessly updating Twitter with ‘Meeting into fifth hour, no progress’; a basketball fan watches the last ten minutes of Teen Wolf on an infinite loop – lonely, bitter tears rolling down his face; and all the while Khloé Kardashian laughs and laughs and laughs. Finally, the screen goes black and the tagline comes up: ‘NBA 2011-12 – It’s Better Than Nothing’.
Ah, you’ve rumbled me already, using the insidious trick of the bloggist: a palpably untrue headline designed to lure you into the main text to see how I write myself into a corner over some impossibly contentious argument. Obviously, for the majority of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, more is more. Certainly there’s lots of more going on in its IMAX-steroid enhanced screen size and soundtrack volume. More permeates every explosion, world-threatening plot-twist and exotic local. The glossy sheen and healthy bounce of Tom Cruise’s hair is a temple of more. You can rest assured that Ghost Protocol is as ridiculous and high-octane as befits a high-end Hollywood action film – it is, in fact, the most gloriously silly film on director Brad Bird’s CV, and he once made a movie about a rat who can control humans by tugging their hair, and uses this power to become a gourmet chef. Trust me, this film busts blocks all over the show. The less that I’m referring too applies to the most important element of any action movie: the plot.
The plot? The plot?!? Mr Donkey, I am already reading your article, I am, for now, on the hook. You don’t need to put another sentence of crazy at the end of every paragraph in order to drag my attention across the gulf of a carriage return.
