I appear to be writing for a real website this World Cup: I've just written my first post for them, here.
I think this is their intellectual property now, so you should read it there. I will transmit it here following the lapse of a day or so. Does that work for everyone? Good, thanks.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
clothes, lack thereof
How have I not heard a single word of praise for Venus Williams' French Open outfit so far? Suddenly everywhere on the Internet appears to have become a Daily Fail bulletin board, full of people shocked and disapproving and taking the opportunity, of course, to offload astonishing quantities of sexist drivel. [Let me not go into those extra-special observations about 'gorillas in lace,' because if I do I will be forced to break some keyboards before I can finish my sentence.]
Where are all the people with taste? A sense of humour? Flair? This dress is smart. It's kitschy and ironic. It's fun. It's bold and sexy -- do we have a problem with bold and sexy, Internet? You never mentioned this before to me. You should have said something when I made that topless Fabio Cannavaro picspam! [Or maybe you did and I didn't listen.] Let us agree not to have a problem with bold and sexy. So what is wrong with this outfit?
As far as I can tell, the problem is that photographers have gone overboard to find pictures of the dress flying up to reveal Venus Williams' skin-coloured underwear. And I do in fact mean underwear that is the colour of Venus Williams' skin, not the sort of colour that gets called 'nude' or 'flesh' even when Michelle Obama is wearing it.
In some of those photos, it does look at first sight as though Williams has nothing on underneath the dress. Will you deal with it? She does have something on. It's not her problem. It's your problem, if you want to make it a problem.
You think the outfit ugly, fine. I'm not saying it's the sort of Oscar de la Renta stuff that stylists make their clients wear on Hollywood awards nights that is universally loved and applauded and yawn yawn yawn. It is a dress that is certainly not lacking in self-awareness, and you can decide for yourself if you think that's a bad thing. But please remember that when you say things like this:
all you're really telling me is that you can't tell the difference between red lace and red lycra.
Guys. This frock is attention-grabbing on purpose. It is inviting comment on purpose. It is also, by the way, still secondary to the fact that she is playing pretty winning tennis - and let's not forget that no matter what Venus Williams was wearing, tennis media would have found a way to prioritise that narrative over her game, as they have been doing for about the length of her career. The truth is that Venus Williams has out-awesomed you. Please just admit this and step away from the keyboard.
And now, we can go back to talking about what we will do in the event of naked Diego Maradona.
Where are all the people with taste? A sense of humour? Flair? This dress is smart. It's kitschy and ironic. It's fun. It's bold and sexy -- do we have a problem with bold and sexy, Internet? You never mentioned this before to me. You should have said something when I made that topless Fabio Cannavaro picspam! [Or maybe you did and I didn't listen.] Let us agree not to have a problem with bold and sexy. So what is wrong with this outfit?
As far as I can tell, the problem is that photographers have gone overboard to find pictures of the dress flying up to reveal Venus Williams' skin-coloured underwear. And I do in fact mean underwear that is the colour of Venus Williams' skin, not the sort of colour that gets called 'nude' or 'flesh' even when Michelle Obama is wearing it.
In some of those photos, it does look at first sight as though Williams has nothing on underneath the dress. Will you deal with it? She does have something on. It's not her problem. It's your problem, if you want to make it a problem.
You think the outfit ugly, fine. I'm not saying it's the sort of Oscar de la Renta stuff that stylists make their clients wear on Hollywood awards nights that is universally loved and applauded and yawn yawn yawn. It is a dress that is certainly not lacking in self-awareness, and you can decide for yourself if you think that's a bad thing. But please remember that when you say things like this:
Anyone who looked at the cover of the daily programme at Roland Garros on Wednesday might have wondered whether they had mistakenly picked up a copy of a lingerie catalogue, with the front of the magazine dominated by an image of Venus Williams in black and red lace, wearing what appeared to be her negligee.
[stuffy torygraph source]
all you're really telling me is that you can't tell the difference between red lace and red lycra.
Guys. This frock is attention-grabbing on purpose. It is inviting comment on purpose. It is also, by the way, still secondary to the fact that she is playing pretty winning tennis - and let's not forget that no matter what Venus Williams was wearing, tennis media would have found a way to prioritise that narrative over her game, as they have been doing for about the length of her career. The truth is that Venus Williams has out-awesomed you. Please just admit this and step away from the keyboard.
