“I spent the first 17 years of my life dirt-poor,” said Cassano, who was raised by a single mother in one of the most crime-ridden neighbourhoods in Italy and said he is certain that had it not been for football, he would have become a hoodlum. “Then I spent nine years living the life of a millionaire. That means I need another eight years living the way I do now and then I’ll be even.”
'On Boxing Day 1789, Franklin wrote to Webster in Hartford, returning the compliment: 'It is an excellent work, and will be greatly useful in turning the thoughts of our countrymen to correct writing.' He shared and appreciated his friend's prescriptivist distaste for vulgar idiom, and wanted to contribute further follies to a future edition of the work.'
Forget the elections about to be held in the Canada/Mexico area, forget the way the Dow Jones and the FTSE are chasing each other up and down like a pair of territorial squirrels who both want the same tree trunk, something really newsworthy is happening.
Argentina have apparently picked a new manager for their national football team, and it is the one, the only: Diego Maradona.
Employing a man with minimal management experience, who is a drug cheat, a cheat cheat, a political radical, a cocaine user, someone whose weight problem lead to him having a gastric bypass: what could possibly go wrong?
It’s as though they saw Newcastle United pick Kevin Keegan as manager and thought ‘Call that soap opera? Hell, we can do better than that.’
[Seriously, though, watch the video: it’s four and a half minutes of pure joy. Even when he’s scoring against England.]
I was thinking about whether Michael Phelps is the ‘greatest Olympian of all time’, and the relative value of medals in different events. For example, the fact that it’s even possible to enter eight events at the same Games means that Phelps has a medal-collecting advantage over, say, a boxer. And the 52 gold medals available in rowing (fourteen events, but multiple people in each boat) seems a lot for a sport with such limited global participation: those events are surely less competitive than, say, the athletics.
So how to go about levelling the field? Well, you could start by cutting events; certainly from the rowing, and probably the fencing (currently 10 events), canoeing (16), judo (14), shooting (15) and wrestling (18). But you still might need to introduce new events to the more competitive sports. In athletics, there’s clearly room for a 50m race, a 300m, a 600m, maybe 2000m and 8000m; we could revive the standing long-jump and high-jump; and learning from the swimmers, there must be room for 4x200m and 4x800m relays. If we got really desperate, we could take an idea from the boxers and weightlifters: have weight classes for the throwing events. The featherweight javelin: it’s an idea whose time has come.
But the sport which is clearly most underrepresented in Olympic medals is the most popular sport of them all: soccer. At the moment there are only two events — men and women — so with 18 players in each squad, that’s a maximum of 36 gold medals, less than are currently awarded in the rowing. So we need some new events. Obviously you’d start with an indoor/five-a-side tournament: what FIFA calls futsal; beach soccer also seems like a plausible idea. Wikipedia reveals the existence of a baffling-sounding Norwegian variant called Synchronised Football. And a penalty shootout tournament might be interesting, too.
But the one which has got me most excited is: keepy-uppy. It is, after all, like a slightly blokier version of rhythmic gymnastics. And the possibilities are endless: there’s the classic version, with the player performing a routine and being marked for the difficulty and style of his tricks. You could have doubles keepy-uppy, with two players keeping the ball in the air between them. There’s endurance keepy-uppy, although as the world record is over 19 hours, that would be a hell of an event to stage. There’s the keepy-uppy 100m sprint. And of course the magic of synchronised keepy-uppy.
I am joking about most this, but actually I would love to see keepy-uppy (or, if you prefer, freestyle football) as an Olympic event. It would be fabulous. And it might actually be a good idea to introduce futsal, but as a replacement for normal soccer: that way football could still have a presence at the Olympics without just duplicating the World Cup.
Interesting article about 'sign names' – i.e. the nicknames deaf people give each other to save spelling out names letter by letter. Via Big Contrarian.
Which, incidentally, means that there are now 10 countries who have won a major international football tournament since England last did it. Germany, Italy and Brazil have won 10 between them in that period.
I’ve just bought Pro Evolution Soccer 2008 for the Wii, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it, but it does take you into a weird parallel world. Not just because of the licensing restrictions that mean the English league is full of clubs called things like ‘Man Red’ and ‘Lancashire Athletic’, and Germany has players called ‘Fnich’ and ‘Harmey’, or the fact that you can play matches like England vs. Barcelona*, or even the robotic, repetitive commentary from Jon Champion and Mark Lawrenson. No, it’s the strange, shiny looking, dead-eyed players with faces that look like they’ve been painted onto blocks of wood from memory. Here’s Christiano Ronaldo, congratulating Rooney on scoring a goal for Man Red.
And yet for all the little bits of clunkiness, it feels enough like football that there’s a real joy to be had from scoring a good goal. It doesn’t feel like playing football, but it does feel like watching-football-on-telly-but-I-can-control-the-players. And even if they look a bit peculiar, I still want to use my favourite players in the game.
If Coleridge came back from the grave and encountered computer games, I wonder how it would affect his concept of the willing suspension of disbelief. He only had theatre as a subject; I wonder what he would have made of a game where you control a little Italian plumber as he jumps up scaffolding, avoiding flaming barrels thrown at him by a gorilla, in order to rescue a princess? Because at some level I think you do have to ‘believe’ in computer games, even the most primitive ones.
*I lost 7-1: Ronaldinho had Gary Neville on toast.
