Extra Time

Ah, that real time were as mutable as football time, and that rewards should be as great as the gods of the stadia make them sound. Then we would all be living a much more exciting life!

Well, no, not really. But there were some amazing moments. Heh.

Pop Cap

In Flanders fields the poppies grow
But not on sleeves the players show
For FIFA says 'political'
And so remembrance has to go.

Resurgam

My favoured team was founded in 1886. It has seen hard times of late, relatively speaking. While always ranked near the top of its league, it has struggled to really impress. Even its trophies have looked tarnished.

This year has brought in new personnel. There is still much deadwood to be cleaned up, but the new growth doesn't look half bad, and the seasoned imports don't look bad at all. There is hope for the rest of this season, which seemed to have kicked off with a massive defeat.

Philosophy vs Pragmatism — Fantasy Football

Fantasy football is for fun, supposedly. Of course, you also play it for the thrill of beating your competitors in a game that is a mixture of skill, chance, and darkest necromancy (or some other kind of divination). And yet, there is also some room for personal philosophy.

In most fantasy football games based on the English Premier League, people think nothing of buying Chelsea's Didier Drogba and making him their captain. He scored a hattrick last night, so those people all received a handsome return on their investment. In real life, of course, he's not often captain, and his cost would be prohibitive to most.

I always start off the season with Arsenal's Cesc Fabregas as captain. It reflects my natural optimism. It might not be the most pragmatic choice, but at least he is in real life the captain of his team.

My philosophy is thus based on some sort of realism. I've seen players think nothing of fielding three left-backs in a squad with only five defenders. Would that make sense in real life? Unlikely. But it can get you a lot of points in a season when left-backs are doing well.

I guess the point about Fantasy Football is that it's fantasy. Do what you want. Enjoy it. No regrets. That's a good philosophy for fantasy games in general.

Whose World? What Cup? (Day 02a)

Argentina-Nigeria was not as dire as Uruguay-France from the previous day. Both teams were somewhat entertaining, although they seemed laboured. The most amusing part was Maradona on the sidelines, who reminded me of Tattoo (played by Herve Villechaise), Mr Roarke's (played by Ricardo Montalban) sidekick, from the 1978 TV series Fantasy Island.

As I type this, the USA-England slugfest continues. It's been easily the most entertaining match so far, although the means by which Clint Dempsey equalised for the US was rather sad, more a failure of goalkeeper Robert Green to get behind the oncoming ball than anything else.

For some, life is a pitch. But for some, that's not quite the way it's pronounced. Heh.

=====

Well, the 1-1 scoreline lasted till the end. A fair result, I think.

Whose World? What Cup? (Day 02)

In their first match, South Korea have scored as many goals as France, Greece, Mexico, South Africa, and Uruguay (in alphabetical order) combined have contrived to score up to this point. It is an interesting phenomenon.

This is perhaps the reason why some people don't like football; the scores don't have the majestic digits of rugby or basketball or even Scrabble™. Many games are dour 0-0 or 1-1 affairs; a 3-1 match is exciting and 7-0 is a truly unusual phenomenon. If that were a rugby score, 7-0 would have indicated a truly terrible game.

I once watched a rugby match back in the old days when Ireland scored five goals for 15 points. Like basketball, the scores are inflated by multiplying and then adding a 'difficulty bonus'. I wonder how that would work in football: would you give 2 points for a shot from within the penalty box, 1 point for a converted penalty, 3 points for a shot from outside the box?

Ah, no point dreaming up heresies. On to the Argentina-Nigeria match, another Afro-American combination which looks as if it could be exciting. We hope that, this time, looks will not deceive...

Whose World? What Cup? (Day 01)

Yeah, I stayed to watch both of the opening matches in the latest season of 'World Cup: The TV Series'. It comes round every four years, as evidence that football is as good as all the world's other sports combined.