And now, we can go back to talking about what we will do in the event of naked Diego Maradona.
Friday, May 21, 2010
alright.
Write The Future from Nalden on Vimeo.
Self-parody: it has finally spread from the football blogosphere to enter the mainstream. Writers, your work here is done.
I'm not sure I love this ad, although I laughed out loud at several points [Gael Garcia Bernal. Who else?] I do enjoy the fact that it cocks a snook at the cliches that make up so much of our non-lived experience of football - the tabloid characterisations and character assassinations, the unmanaged expectations of the media, the puzzling notion that the stepover is a radical footballing move,
Because so often all it takes is a good editor and a nice soundtrack. That is all it takes so much that it's sad how easy it is for a multi-national corporation to make ads that do put a helpless smile on your face, like this.
Given that in India, ads this summer have largely stuck to big brands putting out unspeakably racist commercials set in Africa that depict black Africans as cannibals in grass skirts (Castrol), primitive grunting kidnappers in grass skirts (Sprite), thirsty desert nomads (LMN), and possibly other outrageous things I haven't seen, it's kind of a relief to see, you know, some football. Even ironic football. Salaams, Mr Iñarritu.
---
Item: I have been so sad about Leonardo's totally unjust departure, even beating Juventus 3-0 has had no effect on me. When I own Milan, I will send a bouquet of eco-consciously grown roses to Leonardo every day, no matter where in the world he is.
Labels:
world cup 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
book review: moti nandy, 'striker/stopper'
Cross-posting this from my other blog; apologies if you run across it twice.
Striker, Stopper: Two Novellas, Moti Nandy, translated by Arunava Sinha
There is a section in A Season in Verona where Tim Parks imagines how the average footballer's career seems to be encircled practically from the outset by a tightening noose. In the opening paragraphs of his chapter 'Lecce' [noting this so that those of you who own a copy don't have to turn pages for hours trying to find it, the way I totally did not of course] he notes:
The translator's dedication of these irresistible stories reads 'to East Bengal Club,' which satisfactorily answers the last question here. Parks came to mind as I read these novellas, written in 1970s Calcutta by Moti Nandy, veteran Bengali sports journalist - and novelist, and rendered into English beautifully and sympathetically by Arunava Sinha. One of them is about a young striker's future; the other hangs on an aging defender's past. And at what price? Football in the world of these novellas is not merely weighed in the balance against the civil opportunities of a regular life, like education and stability and honest relationships, all opportunities . No, what price the luxury of doing something you are born for, when families are starving - something Parks' young 21st century Italians have no notion of - and motherless children neglected for training? Nandy's stories evidently milked the problems of working-class Calcutta for all their worth, in narratives full of the drive and relish of great pulp. But those narratives also reflect a very Dickensian sense of righteousness and compassion for human dignity, and it resonates across the generations, across languages and cities.
But the sense comes by-and-by. Our heroes' stories are also full of screeching violins. The teenaged striker Prasoon refuses to buckle down to his little club Shobhabajar's demands, and so finds himself working a petrol pump on a night shift at one point, while he trains on his own in the hope of making it to a bigger club. And what should come rattling along the road one night but an Ambassador holding his teammates who have already sold out to the club's demands, now on their way to the India juniors training camp? Bring on the fricking orchestra, right? What about Kamal Guha's non-existent relationship with his teenage son, with the roots of its trouble in the fact that Kamal never made it back from a game on time to be with his dying wife? [And why not? The club held the telegram back because they needed him on the day. Oh yeah.]
The beauty of Nandy's writing is that it integrates these rather shopworn operatic conventions into a finely-wrought picture of the challenges of the sport: of how truly wearying and alienating the obsession can be, and how manipulative and traitorous the practice of it. Nandy's heroes actually do fight crime, in the form of Calcutta's abject football bureaucracy. Both novellas operate neatly within the real structure of the city's football: most of the action is set around two imaginary clubs, struggling relegation candidates Shobhabajar, and the mighty Juger Jatri, who are capable of running neck and neck with Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. Prasoon must lift himself from the scrabbling mediocrity of Shobhabajar to Jatri [a club where - drumroll - his father once played, and from which he was unfairly ejected after being accused of throwing a match]. Kamal Guha, who has descended from the heights of success with Jatri to a part-timer's role in Shobhabajar, must find a way to keep the club and himself afloat.
