Overeducated sports writers log

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Not like Corpsey, man of the people, worked his way up from paste anonymity to write for The Wire, which is the Guardian of music magazines.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Bearing in mind that as stated I'm thick and lazy, I can't help but see all these arguments over grade inflation etc. as a bit beside the point given that (as I understand it) the planet is about to go absolutely Titanic in the next decade or so?

All education should be rerouted towards the production of clean energy and/or memorising the Unabomber's manifesto IMO.
 

wild greens

Well-known member
Was reading Phillipe Auclair's piece on English football being sponsored through quasi-legal "pan-asian" betting firms this morning and it probably belongs in here even if it's not strictly educated English writers liking football. Phillipe is French to start


The crypto industry is another surrogate front starting to be used in the same way


Nice work if you can get it.

A follow up piece
 
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catalog

Well-known member
The pitch was waterlogged. Great puddles lay across it, shimmering beneath the floodlights. The rain kept on falling, remorseless as if Hemingway himself had written it. Twenty-one footballers struggled to stay upright. The other one was Adam Boyd. He not only kept his footing, he waltzed across the sodden surface. He struck a hat-trick, each goal better than the last. For the third, Boyd collected a pass on the edge of the Owls’ penalty area, drifted to the right, stopped dead to send the pursuing Wednesday full-back splashing. He faked to shoot and watched another opponent slide past engulfed in spray. He looked up then, and seeing David Lucas marginally off his line, toe-ended a chip so delicate it ran down the back netting of the goal soundlessly, soft as a playboy’s fingers along a showgirl’s spine.

 

luka

Well-known member
Jonathan Liew seems to be evolving from a frothy Barney Ronnie impersonator into something more caustic, critical and contrary.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
"What better way to throw down the gauntlet than with an emphatic statement of intent? And while doubtless Max Verstappen has had little time for Shelley in his short, hectic career, his win at the Belgian Grand Prix assuredly boomed: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Echoing Ozymandias’s grand declaration, this was a victory giving notice of his and Red Bull’s superiority, rolling across the echo chamber of the Ardennes mountains."
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Noticed that the first thing I posted in here was an Ozymandias reference.

As a copywriter hack I can sympathise with these sports hacks having to cobble together a story in a half an hour (if that) -
you remember that Shelley quote and it seems a bit relevant, in it goes

I wonder how widely known that poem is, it must be one of the most widely at least vaguely known poems to pop up in men's health magazine
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I would say it's pretty widely known. And also, surely, it's pretty widely known that the point is that the statue has been destroyed along with all his works and Ozymandias' boast has ultimately turned out to be a hollow one. So it seems a strange choice to pick a line from that to describe a resounding victory.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Yeah I thought that too and pedantically checked through the article to see if he was making a point about hubris

He wasn't, which made me wrinkle my lip of cold command

But then I thought oh he's written this in a rush he can't be blamed
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Sport as a repository (a last holdout haven) for Romantic ideals and Romantic language

The gushing, teary eyed and lumpy throated rhetoric of commentators etc
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah I thought that too and pedantically checked through the article to see if he was making a point about hubris
I wondered that too... but unless he can see into the future and knows for certain how the rest of the season will turn out how can he?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Sport as a repository (a last holdout haven) for Romantic ideals and Romantic language

The gushing, teary eyed and lumpy throated rhetoric of commentators etc

Today's Guardian: "Lionel Messi: an emblem of the transient fragility of human beauty"
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Jonathan Liew seems to be evolving from a frothy Barney Ronnie impersonator into something more caustic, critical and contrary.

"Darkness falls quickly in Qatar. The night steals in like a kidnapper, wrapping its shroud around the desert like a bag over the head. Sunsets barely last long enough to choose an Instagram filter. On Saturday evening, either England or France will also discover that in these parts, oblivion descends with a devastating brutality."

I've been wondering if he's deliberately using that bag over head thing to make some sort of caustic, critical and contrary point about Qatar's authoritarian government. Or if he's just being 'poetic' on the clock and he's blundered into an unfortunate metaphor.

I suppose this sort of hammy writing indicates aside from anything else how SERIOUSLY sporty people take sport. Which isn't something I find ridiculous but which I can't really relate to at this point in my life.

Most of my friends family and enemies would consider how seriously I take let's say t.s. eliot ridiculous, after all.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Of course it also indicates how seriously sports journalists WANT people to take sport, so more people read their articles.

Anyway, I want to apologize for ever creating this thread but it's a good read despite my cruel intentions (1997)
 

luka

Well-known member
hes the best. hes an absolute fucking legend of the game. im so in love with barney ronay and i have been years
 
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