Last night, a wannabe North American side (Mexicans won't settle for 'Central American') clashed with a South African side (strangely enough, called South Africa). A South American side (from somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, literally) clashed with a Western European side (Western enough to have an Atlantic shore). Both matches were draws which did not draw, being action-packed but somehow lacking entertainment value.

I staggered off, feeling, "Whose World? What Cup?"

As usual, there was no answer.

The Moment of Impact

Last night I saw two moments of impact. The first was enormous, the second was on a much more personal level. It seemed facetious to compare the two; only an accident of timing had brought them anywhere near each other and they shared little in common.

In the first, the Nazca plate off the coast of Chile thumped yet again into the underside of the South American plate. The result was an earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale (about 10x the magnitude of the one that hit Haiti earlier). The reverberations resulted in tsunami warnings for places as far away as Japan. Despite the intensity of the quake, the death toll is not expected to cross 250.

In the second, promising Welsh player Aaron Ramsey took a hit from a horrified Ryan Shawcross in the Stoke City-Arsenal soccer match. Shawcross missed his tackle and fractured Ramsey's lower leg so badly that the foot was hanging loosely off the joint. It was clear that players from both teams were badly shaken. Ramsey is 19 years old, 5'11"; Shawcross is only 22, 6'5" and was just called up for England.

How can you compare the two? You can't. The first is a natural event in which more than 200 people lost their lives. The second is an unnatural event in which a young man has broken his leg. But the fact is that they are juxtaposed in our consciousness, and human empathy is such that it is easier to imagine breaking your own leg badly than to imagine the agony of 200 deaths.

When I saw the first event in the media, it was hard to assess my immediate emotional response. I must confess I felt relieved that relatively few people had died. When I saw the second, my heart sank. When the cameras pan away from the scene and the last thing you saw was a crunching impact that leaves someone's leg looking wrong, there's a more visceral sensation.

That highlights the difference between an objectified event and a subjectified one. The former was big, and you felt you ought to feel bad for victims of such a disaster. But the latter was more personal. You felt bad at once. You felt bad later when you realised you honestly felt worse for Aaron Ramsey than for Chile. Emotion is a funny thing.

Rationalising Football

Let's for a moment put aside personal philosophies and such, and say that based on likelihood of winning the English Premier League, Manchester United Football Club is often said to be the #1 club in England. It is tempting to say, therefore, that it is a 'better' club than others, since the statistics don't lie, supposedly.

This is exactly the problem that academic league tables face. If a club is successful, or a school is successful, as a matter of fact, then it is assumed that whatever it does must be somehow cleverer than what its rivals do. This is called ex post facto rationalisation; you invent reasons for victory and/or loss after the result is determined.

I have no quarrel with this practice in terms of its entertainment value, but I will point out that it is actually a sort of pseudo-science. What happens on a pitch is a social event; the interactions are too complex to map adequately and the rules (and their enforcement) are unevenly implemented. The difference between defeat and victory, often irrevocably etched, can go down to one man's opinion about whether enough time has passed, or whether another man fell, dived, or was pushed.

You can say of a team that always wins 1-0 that they have no plan B, and if the '1' doesn't materialise, they'll be down to 0-0 or 0-1. But if they always win 1-0, and another team alternates between 4-0 and 0-1, the 1-0 people will win the competition. The 'no plan B' argument never takes into account the fact that every stadium is different, the team itself is different from day to day, the weather is different, and the plan itself, on closer inspection, is never the same. There is no plan B, because there is no plan A; there is just an endless cavalcade of different plans, tweaked on the spur of the moment.

It's the same with schools. You can buy a team, spend money on buildings, and so on. But attention to each student, a plan for each student — these are the things that make a school great. If each student is a winner, then the school wins. The school shouldn't be aiming to 'win the championship' by making some big wins and some small losses out of its students; it should aim to make them all winners.

Sometimes, it seems like a matter of luck. Sometimes, there are allegations of referee bias or undetected fouls. But the fact remains that despite the detailed analysis, sometimes all we have is the factual situation, and no deep explanation as to why it is so. Ask Manchester United how they beat their City rivals last night, and how they lost to Burnley at Turf Moor, and you will hear a tonne of explanations that do not amount to truth.