It is a corrupt world. The little clubs will fight to keep their best players from leaving, scrap and trade favours among themselves to stay afloat. The big ones will intimidate and bully the smaller ones for reasons of their own. Perhaps inescapably, the journeys of both young man and old mirror each other. If Prasoon, with all his ambition and integrity, must learn to be selfish - so selfish that he must eat even when his family cannot - then Guha's quest is that of a man who already knows that all things come to pass, and must sacrifice to achieve them anyway.
As someone says in Parks' book, 'How can you pay for something you hate so much?' But we know football can be grim - there's a living history that tells us so. We read it between the lines in stories of inflated salaries and dream moves. We may even experience it, in a minuscule way, when we participate in that grand ideal of suffering for the game from the stands. Melancholy and football joined hands, after all, around the first time someone decided to pass instead of dribble. Perhaps that is how the conventions of the happy ending in both novellas achieve a note of transcendence. Football still has the power to transform bitterness into joy - and it is extraordinary how steadfast that matter of belief can be. Perhaps the more mired it is in the sordid, the greater its evocation of romance, of a higher logic that can render all accounts balanced and all stories completed. It is a belief that can illuminate not just its honest and proud adherents, but the game itself. The joy of Nandy's stories is not the joy of winning a match - it is the deeper, steadier feeling that comes of looking at the league table at the end of the season, and finding your team where you want them to be.
* - I chose these pictures in spite of the fact there's a moment in one of the stories where a manager flies into a rage because a player suggests they play with a sweeper. 'You want me to play catenaccio!' he squawks. I thought it was sublime.
Striker, Stopper: Two Novellas, Moti Nandy, translated by Arunava Sinha
There is a section in A Season in Verona where Tim Parks imagines how the average footballer's career seems to be encircled practically from the outset by a tightening noose. In the opening paragraphs of his chapter 'Lecce' [noting this so that those of you who own a copy don't have to turn pages for hours trying to find it, the way I totally did not of course] he notes:
... By seventeen or eighteen they are playing in Serie C, or sitting on the bench in Serie B. Solemn men in heavy coats gamble on their future. They are bought and sold ... shunted up and down the length of the bel paese, Treviso, Taranto, Palermo, Turin. They know no one outside the world of football now. They hardly know what to say to a person who is not a player or a manager or a journalist. Or at least a fan. Is there anybody who is not a football fan? ...
The translator's dedication of these irresistible stories reads 'to East Bengal Club,' which satisfactorily answers the last question here. Parks came to mind as I read these novellas, written in 1970s Calcutta by Moti Nandy, veteran Bengali sports journalist - and novelist, and rendered into English beautifully and sympathetically by Arunava Sinha. One of them is about a young striker's future; the other hangs on an aging defender's past. And at what price? Football in the world of these novellas is not merely weighed in the balance against the civil opportunities of a regular life, like education and stability and honest relationships, all opportunities . No, what price the luxury of doing something you are born for, when families are starving - something Parks' young 21st century Italians have no notion of - and motherless children neglected for training? Nandy's stories evidently milked the problems of working-class Calcutta for all their worth, in narratives full of the drive and relish of great pulp. But those narratives also reflect a very Dickensian sense of righteousness and compassion for human dignity, and it resonates across the generations, across languages and cities.
But the sense comes by-and-by. Our heroes' stories are also full of screeching violins. The teenaged striker Prasoon refuses to buckle down to his little club Shobhabajar's demands, and so finds himself working a petrol pump on a night shift at one point, while he trains on his own in the hope of making it to a bigger club. And what should come rattling along the road one night but an Ambassador holding his teammates who have already sold out to the club's demands, now on their way to the India juniors training camp? Bring on the fricking orchestra, right? What about Kamal Guha's non-existent relationship with his teenage son, with the roots of its trouble in the fact that Kamal never made it back from a game on time to be with his dying wife? [And why not? The club held the telegram back because they needed him on the day. Oh yeah.]
