February 2012
1 post
12 tags
The Joy of Sport You Don’t Really Understand
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...
January 2012
3 posts
5 tags
The Thing About Novak Djokovic’s Thing
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...
5 tags
The New York Knicks – NBA Team of the Season
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...
M:I 4 – Less Is More
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...
December 2011
6 posts
4 tags
Lessons for Lob City – Sports' ‘Can’t Fail’...
These are exciting times for the Los Angeles Clippers, a team who’s previous most exciting moment came in 1992, when Ron Harper found a dollar behind his locker and used to it buy a Pepsi which he split with the entire team and both their fans. Last week, the Clippers pulled off a blockbuster trade that unites Chris Paul – a man who excels at throwing basketballs at or near the hoop – with their...
The Last Good Fullback in Town
There was a period of about four years there where the fullback was the king of football. The ever-too-small blanket of tactics had been shifted once again; with double pivot midfields and inverted wingers tapping the ball around each other over the same seven blades of grass becoming the norm, the sides of the pitch opened up for the plucky 2s and 3s. After fifty years of fullback being the...
The Rise of Soccer’s Offensive Tackle
No one really knew what Phil Jones was. We were aware that the boy Sir Alex Ferguson had stumped up a surprisingly large number of pounds for was a supposedly decent defender, but very few people seemed to have actually seen him defend, decently or otherwise. Perhaps this is because being a decent defender at Blackburn is like being a decent road-sweeper in Dundee – all the individual excellence...
50/50 – Men Should Weep
Most of the time, people don’t like to be told how to feel. If you were to try and directly engage someone with an emotion you wanted them to share, they’d react like a cat, turning away sniffily and chewing on the furniture instead. Hollywood movies however, can be as manipulative as they like. Steven Spielberg can practically wave a giant, neon ‘FEEL SAD NOW’ sign and we’ll dutifully irrigate...
In Europe, Stoke Are Haunted By Themselves
Stoke City have learned that it’s a different game in Europe, and not just because one of football’s most mistily romantic names turned up for the first time at the Britannia, bringing with them the cream of Ukraine’s talent pool and the withered corpse of Andriy Shevchenko – but because UEFA have moved the goalposts. Literally.
The Laws of the Game state that a football pitch can be any width...
No One Believes in Odin
During Fear Itself – Marvel Comics’ latest every-superhero-fighting summer extravaganza – a variety of silly events took place, one of which resulted in everyone in Paris being turned into stone. The world was mourning – as the two million new Parisian statues were presumed to be at best dead, and at worst a nefarious army of bad street-mimes – until Odin (Allfather of the Scandinavian pantheon...