Painful to Watch

Last night in Manchester, a strange sense of déjà vu must have filtered through the Professor's mind. Watching your chief export do the dirty on your team, in an excellent performance of the sort he didn't give when he was last with you, must be a painful experience. And losing a match you shouldn't have lost, courtesy of an own goal and a sorry loss of concentration — that must be all too familiar in this part of the country.

It's the same with other former champions that have to rebuild. They'll deny it a lot at first, but the rebuilding takes time and effort, and isn't always successful. Sometimes, it never is. One has hopes for the future, and that the best is still yet to be. But one also worries about the present, and signs of familiar degeneracy.

Word of the Day: Brythain

For some strange reason, people keep asking me what this word means. I shall attempt not to digress too much as I dwell on its convoluted history.

The word brythain is actually cognate with the Welsh prydain, from Celtic pritani — 'painted people'. This came from the habit of the original inhabitants of the British Isles of painting themselves with various plant dyes (especially blue woad). If this etymology is true, it's probably related in parallel to the Roman term Pict for the northern 'barbarians' who painted themselves likewise. Pict, of course, is related to 'picture' — a painted thing.

Some etymologists propose that the Romans used the term Britannia as somehow related to the mythical founder of the island realm, Brutus of Troy. I think that's nonsense. It's a sort of post facto brutalisation.

The problem with the British Isles is that they are the most hospitable lands in the northwest of Europe. Britain itself, on which most of Scotland, Wales and England can be found, is the ninth largest island in the world and currently hosts about 60 million people. Over the centuries, they've been invaded by just about every tribe that migrated north and west, ran out of mainland space, and decided to cross the North Sea or the English Channel. This makes etymology hazardous and has spectacularly enriched the English language, which now seems to have about five different words (at least) for everything.

Britain itself is said to mean 'the Isle of the Blessed', and brythain therefore must mean 'man of the Blessed Isle'. In 1884, Professor Sir John Rhys introduced the word 'Brythonic' as a specific term of reference for matters related to the ancient cultures (pre-Saxon, pre-Norman, non-Roman) that inhabited the island of Britain.

At this point, it's good to get the geography sorted out. 'Britain' is the island which has Scotland (capital: Edinburgh) in the north and Cornwall at the southwestern tip, England (capital: London) in the southeast, and a lump in the west called Wales (capital: Cardiff). Great Britain is the term used to differentiate it from Brittany, the former British holdings in what is now France which were called 'Lesser Britain'. 'The British Isles' refers to all the thousands of islands in the region, including (well, that's a touchy issue for some) Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Shetlands, the Scillies, the Channel Islands, and the Orkneys.

The 'United Kingdom' is actually the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In the old days, it would have been the United Kingdom of Great Britain (under the Act of Union, 1707, in which the kingdoms of Scotland and England became politically a single unit). In 1801, Ireland was taken over by the UK, a most unhappy turn of events which was undone some time later.

It is this curious history which allows the British Isles to field more football teams than some confederations (it seems): Republic of Ireland (capital: Dublin), Northern Ireland (capital: Belfast), Wales, Scotland, and England each have their own teams.

Oh yes, one more thing about England. 'England' literally means 'land of the Angles', and for some time, it was more or less the area called 'Anglia'. Somehow, Alfred the Great managed to manipulate everyone into giving him more space, and England became larger than that. If not for old Alfred, the Pritani would probably be fielding nine soccer teams or more. Haha.

No Cylinders

When something is working at maximum yield, we say that it is 'firing on all cylinders'. What then to make of something that seems to be producing no yield or a declining yield?

In 1886, the venerable institution I speak of was founded with the highest of ideals. It has had many high points and low points. For the last few years, it has been at the top of the table and rarely fallen to anywhere below third place. There was one golden year in which the team could do no wrong, and they remained undefeated the whole season.