The beauty of Nandy's writing is that it integrates these rather shopworn operatic conventions into a finely-wrought picture of the challenges of the sport: of how truly wearying and alienating the obsession can be, and how manipulative and traitorous the practice of it. Nandy's heroes actually do fight crime, in the form of Calcutta's abject football bureaucracy. Both novellas operate neatly within the real structure of the city's football: most of the action is set around two imaginary clubs, struggling relegation candidates Shobhabajar, and the mighty Juger Jatri, who are capable of running neck and neck with Mohun Bagan and East Bengal. Prasoon must lift himself from the scrabbling mediocrity of Shobhabajar to Jatri [a club where - drumroll - his father once played, and from which he was unfairly ejected after being accused of throwing a match]. Kamal Guha, who has descended from the heights of success with Jatri to a part-timer's role in Shobhabajar, must find a way to keep the club and himself afloat.
It is a corrupt world. The little clubs will fight to keep their best players from leaving, scrap and trade favours among themselves to stay afloat. The big ones will intimidate and bully the smaller ones for reasons of their own. Perhaps inescapably, the journeys of both young man and old mirror each other. If Prasoon, with all his ambition and integrity, must learn to be selfish - so selfish that he must eat even when his family cannot - then Guha's quest is that of a man who already knows that all things come to pass, and must sacrifice to achieve them anyway.
As someone says in Parks' book, 'How can you pay for something you hate so much?' But we know football can be grim - there's a living history that tells us so. We read it between the lines in stories of inflated salaries and dream moves. We may even experience it, in a minuscule way, when we participate in that grand ideal of suffering for the game from the stands. Melancholy and football joined hands, after all, around the first time someone decided to pass instead of dribble. Perhaps that is how the conventions of the happy ending in both novellas achieve a note of transcendence. Football still has the power to transform bitterness into joy - and it is extraordinary how steadfast that matter of belief can be. Perhaps the more mired it is in the sordid, the greater its evocation of romance, of a higher logic that can render all accounts balanced and all stories completed. It is a belief that can illuminate not just its honest and proud adherents, but the game itself. The joy of Nandy's stories is not the joy of winning a match - it is the deeper, steadier feeling that comes of looking at the league table at the end of the season, and finding your team where you want them to be.
* - I chose these pictures in spite of the fact there's a moment in one of the stories where a manager flies into a rage because a player suggests they play with a sweeper. 'You want me to play catenaccio!' he squawks. I thought it was sublime.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
when i own milan, #2
When I own Milan, I will hire sopranos to sing Handel arias beneath the open casement of Diego Milito's house all night long.
Multiple sopranos.
Multiple sopranos.
Labels:
when i own milan
Monday, April 12, 2010
when i own milan
This is the first of an occasional series, When I Own Milan, that would really have been better off as tweets, but that I do not wish to tweet.
When I own Milan, I will hire baritones to accompany Ronaldinho everywhere he goes, singing 'Non più andrai' in his ears constantly.
When I own Milan, I will hire baritones to accompany Ronaldinho everywhere he goes, singing 'Non più andrai' in his ears constantly.
Labels:
when i own milan
Thursday, February 25, 2010
look away please, i am being sentimental.
Context. Context for people who don't follow cricket.
I was over-Googling Sachin Tendulkar today, and I came across a piece in the archives of Outlook magazine, a cover story by the historian Ram Guha on the fraught and loaded question of How History Will Judge Tendulkar.
It was written eleven years ago.
A word for MS Dhoni. It takes a spine of steel to be batting the last balls of an innings with Sachin at the other end of the crease on 199. His concentration never wavered, neither did his determination. He stood there and racked up boundaries and sixes in spite of the fact that the entire stadium, the entire country, was yelling at him to give Tendulkar the strike. He had his eye on the team's score and he pulled it past 400. It was great batting, great, professional teamwork, and great captaincy. I've said it before: Dhoni is an emblem of this point in India's cricketing history, and he is everything we have hoped for in a successful batsman and a captain. We are lucky to have him.
It's now complicated to feel this way about Sachin. Can someone like that belong to you, to your team, to your time? Beyond a point, isn't all of that just chauvinism? Isn't it only that you are letting some part of you be defined by the fact that you are of their time? Sport cannot define a nation and its character. It's just love that nourishes those fantasies. Last night, Tendulkar said, "I do not know how to react to this but I would like to dedicate this double hundred to all the people of India who stood with me for the last 20 years and supported me no matter what. There have been ups and downs, but they stood behind me."
