Jump to content
Newcastle-Online

Not Worthy Of A Thread

Thespence

by Thespence
in Football

 Share

Recommended Posts

Guest Slippery Sam

Guest Slippery Sam

Posted
Posted

Watching The Footballers' Football Show. Neil Warnock looks like a Spittting Image puppet.

Link to post
Share on other sites
Dokko

Dokko

Posted
Posted

Tevez arrested for driving while disqualified.

 

Could lead to (though probably wont), a prison sentence

 

He'll pay a fine equivalent (to him) to what you get for hopping the metro.

Link to post
Share on other sites
Tiresias

Tiresias

Posted
Posted

Good article

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2013/mar/08/barney-ronay-football-journalists

 

There is as yet no accepted collective noun for a group of football journalists – although given the public perception it isn't hard to come up with a few hoary old front-runners. A buffet-brunch voucher of football journalists. A receipt spike. A laziness. A sherry-stained complacency of football journalists. In fact, though, looking around a packed press room at Old Trafford on Tuesday night what was most striking was the basic human variety of the global football journalist community. There were, and I can't emphasise this enough, all sorts.

 

From the familiar, old-school scribes huddled in one corner like car-coated aristocracy, to the immaculate Japanese, the bearded it-boys of Spain, and beyond this the hordes of sharply dressed entrepreneurial types who encircle all major sporting occasions these days, coiled into the territory between journalist, PR person, and glazed and hungry media-smurf, and drawn to the court of Very Important Sporting Things wherever it reassembles itself.

 

Yes: here comes everyone. And everyone, these days, is a football journalist. Open the curtains and look outside. That man isn't a bus driver. He's a football journalist driving a bus. We all are now. In fact, if ongoing conversion rates to the football blogger/tweeter/commenter/online-incontinent community are maintained, current projections suggest five years from now every human being on the planet with fingers and a workable degree of lumpen malevolence will be, on some level, a football journalist. At the very least it seems certain we can look forward to a brighter future where our sons and daughters will all be football journalists, and their sons and daughters too, a lineage of ever-expanding bloggers, satirists and strident new voices, right up to the point it no longer becomes necessary to use the phrase "human being", which can instead be replaced with the words "football journalist".

 

If this is all a bit "meta" and self-regarding (not that you really mind: we're all football journalists here) it is worth noting that this kind of bloodless, mob-handed industry takeover has perhaps never happened before in such a public manner. At a time of rare and delirious expansion, football journalism in its traditional form is also facing the spectre of its own slow death. Not because nobody wants to do it any more, but because everybody seems to want to do it at the same time. It is hard to imagine this process in other day jobs: the suburban milkman setting off on his morning rounds and finding hundreds of other people already patrolling the dawn streets on rickety box-car floats quietly leaving their own bottles of home-brewed white liquid on the shared doorsteps, brushing past him on the driveway as he stands, a little bewildered in his dairy apron, just lingering long enough to mutter something barbed about traditional milkmen being finished, a stitch-up, a laughing stock, perhaps even tagging a little scroll of abusive post-it notes – "I expect better … can't believe you get paid for this …" – to the foil tops of his pints of outmoded semi-skimmed.

 

It is of course important to remember how we got here. For the first few decades of organised football there weren't really football journalists at all. This was a sport reported as an inside-page write up by somebody called Old Tweedy or Kipper Of The Kop, a watch-chained, tobacco-wreathed figure dwelling in a peculiar nexus between newspaper man, bookie and saloon bar lurker. The idea that football writing was actually "writing" first took hold in the 1950s, with the revered Geoffrey Green's line about Billy Wright against Hungary at Wembley – "a fire engine always heading to the wrong fire" – acting as a kind of Jailhouse Rock explosion, a moment of fevered hormonal awakening for the hordes of quiff-flicking, angora-sweatered football journalists firing up their skiffle boards and unfurling their jazz clarinets all ready to "blow" some football.

 

A distinct, elegant kind of voice began to emerge, influenced later by the great Brian Glanville, a polyglot who inspired a host of eager imitators keen to hurl in gratuitous elements of European argot ("Moore employed as what they call in Italy un difensore centrale … England attacking via what in French is known as un short-corner") through to the enduring demi-gods of the press box, the uber-scribe with his broad, Zeus-like vista, his beefily swaggering prose. Against this the alternative voice of the DIY journalist of the 1980s also emerged, a fanzine culture crossed over from the zines attached to punk music that found enduring expression in When Saturday Comes and thereby in the sideways-glance pages of broadsheet newspapers, the scamp-journalist with his postmodern snark, his weak jokes, his Saturday back-page column.

 

It is from a related modern tradition that the current gloriously yahooing online free-for-all has emerged, and out of which the new model army of football journalists has sprung. The most notable of which, beyond the ubiquitous Angry Incoherent Man, is perhaps the Garden Shed Genius, the writer whose work is the football equivalent of growing a single, magnificent prize marrow, some polished and waxed super-specimen devoted to Argentinian left-backs of the 1970s, or goalkeeping errors in the Romanian third division, to be waggled about the supermarket aisles occasionally as a chastening example of locally sourced organic super-hackery. Beyond him also we find the related figures of the talented amateur generalist, happily tilling his online hipster allotment, and the genuine journalist manqué, the talented writer who might well have in other times already been making a living in traditional football journalism, but who is for now excluded from the paid profession by its own ongoing evolution into a not-for-profit, online shouting match.

 

Does any of this really matter? No doubt, for all the industrial death associated with the journey to exuberant universality, this is also a kind of golden age, a generational explosion of digital literacy. Perhaps the only real issue here is the baffling amount of anger and anxietywrapped up in all this: the resentment, the chafing, the revelation that not only is everybody in the world now a football journalist, pretty much everybody in the world appears to be an angry football journalist too. Perhaps it is simply a matter of settling down, an anxiety of shared and unmapped evolution. Really we should all be showing a little more species love. We are the world. We are the football journalists. We are, for now, one big malevolently self-dissolving family, yoked together in our brilliantly perilous open future.

Link to post
Share on other sites
Dinho lad

Dinho lad

Posted
Posted

Nice midfielder Eysseric suspended for 11 games for a dangerous tackle on St Etienne's Clement - must have been a hell of a tackle! Anyone see it?

 

yes, it was awful. but not sure about the 11 match ban.

Link to post
Share on other sites
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...