This year, however, with various stalwarts farmed out into the unknown and the untested and untried brought in to replace them, the team seems to have been firing on no cylinders at all. We have a player who claims he is the best of his kind; well, we are thankful that there is only one of him, then. We have a captain who is forever mouthing off inappropriately and causing dissension in the ranks; sometimes all he seems to think about is his position and his pride.

We are decimated by injuries and by the need to wait too long for the next generation to rise up and lead. In fact, while we were waiting, some of the better players of that generation have gone on to other institutions and done very well. Occasionally, they get the opportunity to 'stick the boot in', as it were, against our side. It must give them some pleasure to return to the Emirates and win.

There is no point in appointing vice-captains who don't play and can't lead. There is no point in picking players without the guile to unlock the defences of teams like Sunderland. Sadly, even the inventive and eccentric talent of the Persian (haha) is now linked to an ultimatum that the club should show ambition. Well, people like him should show some spine. Rome wasn't built in a day, although you apparently can raise a Villa in a few months.

Time to build up the Arsenal and stand United. Or something like that.

Midweek Football Ruminations

If football be the love of food, play on;
I have excess of it, forfeiting
An appetite that sickens, so do I
Refrain again.

I have been watching way too much English Premier League football. I see that now. I have had a love-hate relationship with it for years. Grainy black-and-white Division One footage was my mainstay in the long and boring weekend afternoons. I supported Liverpool when I was young and knew no better. Ray Clemence's steady acrobatics between the sticks, Bruce Grobelaar's steady antics anywhere except between the sticks... I wondered at times why I ever supported a team which only seemed to run on interesting goalkeepers, and with Bruce I sort of gave up.

For a brief spell, I supported the quixotic behaviour of Nottingham Forest. I suppose I had dreams of Robin Hood and stuff like that. Well, least said is best.

I've been an Arsenal fan since the 1996/97 season I think. (I have always had an affinity for creative teams founded in 1886, like Coca-Cola and Mercedes-Benz.) The thing that caught my eye was not at first style and passion and all that stuff, but the fact that a team named Arsenal would have a coach named Arsène. A decade later, I am a great fan of Mr Wenger.

Wenger was born in 1949 (yes, he will be 60 next year, along with Billy Joel), a younger son who grew up to have an undistinguished playing career. He eventually surfaced with degrees in engineering and economics, and a manager's diploma. This was where his career really took off. Wandering around the world and ending up in Japan, he developed a sound resumé by displaying unflappable Gallic cool, an intellectual streak, and a penchant for rigorous philosophy backed by the test of hundreds of football matches. Eventually, he reached England.

Not many gave him a chance at first, but he proved his mettle by taking charge subtly and firmly. He never insulted his predecessors nor his players. He worked with the stingy and physically brutal 'boring, boring 1-0 Arsenal' sides of his earlier years and also with the 'Unbeatable' 2003/2004 side that lost no games. Along the way, he won over the fans and even had an asteroid named after him. He has received France's highest civilian honours and accolades from round the world. And his management style, while open to some criticism, could certainly not be worse than that of many other world-class leaders.

Most of all, Mr Wenger has shown competence, fairness and stability in all his dealings. I am sure he has had a few lapses here and there; most of these have been at those junctures where competence, fairness and stability clash. He has had to be ruthless in building up his side repeatedly after the loss of key senior players, but he has always been consistent in nurturing the young into leaders, movers and shakers. He is not one for drama or Byzantine dealings.

This midweek, surfeited with football, I reflect on Liverpool and Arsenal. I have long been a fan of Liverpool FC and never of its managers; I have long been a fan of Arsène Wenger, and also of his club. When the two meet in battle, I find it hard to be partisan; when the two battle other foes, I am firmly in the red.

Crypticism

Yes, the Avenging Angel of the Archdiocese, twice referred to as Trivandrum in this blog, was the subject of the last challenge.