But you stood behind us, too. That's what we meant to say when we yelled at Dhoni to give you the strike.
I was over-Googling Sachin Tendulkar today, and I came across a piece in the archives of Outlook magazine, a cover story by the historian Ram Guha on the fraught and loaded question of How History Will Judge Tendulkar.
...That he is so marvellously cool about this is perhaps the most remarkable thing about him. His gifts of character, if anything, exceed his cricketing gifts. Look into yourself, dear reader, and examine afresh how you react to a child who wails at night, to a hard disk that crashes when you are finishing a book, to an examination paper that is to be answered at eight the next morning. We routinely respond with anger or dis-belief to the most trivial tests of character. Yet this man meets with complete equanimity the intensely magnified and completely unfair expectations of a billion of his countrymen.
It was written eleven years ago.
A word for MS Dhoni. It takes a spine of steel to be batting the last balls of an innings with Sachin at the other end of the crease on 199. His concentration never wavered, neither did his determination. He stood there and racked up boundaries and sixes in spite of the fact that the entire stadium, the entire country, was yelling at him to give Tendulkar the strike. He had his eye on the team's score and he pulled it past 400. It was great batting, great, professional teamwork, and great captaincy. I've said it before: Dhoni is an emblem of this point in India's cricketing history, and he is everything we have hoped for in a successful batsman and a captain. We are lucky to have him.
It's now complicated to feel this way about Sachin. Can someone like that belong to you, to your team, to your time? Beyond a point, isn't all of that just chauvinism? Isn't it only that you are letting some part of you be defined by the fact that you are of their time? Sport cannot define a nation and its character. It's just love that nourishes those fantasies. Last night, Tendulkar said, "I do not know how to react to this but I would like to dedicate this double hundred to all the people of India who stood with me for the last 20 years and supported me no matter what. There have been ups and downs, but they stood behind me."
But you stood behind us, too. That's what we meant to say when we yelled at Dhoni to give you the strike.
Monday, February 1, 2010
book review: four years too late
I'm book logging through 2010 as an informal, self-disciplinary project [neither as louche nor as painful as it sounds, I promise you] over here, my old haunt o' generalities. I've also just returned from the Jaipur Literature Festival, where puzzlingly enough, no sports were played. Someday I hope Pitch Invasion can host a panel there. Here, I cross-post my thoughts on a book I ought to have read have read four years ago but only got down to tackling at the start of this year. Suggestions for the august festival to include cricket and football in its annual schedule to follow shortly.
The Italian Job, Gianluca Vialli and Gabriele Marcotti
I was annoyed within the first twenty pages of this book by the writing, which seemed to me to be bent on underselling its solid ideas to some ideal reader who is suspicious of reading anything that doesn't come wrapped around a fried snack. ['To map a footballer's ability, let's plot his characteristics by drawing an x and y axis (For those of you who weren't paying attention in geometry, this is a cross).'] It is a book that consciously positions itself in relation to the sort of football coverage we see in English tabloids, both in terms of what it tries to be (simple! breezy! smart!) and what it won't be (gossipy, prejudiced, sensationalist). Would Vialli and Marcotti have written the same book today that they did four years ago, post the blogular explosion, the broadsheets stealing a march over the tabloids in online brand-building, and the intensified debate over English football's gentrification?
I don't think so. More importantly because I can't see how they would now deal with the other side of its subject? Like the other major overviews on Italian football (John Foot, Calcio and Paddy Agnew, Forza Italia), it was written before Calciopoli, before the World Cup, before Filippo Raciti and Gabriele Sandri. I sincerely believe that had any of these books come out even six months after the trials we would be asking different questions about Italian football - and that's why, in spite of its many successes, the book already feels like its shaping an irrelevant argument. It's constructing an opposition that doesn't really matter. [I know that's not a bad thing, I'm just pointing it out.] But I appreciate Vialli's resistance to simply writing a charming out-of-the-ordinary travelogue about his career in Italian and English football. He and Marcotti are clearly geeks of the first order when it comes to soaking up opinions and facts, about the technicalities of training and attendances and television habits and stuff, and they lay it out really well in the book. The style gets less cutesy as the book goes on, and while they make the same points that Foot and Agnew do, they are far more interested in laying them out as journalistic arguments than in the style of the factual compendium [Foot] or the credible but subjective memoir [Agnew]. I don't think they are critical enough of either football culture: then again, it may be the gap of four years talking.
