Tag: sport

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Napowrimo Other

napowrimo 17: The Death of Maradona

I’m in a Greek bar, watching football;
Giggs, Rooney and Ronaldo on the break
so fast and effortless
it almost seems like cheating.

Then at half time,
among the trailers for upcoming matches
in the Bundesliga and the NBA,
a slow-mo montage of Diego Maradona.

Mainly the fat Maradona;
waving to an screaming crowd,
singing with some chisel-cheekboned pop star,
waddling out onto a football pitch
in a tent-like no. 10 shirt,
his mouth and eyes reduced to creases in his face.

Does this mean he’s dead?
Or dying?
Perhaps they just think that it can’t be long now,
and want to advertise the wallowing
in grief, nostalgia
and self-righteous pity
as an upcoming attraction
for the fans.

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Other

Manchester United 7, Roma 1

That’s what you watch sport for. All the dreary 1-1 draws are justified by an evening like that. Not that a 1-1 draw can’t be entertaining, but you need the crazy, Hollywood nights from time to time as an inoculation against cynicism and boredom.

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Culture Other

Bare-faced cheek from Sky Sports

I was watching the football this evening (and no, I haven’t done my napowrimo poem yet, and yes, that’s probably what I should be doing now instead of this post), and all the players looked rather short and squat. And changing the format setting on the TV didn’t seem to help.

I came to the conclusion that what Sky had done was take a picture which was being filmed in the traditional 4:3 ratio, cut the top and the bottom off, and stretch what was left to a widescreen ratio. So they had reduced the amount of the game you could see and distorted the picture in order to produce fake widescreen, on the assumption that as long as the punters thought they were getting a widescreen broadcast it didn’t matter if they crippled the picture. Which, frankly, I took as an insult.

Oh, and I couldn’t help noticing that these days Solskjaer still has the baby features, but now they’re combined with the premature aging effect of sport played at the top level, he looks more like a baby who has been preserved in a Swedish peat bog for a few hundred years.

I know, I know, less wittering, more poem-writing.

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Other

there’s only one Ronaldo

For the benefit of those of you who don’t know who he is, this is Christiano Ronaldo, who is, this season, a contender for the best footballer in the world:

George Boateng, captain of Middlesbrough FC, talking about a particularly unsubtle tackle by one of his teammates on Ronaldo:

“I’m not saying Morrison wanted to spoil his career or I’d ever do anything like that.

“But one day somebody will do it — whether in an international or in the Premier League. People don’t like it.

“People have pride in the game. No one likes to have the mickey taken out of them. One day, someone will hurt him properly and he’ll be out for a long time.

“When you’re playing Sunday football with your mates, it’s great.

“But at the top level, people don’t want to have the mick taken out of them. As professionals, we know he can do it. But if you want to do it, do it when it’s 0-0 or it’s important. Don’t do it when you’re winning 1-0 and there’s only two minutes to go.”

The reaction people have to Ronaldo really amuses me. He seems to outrage some deep streak of puritanism in the English football fan. It’s as though he was some kind of decadent affection on the part of Manchester United, a bit of imperial bling they brandish around just because they can.

I can see why he would irritate some people even without all the step-overs; he seems to have a blissfully unwavering sense of his own wonderfulness. But I think that Boateng is essentially right in his analysis: Ronaldo is in fact taking the mickey. He is showing a lack of respect. I think he knows that ‘at the top level, people don’t want to have the mick taken out of them’ and does it anyway. He’s rubbing their noses in the difference between playing at the top level and being one of the best in the world.

The mistake is to confuse a lack of respect for his opponents with a lack of seriousness, and to think that he’s failing to take the English league as the very serious business it likes to imagine it is. He wouldn’t have scored 20 goals this season if he was just goofing around. On the contrary, I think he embodies the confrontational nature of sport just as much as someone like Roy Keane. All his tricks and flicks are the equivalent of Keane’s tooth-rattling tackles, designed to impose himself on his opponents; the fact that people keep muttering about how much they’d like to kick him is a clear sign it’s working.

And if they really want to take him down a peg or two, the solution is simple enough: just cleanly and legally take the ball from him whenever he comes near. How hard can it be, right?

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Other

Ian Wright Wright Wright

A reminder that before he became the Match of the Day class clown, he was quite a useful footballer:

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Other

John Amaechi, Tim Hardaway and homophobia

I only wandered onto this by accident, so a note for those like me who are outside the US and may have missed this story: John Amaechi is a former basketball player who recently came out. Tim Hardaway is another former player who had some comments about it, as you can see:

There are all sorts of interesting aspects to this story, not least the segment where the ESPN host interviews the radio host whose interview with Hardaway kicked off the incident. I kept expecting someone to unambiguously express outrage at Hardaway’s hate speech, but it just didn’t happen. See, similarly, this article, which frankly made me feel a bit queasy. Or the comments on this other YouTube video.

Every time a sportsperson in a major sport comes out, it has to be a step in the right direction, but it’s clearly not going to be easy any time soon. From a campaigning point of view, John Amaechi probably isn’t ideal as the first NBA player to come out. He wasn’t particularly successful or famous, which reduces the impact. He’s also extremely articulate, and British. Articulate would normally be a good thing in these situations but it doesn’t exactly run counter to gay stereotypes. And that articulacy delivered in an English accent makes him, I imagine, something of an outsider in basketball culture; at one remove from the emotional centre of the game.

As I’m British, I don’t actually hear basketball players talk very often. Perhaps I’m being unfair in my assumption that they aren’t generally intellectual and hyperarticulate. If anything, American athletes often seem more verbally fluent than their British counterparts, possibly because the college sport system keeps them in education longer. But they aren’t employed for their speaking skills, after all.

As I don’t follow basketball, I can’t suggest the kind of player who would make the most impact by coming out. I guess it would be the equivalent of a Roy Keane or John Terry — someone who is the very embodiment of the qualities the supporters like to think are most important in the game.