Through Gritted Teeth #20: Roy Keane
June 17, 2011 § 3 Comments
by Alex Hess
Let’s get one thing straight from the outset: I hated Roy Keane while he was a player. Hated him. He was a genuinely detestable human being. He was the snarling, fouling, talismanic captain of the club I despised, and perfectly encapsulated all the reasons I loathed them: the relentless, ludicrous dedication to winning, the play-by-my-own-rules attitude, the scorn and disdain for anything and everything non-United. He relentlessly abused referees, he deliberately injured opponents. And yet, in retrospect, I can’t help but respect him. Even worse — as sacrilegious as it may be for a Liverpool fan — I find myself quite admiring Keane The Player. Of course, it’s far easier to take up such a position a good few years after his retirement, with sufficient time elapsed for my traumatic childhood memories of United’s Keane-driven treble-winning side to have somewhat faded, but there nonetheless exists in my mind a genuine, grudging, approval for his efforts in United red. « Read the rest of this entry »
Through Gritted Teeth #14: John O’Shea
May 26, 2011 § 1 Comment
by James Tyler
When I finally discarded my delusional, wayward visions of dribbling gallantly up and down football pitches for money, accepting my fate as a member of the tie-wearing rank and file – and I don’t knock; it’s a perfectly acceptable life – I began to look upon the game I’ve always loved with fresh eyes. « Read the rest of this entry »
Rooney’s broom
April 4, 2011 § 11 Comments
What is a football club?
Let’s first adopt a strictly material attitude and suggest that a football club is the sum of all its parts: players, staff, stadia, training facilities, badge, whatever. So Manchester United is Sir Alex Ferguson plus Wayne Rooney plus Ryan Giggs plus Paul Scholes … plus red shirts, white knickerbockers, and an eye-watering soul-sapping maelstrom of debt. Or, in abstract terms, any football club F consists of p1, p2, p3 … pn, where p is a component part of F and n is the total number of distinct component parts. Such a solution is satisfying in one regard, in that it makes a certain intuitive sense to suggest that a thing is made up of its make-up. It has a coldly ontological appeal. And it can apply just as simply to the more abstract concepts we often ascribe to a football club as well; the character of a club is just the interplay of the characters of all those component parts. « Read the rest of this entry »
Eye of the lens
March 4, 2011 § 5 Comments
A televised football match contains a hell of a lot of dead time, in which the viewer — as opposed to the attending spectator, who is at least participant in the atmosphere, however insipid it often is — isn’t watching any football. FIFA themselves calculate that a football match has between 48 and 61 minutes of actual football, which is a travesty all of its own, and so the production team have getting on for 45 minutes of non-studio time to fill. Plenty of this is players milling, jostling, chuntering, spitting, limping off, jogging back on, and so on, but there are times when even the narrative grip of such ephemera wanes, and the producer is forced to look to the crowd. « Read the rest of this entry »