Stuff I liked:
+ The whole section on referees, which intersperses observations on the culture of refereeing in England and Italy with interviews with Graham Poll and Pierluigi Collina, as well as the section on managing time in football - apparently there is a FIFA reco that states that matches must aim to keep the ball in play for sixty minutes: most matches today manage an average of fifty-two out of ninety.
+ One of Vialli's rare dips into his personal history as a pro: playing the 1990 semi-final against Argentina in Napoli. Amazing and creepy, 'like playing under water,' he says, because no one actually didn't cheer for Italy because of Maradona, they were just - muffled.
+ Jose Mourinho. No one gives interview as good as this man. Vialli and Marcotti gad about talking to a number of smart people: they get Capello, who is crusty and smart and Lippi, who is suave and smart, and Wenger, who is smart in his dogmatic way and Ferguson, who is smart in his totally calculating way. Mourinho is still the best.
+ The section on managers explaining tactics, which includes the gem of the fact that Luis Felipe Scolari apparently gave all the 2002 Brazil team copies of The Art of War. Cafu said it helped him win the World Cup. CAFU. DON'T YOU JUST LOVE FOOTBALL?
+ The sub-section on ultras.
I think the journalistic approach works weakest when they're talking about the fans [and why fandom is different in both countries, why fans are this here and so there]: this is where all their careful planning and their continuous battle against ethnocentrism breaks down in spite of their best efforts. There's a lot of guff from Wenger about the Anglo-Saxon temperament and the Latin temperament, and I hate that people actually think this sort of talk works outside of novels to prove anything. There's also a lovely little idea from one of the interviewees about the Italian fan worshipping the club in the abstract, as an article of faith, while the English fan supports the club as a part of his identity. While I don't think the binary stands culturally, I do think it's an interesting way to maybe categorise fans as a whole. The guy who says this says it's why the fan of 'the abstract' is much less inclined to defend their club, and much more willing to criticise, though, abd I don't know about that. I think faith in an abstract can also lead to a tolerance for its physical manifestation, no matter how un-ideal, that is quite durable. There's no reason why it wouldn't help you assume respect in the first place. I know a lot of people who, like me, weren't particularly interested in having Ronaldinho or Beckham play for their club, but who, once they came, imposed the same expectations on them as they would on other Milan players, and gave them the same presumptive goodwill.
Would I recommend this book? Yes. Would I rec it if you knew nothing about Italian football? Yes. Would I rec it if you knew nothing about English football? Questionable. It's written for English fans looking across to Italy. Would I recommend it if you are interested in history? Yes. Not in the way I would recommend Foot, who wrote an actual history, but to see how football changes, how its narratives change, and to wonder about how long it will last.
The Italian Job, Gianluca Vialli and Gabriele Marcotti
I was annoyed within the first twenty pages of this book by the writing, which seemed to me to be bent on underselling its solid ideas to some ideal reader who is suspicious of reading anything that doesn't come wrapped around a fried snack. ['To map a footballer's ability, let's plot his characteristics by drawing an x and y axis (For those of you who weren't paying attention in geometry, this is a cross).'] It is a book that consciously positions itself in relation to the sort of football coverage we see in English tabloids, both in terms of what it tries to be (simple! breezy! smart!) and what it won't be (gossipy, prejudiced, sensationalist). Would Vialli and Marcotti have written the same book today that they did four years ago, post the blogular explosion, the broadsheets stealing a march over the tabloids in online brand-building, and the intensified debate over English football's gentrification?
