May 2012
6 posts
12 tags
Knowing Is Half the Battle
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...
9 tags
San Antonio Spurs - Familiarity Breeds Success
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...
6 tags
Hibernian 1-5 Heart of Midlothian – The Bizarro...
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...
6 tags
Rudi Skácel – Hearts’ Vital Luxury Player
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...
6 tags
The Avengers – What’s Marvel’s Endgame?
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...
10 tags
Athletic Club de Bilbao – Winner of Romantic Top...
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...
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...