Unfortunately, sometime during the thrashing handed out to Aston Villa by the Red Man last night, I fractured my right small toe into a couple of separate little pieces. Ouch. Grounded, moody and not very inclined to sit at a computer, reduce my circulation, and lose the toe altogether.

That toe seems like a metaphor for working life.

Adversity Creates Success

I have been a fan of the old 'canonicals' for years. Founded in 1886, that group of mavericks continues to enthrall under the leadership of their foreign manager. Recently though, their form has seemed rocky at best. They have lost a formidable champion for a while, their board looks shaken up, the manager seems less than convincing on the issue of taking money in from outside... the list goes on.

It was with great joy, therefore that I watched a stupefied imitation of this part of my Western heritage trail stagger around blindly for one whole afternoon, almost lose it totally, and then recover in regal fashion to trounce the heathen on our home ground. While there are those who will still say, "Better Red than dead," I will continue to say that we are still much alive and that the best is yet to be. We might even beat the Blues. Ha.

Grassroots Feedback

Yes, I do watch English football; I've done it all my life. And I will watch it even if Arsenal aren't playing (not that the Gunners are particularly English anyway).

I am happy with simple things. Ben Thatcher getting red-carded (any red card for him is overdue); Joey Barton not scoring a penalty (yes, bad things happen to bad people); Chelsea being held 2-2 at the Bridge by Bolton. I feel sorry (a little) for Everton, especially since one goal against them came from a MUFC alumnus and one came from one of their own alumni.

But that's the nature of things. Alumni from your greatest rivals will cause you as much pain as your own alumni. You can spend like Croesus and still not win the title. People will say nasty things about you (how come your man is in the FA as well as your board?) and sometimes mean them.

There are many similarities between English Premier League football and education in Singapore. And, of course, many differences too.

They Are Both Spheroids

The question of course is a trivial one: "What is the main similarity between the Earth and a football?"

Of course, a lot of people speak of football (soccer to the odd-shaped ball fans) as a global sport (which it is). Some even say that the world revolves around football (well, if it did, then football would revolve around the world too). But there is no doubt that a large population is interested in the game, and sometimes finds auguries as to the state of the world in it.

Well if football is prophetic, then we're in trouble: just last night, the men of the Eternal City crashed and burned 1-7 at the hands of the Red Devils.

Ah well. It's all balls anyway.

Ars Magna, Vita Brevis

Yes yes, this is an utterly pagan Easter night post.

As everyone knows, I am a loyal and extremely patriotic adherent of a venerable institution founded in 1886. It has won many awards and medals over the years, and its fan base is wide - covering several continents and many other cities besides its own. My blood flows freely in its colours.

The problem is that this institution can be so much greater than it is. It has everything: young and enthusiastic talent who contain world-class award-winners within their ranks, a developmental system touted as holistic and complete, management once considered enlightened and academically supreme. But it is not indubitably championship material any more. It tends to win enough to make pundits say that it might be the best, and then falter in certain key areas.

They have a brand-new expansion, costing millions in donations and investments. They will be paying off the creditors for years to come. The new site is huger than the old one by far. It should bring with it dominion and power, majesty, honour... argh, all right, I have gone too far and verge on blasphemy now. For the new site has recently been the venue of horrible defeat at the hands of the enemy.

It is an unhappy situation for me. It makes me suffer. I remain loyal and patriotic. I will not let go of this old lady who has provided me with so many thrilling experiences over the years. Yet I am sad, I am hurting. We have become the laughing-stock of millions, our captain appears to be out of the action for months at a time (and even when active, seems a little out of sync with everyone else despite his native talent).

But what can I do? I have suffered long enough as a fan of Arsenal FC. This venerable North London football club has seen highs and lows, and to be truthful, is not doing as badly as it might. It is currently fourth in the English Premier League. Manchester United and Chelsea, however, have an insurmountable lead. And Bolton and Everton are not far behind. Let's not talk about Liverpool though. And we lost to West Ham 0-1 at Emirates Stadium yesterday. Woe, woe, woe.