I don't think so. More importantly because I can't see how they would now deal with the other side of its subject? Like the other major overviews on Italian football (John Foot, Calcio and Paddy Agnew, Forza Italia), it was written before Calciopoli, before the World Cup, before Filippo Raciti and Gabriele Sandri. I sincerely believe that had any of these books come out even six months after the trials we would be asking different questions about Italian football - and that's why, in spite of its many successes, the book already feels like its shaping an irrelevant argument. It's constructing an opposition that doesn't really matter. [I know that's not a bad thing, I'm just pointing it out.] But I appreciate Vialli's resistance to simply writing a charming out-of-the-ordinary travelogue about his career in Italian and English football. He and Marcotti are clearly geeks of the first order when it comes to soaking up opinions and facts, about the technicalities of training and attendances and television habits and stuff, and they lay it out really well in the book. The style gets less cutesy as the book goes on, and while they make the same points that Foot and Agnew do, they are far more interested in laying them out as journalistic arguments than in the style of the factual compendium [Foot] or the credible but subjective memoir [Agnew]. I don't think they are critical enough of either football culture: then again, it may be the gap of four years talking.
Stuff I liked:
+ The whole section on referees, which intersperses observations on the culture of refereeing in England and Italy with interviews with Graham Poll and Pierluigi Collina, as well as the section on managing time in football - apparently there is a FIFA reco that states that matches must aim to keep the ball in play for sixty minutes: most matches today manage an average of fifty-two out of ninety.
+ One of Vialli's rare dips into his personal history as a pro: playing the 1990 semi-final against Argentina in Napoli. Amazing and creepy, 'like playing under water,' he says, because no one actually didn't cheer for Italy because of Maradona, they were just - muffled.
+ Jose Mourinho. No one gives interview as good as this man. Vialli and Marcotti gad about talking to a number of smart people: they get Capello, who is crusty and smart and Lippi, who is suave and smart, and Wenger, who is smart in his dogmatic way and Ferguson, who is smart in his totally calculating way. Mourinho is still the best.
+ The section on managers explaining tactics, which includes the gem of the fact that Luis Felipe Scolari apparently gave all the 2002 Brazil team copies of The Art of War. Cafu said it helped him win the World Cup. CAFU. DON'T YOU JUST LOVE FOOTBALL?
+ The sub-section on ultras.
I think the journalistic approach works weakest when they're talking about the fans [and why fandom is different in both countries, why fans are this here and so there]: this is where all their careful planning and their continuous battle against ethnocentrism breaks down in spite of their best efforts. There's a lot of guff from Wenger about the Anglo-Saxon temperament and the Latin temperament, and I hate that people actually think this sort of talk works outside of novels to prove anything. There's also a lovely little idea from one of the interviewees about the Italian fan worshipping the club in the abstract, as an article of faith, while the English fan supports the club as a part of his identity. While I don't think the binary stands culturally, I do think it's an interesting way to maybe categorise fans as a whole. The guy who says this says it's why the fan of 'the abstract' is much less inclined to defend their club, and much more willing to criticise, though, abd I don't know about that. I think faith in an abstract can also lead to a tolerance for its physical manifestation, no matter how un-ideal, that is quite durable. There's no reason why it wouldn't help you assume respect in the first place. I know a lot of people who, like me, weren't particularly interested in having Ronaldinho or Beckham play for their club, but who, once they came, imposed the same expectations on them as they would on other Milan players, and gave them the same presumptive goodwill.
Would I recommend this book? Yes. Would I rec it if you knew nothing about Italian football? Yes. Would I rec it if you knew nothing about English football? Questionable. It's written for English fans looking across to Italy. Would I recommend it if you are interested in history? Yes. Not in the way I would recommend Foot, who wrote an actual history, but to see how football changes, how its narratives change, and to wonder about how long it will last.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
a semi-open letter to susy campanale
I wrote an email to Football Italia's Susy Campanale about her blog today, which argues that
Got that? Play-acting, provocation of opponents, gamesmanship, racism. Yes, you're right. One of these is in fact not like the others. They haven't published my response on their site yet, so I thought I'd put it up here. If you want the shorter and more succinct version of what I attempted to say in the midst of my stuttering rage, please read Martha's response.
---
Dear Susy,
This is unbelievable. So Juve fans actually bring a banner into the stadium saying YOU WOULD ANNOY US EVEN IF YOU WERE WHITE and you mention it as an aside in a blog that berates Mario for acting like a kid who faces extreme provocation when he goes out to play - which, that's right, he is! In a match where, according to C4's own match report, he was not started because they were afraid it would trigger racist chanting? It's as good as saying '...but he provokes it!' in spite of your neatly-placed caveats.
Why is Mario's attitude constantly hogging the focus in any discussion about the reactions he faces? Is this how Italy always treats its bratty kids who are good enough to make it to the national team? No. It isn't. The Tottis and Chiellinis - and even the Cassanos - of the world haven't confused people the way Mario does. Come on. Basic decency goes beyond acknowledging what is right, it's about doing what is right. Shame on you, Ms Campanale. And shame on you, Juve, for sending open letters to your hate-mongering fans when you should be locking them out of your matches.
----
I realise it's not the most reasoned response one could have made under the circs. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I don't actually want to defend Mario's footballing crimes or anything. He's a teenager with an attitude and a chip on his shoulder, and no one is going to stay that way forever even if a lot of footballers really have made the attempt to do so. I'm just so tired of discussions of anti-Mario racism that are predicated on Mario's attitude, and discussions of Mario's attitude like Campanale's blog ostensibly is, that attempt to equate racist behaviour with that laundry list of his personal sins as though they are in some way related.
When this first started, the season before last, I had a racist moment myself. I looked at the banners and thought oh wow, well. One day Mario Balotelli is going to score the winning goal in a World Cup final, and it will shut everyone up and we will all look back to the abuse he was subjected to as a teenager in sad stupefaction. It was a stupid kneejerk fantasy that made me happy for about a minute. It was obviously rubbish. Mario's future success, and the future improvement of his character, and the thought that maybe somehow someday he is going to morph into the best, nicest, handsomest, most successful footballer ever created, will not stop racism against him. It will not retroactively correct tifosi's failures because he triumphed in spite of them. It will not be the final proof of his Italianness to those who sing that black people cannot be real Italians.
Because Mario's character is really not the point at all.
Racism must be stamped out of football, but so must play-acting, provocation of opponents and the kind of gamesmanship that has become your bread and butter.
Got that? Play-acting, provocation of opponents, gamesmanship, racism. Yes, you're right. One of these is in fact not like the others. They haven't published my response on their site yet, so I thought I'd put it up here. If you want the shorter and more succinct version of what I attempted to say in the midst of my stuttering rage, please read Martha's response.
---
Dear Susy,
This is unbelievable. So Juve fans actually bring a banner into the stadium saying YOU WOULD ANNOY US EVEN IF YOU WERE WHITE and you mention it as an aside in a blog that berates Mario for acting like a kid who faces extreme provocation when he goes out to play - which, that's right, he is! In a match where, according to C4's own match report, he was not started because they were afraid it would trigger racist chanting? It's as good as saying '...but he provokes it!' in spite of your neatly-placed caveats.
Why is Mario's attitude constantly hogging the focus in any discussion about the reactions he faces? Is this how Italy always treats its bratty kids who are good enough to make it to the national team? No. It isn't. The Tottis and Chiellinis - and even the Cassanos - of the world haven't confused people the way Mario does. Come on. Basic decency goes beyond acknowledging what is right, it's about doing what is right. Shame on you, Ms Campanale. And shame on you, Juve, for sending open letters to your hate-mongering fans when you should be locking them out of your matches.
----
I realise it's not the most reasoned response one could have made under the circs. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I don't actually want to defend Mario's footballing crimes or anything. He's a teenager with an attitude and a chip on his shoulder, and no one is going to stay that way forever even if a lot of footballers really have made the attempt to do so. I'm just so tired of discussions of anti-Mario racism that are predicated on Mario's attitude, and discussions of Mario's attitude like Campanale's blog ostensibly is, that attempt to equate racist behaviour with that laundry list of his personal sins as though they are in some way related.
When this first started, the season before last, I had a racist moment myself. I looked at the banners and thought oh wow, well. One day Mario Balotelli is going to score the winning goal in a World Cup final, and it will shut everyone up and we will all look back to the abuse he was subjected to as a teenager in sad stupefaction. It was a stupid kneejerk fantasy that made me happy for about a minute. It was obviously rubbish. Mario's future success, and the future improvement of his character, and the thought that maybe somehow someday he is going to morph into the best, nicest, handsomest, most successful footballer ever created, will not stop racism against him. It will not retroactively correct tifosi's failures because he triumphed in spite of them. It will not be the final proof of his Italianness to those who sing that black people cannot be real Italians.
Because Mario's character is really not the point at all.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
